Hair Care and Grooming For Your Long Curls

Grooming your long curly hair is essentially the manner in which you interact with your long curls on a daily basis. Think of it as a daily mini-routine that you aim to stick to as a long-haired dude. Grooming your curls must be done when you’re growing your curls long and when you’ve achieved your desired long length; this isn’t something that you simply forget about once you’ve reached your hair-growing destination!

Let’s go through the key elements to optimally care and groom your curls daily.

Use a conditioner frequently

From all men’s hair products available, conditioners are your best friends when it comes to sporting head-turning curls as a male. Whether it is that you use a rinse-out conditioner or a leave-in conditioner, you must use a conditioner at least on an every-other-day frequency, and you must always use a conditioner after shampooing your curls. There are no “ifs” or “buts” here, guys; just squirt some of that conditioner on your fingers and coat your curls with it. Presto.

In case that you aren’t aware (yet) of what a men’s hair conditioner is, then I strongly recommend that you read my guide on curly hair products for men which is also part of this series of guides on long curly men’s hair that I’ve published here at LongHairGuys.net; you really don’t want to skip on your use of a good conditioner, so take your time reading the guide on curly products that I’ve just linked to. Using a conditioner as explained in that guide will pay off big time with regards to owning a great set of waves, coils or kinks.

Use a deep conditioner once per month

A deep conditioner is a type of hair-improving product that you use on your hair to reset and obliterate all the frizz, flyaway hair strands and untamable curls that have been plaguing your curly mane over the last month. Deep conditioners are great curly-friendly products that 99% of curly males aren’t aware of. All that you need is about fifteen minutes of your time to leave the deep conditioner on your hair as you go about your house’s errands or entertain yourself reading the other long-hair guides on this website.

Always tie your curly hair into a bun or braid before going to bed

This may sound like I’m joking around, but tying your curls into a bun or a braid before hitting the sack will improve the shape of your curls in just a couple of days. If you think about it, how many hours do you spend on your bed sleeping (or trying to sleep)? What? Six hours, seven hours or even nine hours for those lucky few? Well, all those hours are hours that you spend tossing your head around your pillow and rubbing your long curls against your head and pillow, which then flattens and tangles your curls. Over time, your curls will lose their lustrous shape from the chronic head-rubbing friction that they have to put up with for many hours on a daily basis.

Just tie your long curly hair into a bun such as a man bun or put your curls into a single braid style. If your hair is too short to braid it or put it in a bun, then go with a ponytail (see my hairstyles guide in the menu for instructions on these three long hairstyles among many other hairstyles that I’ve published). Oh, and going to bed with wet hair or dry hair does not matter, unlike the hearsay that is regurgitated by good-meaning hairdressers; you will, however, run into problems with falling sleep if your hair is wet when you go to bed (wet long hair is very uncomfortable to sleep with).

Do not straighten your curly hair

I just cannot repeat this enough, folks: do not straighten your long curly hair! I don’t care if you’re using the latest hair straightener or that you’re using a hair relaxer (or texturizer). If you want to own an aesthetic and shapely mane of waves, coils or kinks, then you better stay away from any hair-straightening method.

Do not bleach, color, highlight or dye your long curls

Right, I know that those blonde highlights that surfers get look cool and whatnot, but any kind of hair dyeing will damage your curls. So whether you’re bleaching your hair or just getting your tips highlighted, you should skip them all as you’d with any kind of hair-straightening method.

The only hair-coloring method that can be used on long curly hair without damaging is the method of using henna to give your curly mane an earthy/dark-red hue that can look really good on curly-haired men. Just don’t go around using a lot of henna on your first application as your lustrous curly mane can easily turn orange, or, even worse, green. You’ve been warned.

Detangle your curls frequently

Once curly hair grows longer than six inches (the official length category for long men’s hair), tangles and knots will start to become a weekly ritual, as should your detangling efforts. Most hair knots and tangles are easy to undo, but you want to catch them in their earlier forming stages.

Conditioners are, by far, the best men’s hair products to keep your knots and tangles at bay as conditioners lubricate your curls and enhance their curvy shape, which directly promotes the well-being and non-tangled state of you curly mane.

What you should be doing to keep those pesky knots and tangles away is to use a conditioner frequently, as I explained earlier in this guide. On those days that you use a conditioner on your hair, all that you’d have to do is coat all your curly hair with conditioner and then run your fingers as a rake (i.e. curl your fingers towards your palm in a rake-like fashion) through your curls, from bottom (i.e. the scalp) to top (i.e. the tips of your curls). This action undoes any early-forming knots or tangles and it also helps you to rapidly spot any serious knots/tangles that may have gone undetected on your previous hair-conditioning sessions.

