5 Year Loc Update

My 5 Year loc update on my DIY Microlocs

So these babies turned 5 back in February - whew what a ride! I've now been through the baby loc stage, the 'ugly' stage, I've gone through a whole pregnancy and brutal postpartum shedding stage and my hair colour has gone from black, red, back to black and now back to red lmao!

So as of mid February 2020, my locs are now definitely just past bra strap length, which finally puts me at a length that's longer than when I first loc'd my hair back in 2015. Talk about shrinkage!

4 months before I loc'd my hair (October 2014)

The biggest change you can see right off the bat since my 4 year loc update is that I am back to being a red head! I changed to black after giving birth because honestly, red is high maintenance. That being said, I got bored of it really quickly and missed how the vibrant red matches my personality. The red is back to stay for the foreseeable future!

When it comes to growth, my locs are now firmly in camp bra strap length, which is the longest my hair has ever been, as you can see from the above picture, the longest my hair had gotten to was a smidgen past arm pit length, so I am cheffed with that. My long term goal is to reach tail bone length, just to know I can, I think I'd probably then cut it back to waist length, but let's wait and see. I don't anticipate that happening for another 3-4 years anyhow.

A hill that I am very glad to be getting over is the postpartum shedding. Good gawd almighty, I had it bad! I knew it was going to happen judging by my mother and sisters, but I still wasn't prepared to see it happen in reality. I lost sooooo many locs, I would look in the mirror and cry. Ninety percent of the locs I lost came from my hairline, which is something I've always been super self conscious about. I have 2 very sparse areas on my temples that I refer to as my semi-circles of baldness and those morphed into my entire front row of locs. Horrific, I tell you, but I'm now very happy to report that those started to fill back in after my son turned one and now I have lots of baby locs along my hairline that are filling in beautifully. It will never be perfect, and God help me when I give birth again at some point in the future, but I'm very happy with what I've got.

Some of you may know that I've had an undercut for close to two years now and the primary reason for doing so was because of the sheer abundance of lint and build up I had in the first two rows of my nape area. I didn't want to have to resort to chopping all my lovely locs off, so that was an apt solution. However, I was starting to get buildup in the locs after the undercut as well, so I realised I had to be doing something really wrong to cause it. After some frantic googling and YouTubing, I came to the realisation that I wasn't washing my locs properly! Can you imagine? So now I am very thorough when it's wash day, particularly on the days when I'm going to retighten my microlocs. I describe it as washing my locs like they are a stiff pair of jeans. That is the necessary level of vim I need to keep my microlocs build-up free.

Speaking of the undercut, I have a new barber (queue harmonious angels singing lol) now my undercut styles are fire and I am proud to show them off, where I was living before there was ONE option for a black barber and he wasn't very good when it came to design. Now I have options and my barber of choice is amazing when it comes to design and very creative! So I'm extremely happy about that, I suffered for over a year with baaaaaasic looks. 

The red is just so much more me right?!?

So that's it, 5 years and loving it! You can catch my full 5 year microbic update on YouTube below, enjoy!

Rose

xoxo