HOW TO MAKE DREADLOCKS So, are you ready....??! Start getting excited, cos these are the Full-Blown Instructions on how to make the nappiest dreads you have ever seen with the incredible Knotty Boy Dread Wax!

You are entitled to a 30 day money-back guarantee on ANY items that you buy from Salon Collective! If you are not satisfied with your order, send it back within 30 days and we will send you a replacement, or refund the full cost of the goods. Dreads do NOT just happen overnight. You must understand that, unlike a haircut you get in a salon, this new 'doo' takes a lot more patience than any other - years of patience. You must be willing to deal with unco-operative hair for a little while - at least until they actually start growing into dreads by themselves, and especially if your hair is quite short. (Short dreads tend to work their way out faster than long, tangled locks, so they take a lot more maintenance - but, on the other hand, it's good to start them when they're short, as they tend to turn out stronger and tighter, faster.) GOOD news is that Knotty Boy helps speed up the whole process of "letting them come together" in a BIG way, binding those locks together so they don't come apart in the soft, new dready stages, and lets them get a good head-start. After about 3 weeks or so, you'll start to find that your new locks are getting tighter and harder. You still have a long ways to go... have a lot of patience and keep working on them all the time, even when you're just sitting at school, working, on the computer or reading a book it helps to keep twisting them up or back combing them when you have a minute. But Knotty Boy keeps them together a lot better than if you were using nothing at all and just letting moss grow in there or something. STEP 1: a good, patient friend or two or five to help you with this job. They're probably the most important things you'll need! STEP 2: A jar of Knotty Boy Dread Wax (may need more if you gots supa-long hair). Yeah, actually, this is probably the most important thing you'll need... if you want phat dreads fast. STEP 3: A comb with closely-spaced tines - Dreading Combs now available. STEP 4: Paper towel to wipe your goopy hands on. But Knotty Boy sure won't hurt you, and it smells great! (some actually use it on their hands as a moisturizer.) STEP 5: Hair clips or barrettes or elastics, or something to keep the other sections of hair out of the way. STEP 6: All the Bob Marley records you can find or borrow to play during the first hours of your Dreadlock Holiday. (May I recommend my personal favorite, "Catch a Fire", for this most important event.) STEP 7: and time, patient time for the starting of the dreads! SO LET THE DREADING BEGIN!! 1- To start, you can either section hair into uniform sections, like a grid, or just start at the back and work forward, grabbing locks that are about the size of your index finger, or as desired (note that the shorter the hair, the skinnier the dread must be, but fret not, they will grow together and get bigger as time goes by.) The grid method makes the locks look a bit more pro and uniform - just takes a bit longer to separate out. No biggie, yer gonna be here for the next 4 hours anyway! What's another 15 minutes? However, I recommend that to avoid the blinding white or whatever-color part in the middle of your head, to grab sections randomly from either side of that part and dread like that. 2 - Take the first section of hair, and with the comb or fork, "back-comb" the hair like crazy starting from the very scalp and working your way down to the tips. Back-combing is the process of combing the hair TOWARDS your scalp. This process will tease and tangle up the hair. If you are unsure of this method, just ask virtually any Mum about back-combing and the response you get will be, "Oh my, like we did back in the 60's with the beehives. Let me get out the photo albums..." *It's actually very important to make sure the hair is really good and knotted at the base, next to your scalp, because that is where the dreads must start to come together on their own when your hair grows another inch or so. Also known as those #!@*! roots. So anyway, do this back combing thang a couple of times until you feel it's sufficiently knotted and tangled, then twist that lump of hair into a semi-dreadlock. You may be surprised to find this dread is a lot shorter than the rest of your un-dreaded hair, especially if you have quite fine hair. Don't worry, you're doing everything right. Another thing to note is this process of pulling and back-combing my cause you some occasional scalp pain, but, hey! no pain, no nappy dreads, baby! 3 - Open the Knotty Boy Dread Wax and remove the dust-cover. OK - inside, the surface will appear hard and smooth, so take your fingernail or the end of the comb and just break the surface in, using your finger to start softening the wax up, making it more workable and pliable. It may take a bit of muscle to get it going at first, but it's better to have the wax this way than a product that is too soft and greasy and gets all over your face when you sleep at night. 4 - Take a blob of the wax on your finger (work out any little clumps of the wax) and start working it into the tangled hair, starting, again, from the scalp and working down to the ends. Take more blobs of wax as you need it and just get it thoroughly waxed and twisted up - but not so much that it would be a sticky mess in your friend's hand if he/she were to give your new dread a playful tug. 5 - Now just keep repeating the grab-backcomb-twist-and-wax process the whole long day! Well, it won't really take all day... actually, yes, it will...well, about 3-5 hours of it anyway. But, hey! Just keep thinking about what a babe/fella-magnet you're gonna be when they're done! Read on for some other really useful tips about after-care... After the first shot at getting them all locked up, sit down and re-wax each one as best you can at LEAST twice a week to begin with, if not every few days, but use your judgement. You'll find that the first few days things will feel a bit tacky and sticky up there, but as your dreads start to lock in the next few weeks and aren't as soft anymore, things dry out a lot. After they've started to form into real dreads , you can use Knotty Boy to get the loose hair back into the main dreads and goop them up whenever you feel it's necessary, and when you're at that stage, the waxiness lasts for only about a day after you reapply it. One very good thing to do for sleeping after you've just waxed is, either find an old pillow case that you don't care about to put on your pillow for the a while, or pin a towel to the pillow. Knotty Boy isn't slimy or anything, but it may get your pillow a bit waxy after just having put it in your hair. If your hair is long enough, tie it back, and if it's short you can always wear a tam or nylon stocking to keep it away from your face when you sleep. Washing Dreads Anytime you feel that your dreads need to be washed, just wash them. If you're using Knotty Boy, and you've just done your dreads up with it for the first time, try to not wash for at least a week, to give them time to dry out a bit. But after that you don't have anything to worry about, cos you can always re-wax the loose pieces back into the main dreads, and washing them actually helps them dread up better once their dry! When you wash, give your scalp a really good scrub with the Knotty Boy Dread Shampoo Bar. You don't have to have a dirty itchy scalp just cuz you gots dreads, it's GOOD to wash your dreads cos it gets them tighter and stronger anyway. This shampoo kills everything, and makes your dreaded scalp tingley and healthy - no more itchies. And, baby, it be the sweetest, mintiest stuff you ever done smelled. SOOOOO nice. Do NOT use regular hair shampoo because they contain conditioners and other ingredients that detangle hair, not knot it up! Don't worry about washing the dreads themselves, the soap that runs down from your scalp will clean them just fine and you don't really want to mess with them too much anyways, just keeping your scalp healthy is the important part. And here's a little tip for drying your dreads after you shower, either pat them dry with a towel (new dreads) or whip out the excess water by head banging to ‘Hot for Teacher' Van Halen. Or ‘Panama' , - but only for the more experienced dreadies... Or how ‘bout ‘Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away', by Motley Crew... - and then throw them in a big, loose hat and just let them dry in there all day. It makes them into much drier and tighter dreads. BACK TO MAIN PAGE With thanks to the Knotty Boy website.