As a side note, you may also use a wide-tooth comb to detangle your tangled knots instead of using your fingers as a rake (wide-tooth combs already have a pre-formed raked shape). Whatever you do, never (absolutely never!) use a hair brush to detangle your long curly mane!

Here’s a photograph illustrating the difference between a hair brush (on the left) and a wide-tooth comb (on the right):

To detangle/undo any serious knots or tangles, just go ahead and coat them with more conditioner and then softly and carefully pull them apart by pulling the hair strands that are tangled or knotted.

Trust me, the first few times may seem like you’re performing brain surgery, but you’ll soon get the hang of it and you’ll be able to pull apart those hardcore tangles and knots in seconds.

Only use your fingers or a wide tooth comb to style your curls

To style your curls, whether they’re still growing or have already achieved their final length, you must only use either your fingers or a wide-tooth comb (or even both, if desired). As a curly-haired guy, you must absolutely avoid the use of a regular hair comb or a hair brush; this is because most men’s combs (except for wide-tooth combs) will destroy your curl pattern temporarily and permanently (the latter being the worst offense to your precious curvy locks).

Wide-tooth combs are easy to find and they are great assets to own if you like side parting your curly mane or doing any kind of mild hair-shaping.

Likewise, you can also use a hair pick to aid in the styling of your hair, especially if lifting up your long curls so as to achieve a big-volume hairstyle like the afro hairstyle (see this guide’s section on styling long curly hair to learn more about suitable hairstyles that can be achieved with a wide-tooth comb and/or your own fingers).

Curly hair care for boys is the same as that for adult males

Men’s curly hair and boys’ curly hair are the same. The same grooming and hair-care habits are to be used to grow and maintain a healthy mane of curls. The only real difference between boys’ curls and men’s curls is that curly hair in prepubescent boys grows somewhat faster, but that’s about it.

I still find it particularly unbelievable how many curly fathers are oblivious to their son’s curly hair and will think of their (son’s) curls as some kind of out-of-earth entity. What I mean by this is that many curly fathers who bring their kids to our barbershop will sit their son on the barbershop chair and tell us to “go all out buzzing his kid’s hair”. Not good at all, and this stems from the wrong belief that curly hair is vastly different among adult males, adult females and children. The fact of the matter is that a curly boy’s mane requires the same hair care and grooming explained in this guide and which too applies to curly male adults.

One aspect of curly-hair care that differs slightly between kids and adults is the use of hair products. I personally vouch for using the least amount of hair products like shampoos, conditioners and hair-styling products on your son’s curly mane, which is also recommended by men’s hair guru Rogelio Samson from the curly-hair website www.ManlyCurls.com and Curly Nikki. Why? Because hair products are, for the most part, loaded with chemicals that your growing boy could do best without.

By all means, I’m not trying to sound any false alarms here, for most chemicals used in personal care have been researched to not cause any direct impending damage to the body, but, considering that humans have evolved though tens of thousands of years with no man-made chemicals, why would you want to expose your son to more chemicals than needed?

Following from the above, I recommend that you use hypoallergenic hair products like baby shampoos as kids have a slightly-higher risk of developing allergies to certain chemicals in persona-care products than healthy adults do. If you don’t buy hypoallergenic hair-care products, then simply use a fraction of the amount of product that you usually use on your hair. Using an amount of hair product on your son’s hair that equates to 25% of what you’d normally use is a good number to stat with.

Still, I encourage you to seek advice from your son’s pediatrician on any exotic or unknown hair products that you may expose your son to.

Conclusion on hair care and grooming for long curly men’s hair

Just like with my guide on how to grow long curly hair, both hair care and grooming for men’s curls requires plenty of patience. Then again, anything that’s worth its achievement does too require patience. Incidentally, however, the act of looking after your curls and of grooming them daily isn’t rocket science and is something that rapidly becomes intuitive, which means that, soon enough, you won’t have to even think about your hair care and grooming and you’ll just go about it smoothly and with no inconvenience on your part.

Overall, it’s very important that you do not damage your hair to begin with. Hair in both males and females cannot be repaired per se (i.e. it cannot be repaired permanently from any damage that it sustains) so, to flaunt some seriously-lustrous curls, you must remain pro-active and, above all, keep your hair damage free with all the knowledge that you’ve acquired from this guide.

I’m here to help you, folks, so feel free to ask you questions by commenting below. The next curly-hair guide (fourth) on this series of guides that I’ve published at LongHairGuys.com is found below these lines.

Keep those curls of yours groomed daily like a boss!

Last updated: 25th July 2020

This is the third part to our Long Curly Hair Guide – Please visit now the forth part to this guide: Haircuts and Hairstyles for Long Curly Hair.