Humidity brings out the cloudlike qualities of our hair. Although humidity affects many people's hair enough to give them "fly-aways" or make their ends fluffier, humidity can make our hair expand to the point that it might take up an entire doorway. Our curls seem to explode apart, in slow motion, enough to startle passersby. Many times we may want to play up our hair's spectacular expansive nature, but at other times you may want to simply get through the day with predictable hair. If this is the case, it's good to understand what humidity does with your hair.
Angela Nissel vividly described her hair's reaction to humidity. She wrote in Mixed: My Life in Black andWhite, "My hair expands like a balloon if there is any humidity. If the kid sitting next to me spills his juice box - poof - the liquid on the floor causes my hair to enlarge. Every single day I'd leave the house with two braids and two barrettes, and sometime between the Pledge of Allegiance and the first bathroom break one of my barrettes would pop off, unable to sustain my swelling, expanding hair."
You might be able to shield your hair from rain, but humidity is present everywhere that air is present. When it's extremely humid, there is a high percentage of water in the air, which means there is a reservoir of hydrogen available. If your hair has been flattened or set while wet, hydrogen atoms were removed and re-formed in new positions as the hair dried. When hydrogen atoms are absorbed back into your hair from the humidity, they return to all of the old positions they'd been removed from when your hair was set. As the hydrogen atoms return, they reinforce and tighten each twist and curl.
As strands of hair take in hydrogen, the curls draw up at slightly different rates or in varying amounts. Sometimes hair that's closer to the outside is exposed to the humidity before hair near your scalp is. As the hairs spread apart, your curls no longer lie perfectly in sync with one another. Now, with each strand's natural curl returning, it's happily doing its own thing. With each strand behaving independently, your entire head of hair blows up. If all of this sounds hauntingly familiar, don't worry. This article will teach you how to prevent your hair from expanding in humid weather if you don't want it to.
There are several factors that make your hair so curly: curls are shaped by the follicles they grow from, by the uneven rate each side of the hair grows, and by the composition of the cells within each twist and turn of the curl. Curls are built deep into every fiber of hair and are structurally reinforced by the placement of the cells within them.
The shape of your follicles determines how much your hair curls, much as a squirt of cake frosting is changed by the shape of the tip it's squeezed from. Straight hair comes from a rounded follicle and is nearly round in cross section. Wavy hair comes from a slightly oval follicle, so the hair that grows from it is slightly oval. Loosely curled hair comes from a more oval follicle, and in cross section looks oval. Very curly hair, such as is common in those of us of African descent, has follicles that are like flattened ovals. In cross section, each of our hairs is bean-shaped to nearly flat, and grows from its follicle like a ribbon. Very curly African American hair can have up to thirty more twists per inch than Caucasian hair has.
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