Maintaining Dreadlocks with Palm Rolling
Regular palmrolling helps dread mature with less bumps and lumps. Dreadlocks are most impressionable during the first few months.
Palm Rolling is a technique for helping the knots compress and tighten to become dreadlocks. To some extent knots will do this on their own over time but this depends on many things, like whether they are washed in the mean time and how resilient the hair is to knotting. It's often necessary to give the hair some assistance. Palmrolling is usually done soon after new knots are created. This allows them to begin tightening before they can loosen. Once they are moderately tight they are much less likely to simply relax and revert to straight hair. This also makes palmrolling very useful, right after clockwise rubbing, to help the new knots compress and tighten.
Palm rolling is often done with dread wax or cream in the hair, dread cream for highly textured African hair types, dread waxes for hair with less texture like Caucasian and Asian hair. These dread products allow the hair to move when the hair is compressed and rolled but when the hair is not manipulated they help it stay where it is, maintaining it's progress when it's not being compressed by an outside force.
Palmrolling is pretty simple. There are two types. Uni-Directional and Bi-Directional. The one that should be used is determined by how you are maintaining your dreads:
Uni-Directional Palmrolling is when you roll the dread in one direction, always in the direction that tightens your twist. It is only used on dreads that are being maintained with re-twisting.
- The dreadlock is held between the palms with moderate pressure.
- Slide your palms in opposite directions, this causes the dread to roll. Be sure to make it roll in the direction that causes the twist to tighten.
- When you come to the edge of your palm place the dread back where you started and repeat the rolling motion.
- After repeating several times you'll need to let the twists out of the dread before you can continue rolling.
- Try to palmroll each dread for 30 seconds. If you have just added dread cream you should roll each dread for 1 minute if possible.
Bi-Directional Palmrolling is when you roll the dread back and forth. It's used for all dreads except for ones maintained by re-twisting. Backcombed dreads, strand twists, and locks started from braids are usually maintained with Bi-Directional Palmrolling. Bi-Directional palmrolling is preferred because it is faster to do and a little more effective. It doesn't work for twists though because it tends to un-twist the twists.
- The dreadlock is held between the palms with moderate pressure.
- Slide your palms in opposite directions, this causes the dread to roll.
- Reverse the direction causing the dread to roll the other way.
- Repeat this motion.
- Try to palmroll each dread for 30 seconds. If you have just added dread cream you should roll each dread for 1 minute if possible.