Understanding Hair Textures and Ways to Care for Your Hair

Photo Credit / Yaasmeen Piper 4c hair is known for its extremely curly look.

Angela Pender

Staff Writer

Dealing with natural hair means meaning dealing with different hair types and textures and learning how to manage the hair that you were born with.

Everybody, male or female, has a certain curl pattern in which defines their hair, that makes everyone unique, but what are curl patterns?

According to Allure, “your curl type is determined by the shape of the follicle that your hair grows out of from your scalp. The flatter or more oval shaped the follicle, the curlier your hair; while the more circular the cross-section, the straighter your hair.”

A person’s natural curl pattern is defined by the texture they have and the products they use because each grade of hair has its own style.

For instance, wavy hair is classified as a type “2” hair, curly hair is type “3”, and coily or kinky hair is type “4”.

Wavy hair has an “S” curl and is between straight and has slight bends at the ends.

This hair type is more prone to frizziness and takes a lot to obtain the perfect curl.

People who have “2A” hair have to be careful with using heavy products because it can easily weigh their stands down like the model Arizona Muse, “2Bs” are flatter at the crown with S-shaped waves starting from the mid-length like singer, Tori Kelly, and “2Cs” waves are thicker, coarser, and liable for frizziness like the singer Lorde.

The S-bends are well-defined and begin at the roots.

If you have “3A” hair, it tends to be shiny with larger and loose curls like Zendaya.

People with “3B” hair have coarse and springy hair like Mariah Carey, and tends to get dry so keeping the hair hydrated is important, while “3C” hair types curls are tight “corkscrews” that have tight strands which are densely packed together giving a lot of volume, like Yara Shahidi, star on the ABC show “Grownish”.

Coily hair or type “4” is known as Afro-textured hair which is naturally dry and spongy in texture and can be soft, coarse, and wiry.

These strands are very tight, small curls of zig-zag and prone to have major shrinkage.

“4As” have a dense springy S pattern like Skai Jackson, a star on the Disney Channel show “Jessie and Bunk’d”.

If you have “4B”, your strands are deeply packed, thicker, and can bend in sharp angles like the letter Z like Issa Rae, star on the HBO show “Insecure”, and “4C” is similar to “4B” but the coils are more fragile and have a very tight zig-zag pattern that sometimes goes unnoticeable to the eye, but are still tight curls like Lupita Nyong’o.

As you can see, there are many types of curl patterns, the hard part is finding the one that best fits your hair.

Email Angela at:

apender1@live.esu.edu