Been meaning to do this for a while now; provide some good informative macro shots of my dreads for your scrutiny. I remember wondering how on earth the new hair growth would become knotted. My hair has grown about 3 inches since it was first backcombed. A small amount of this new length has just disappeared into the shortening effects of knot formation, and about half an inch right at the roots is still straight hair, and the rest is approximately 2 inches of new knots

The original backcombed hair is now fully knotted. I really can’t see how it could get any tighter; it’s rock-hard in places. I was paranoid there may be some wax in the really hard parts, so I had a poke around with a crochet hook and pulled out a few little clumps of hair from the centre of the dread, but it was all clean - just very very tightly knotted. My hair was backcombed so tightly, almost to a third of its original length in places, so I guess it’s just very densely packed.

I’ve chosen to keep the ends of my dreads loose and wispy, rather than rounding them off, because that’s just my preference. I even un-picked a few ends which were too blunt for my liking.

New baby hairs are growing out of my scalp constantly, creating a halo of frizz around my head. They find their way into a dreadlock eventually. Some of them have just laid themselves flat along the outside of my dreads. This is more noticeable on the short ones, like on the sides of my face, where new hairs have laid themselves down the full length of the dreads and knotted at the end.

Ok, I’ll put up some old pics first for comparison.

Week 4

Week 6

Week 9

3 Months

Week 15

4 Months

6 Months

7 Months

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And now it’s fun time It’s technically another two days until my dreads are fully 8 months old, but it’s near enough These images are massive and I don’t want them to eat my web-space, so I’ve created thumbnails linking back to the flickr.com files, where you can choose to view the original sizes e.g. 3500+ pixels. I’m really proud of all these knotty knots, and am glad to finally have a good collection of photos of them Yay for dreads!

8 Months Dready Macros

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Hope that wasn’t overkill! Did you have a good snoop around? Find anything gross? Shouldn’t be anything worse than a few scalp flakes in there. I remember before I decided to get dreads, when I knew absolutely nothing about them, I didn’t even know they were knotted hair! Some pics like these would have been pretty enlightening. Hopefully they’re of some use to you