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Must-Know Resources To Create A Haircare Routine And Hairstyles For Curly Multiracial Hair
One of the biggest challenges of multiracial parenting is making sure that your child learns to love everything that makes them unique without feeling excluded because of it. For parents, like myself, with a multiracial child, learning how to properly care for and how to style multiracial hair can be intimidating but is also essential.
Luckily, there are numerous natural-hair-positive kids hairstyle guides available. This is in addition to blogs, magazines, and apps that support your desire to learn the best multiracial hair care and styling practices. In this post, we’ll look at seven of our favorite multiracial hairstyle guides. We will also give you some of the best tips we know for getting started on styling your child’s hair.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click and purchase, Multicultural Kid Blogs will receive a small commission that will be used towards maintaining the site.
The Best Books For Learning To Do Curly Multiracial Children’s Hair
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Chocolate Hair Vanilla Care: A Parent’s Guide to Beginning Natural Hair Styling
Compiled from the celebrated blog with the same name, this book offers a comprehensive guide to biracial hair styling. Chapters focus on creating routines, practicing braiding/plating, and troubleshooting matts and other damage. Step-by-step styling instructions (starting with parting) accompanied by full-color photos are a key element of every chapter.
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An Essential Guide To Caring For Afro And Mixed Race Children’s Hair: Mixed Race And Afro Children’s Hair Care Manual
This book makes a great getting-started guide for parents of multiracial children who are feeling overwhelmed. While it’s not as extensive as other books on this list, it’s also not as intimidating. The photo-supported washing, conditioning, detangling, and simple-style instructions are short, but also very straightforward and easy to follow.
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Easy Care for Biracial Hair
A good balance between price and value, this book provides step-by-step styling instructions for just a few different styles of incrementally greater complexity. It’s certainly not the most extensive book available for multiracial hair care or styling, yet it still has useful information.
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A Parent’s Guide To Natural Hair Care For Girls: A How To Guide For Healthy And Gorgeous Black Hair Plus An Introduction To Natural Hair Styles
With 24 chapters and 182 pages, this book is one of the most extended guides for a multiracial hairstyle for you. Notably, it distinguishes between styling for infants (under one year), babies (one to two years), and toddlers. That being said, some reviewers find the information to be unimaginative, despite the unique organization.
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Kinki Kreations: A Parent’s Guide to Natural Black Hair Care for Kids
This book is a great source of unique multiracial hairstyle inspiration and instruction. Moreover, the photos and step-by-step instructions are clear and there’s a strong focus on keeping a hairstyle natural and healthy. Though note that some readers found the book’s lack of attention to different hair textures exclusive and problematic.
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It’s All Good Hair: The Guide to Styling and Grooming Black Children’s Hair
An older styling guide, this book focuses on kids’ hairstyles for longer-than-shoulder-length hair. Though many readers find it helpful, some think the instructions are too oversimplified.
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Kids Talk Hair: An Instruction Book for Grown-Ups & Kids
This book provides a variety of hairstyles for biracial hair. Some reviewers say it may not be ideal for beginners. Additionally, some readers find the book’s explicitly negative attitude about mothers with processed hair offensive.
Top 5 Tips & Tricks For Styling Curly Multiracial Hair
The best curly multiracial hairstyle will start with an excellent hair care routine. What’s more, that hair care routine should (ideally) be specific to your child’s hair type. Consider that professionals say that a little well-planned damage can go a long way towards helping a hairstyle stick. However, that’s just not a good attitude to adopt when you’ve got any kind of textured multiracial hair. Moreover, regular “curly hair” products often don’t moisturize multiracial curly hair the right way. With this in mind, here are my 5 top tips and tricks for styling curly multiracial hair.
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Tip 1: Start by identifying the curl pattern.
Too often, people simply label multiracial hair as “textured” and call it a day. But the best care practices, products, and styles all depend on what kind of texture the hair has. To identify the curl pattern, you’ll want to look at the shape and tightness of the curl as well as the amount of shrinkage that happens when it dries. Check out this guide to the different multiracial hair types to find out more!
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Tip 2: Remember there’s more to multiracial hair type than the curl pattern.
You should also consider the hair thickness — that is, whether the individual strands fine, wiry, or coarse. Also, consider the porosity and density of your child’s hair. Fine, porous, and/or thin hair won’t be able to handle the same styles, techniques, and tools as coarse, low-porosity, and/or thick hair. Determine what kind of brushes, products, and heat styling tool you should use as well as which protective styles you should try.
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Tip 3: Don’t be afraid of the internet.
Once you know your child’s hair type, there’s so much useful information available online. For example, a post on Medium.com is about products and styling techniques for fine, low-porosity, type 4B hair. An article in Teen Vogue (as well as others) can help you find a celebrity hair type “twin” for proven-to-work style inspiration. There’s even a website (and app in development) you can use to check styling products to make sure they’re the best fit for your child’s hair type.
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Tip 4: Get smart about shampoo and conditioner (and drying and detangling).
As general rules, don’t use shampoo more than twice a week or towel-dry, blow-dry, or air-dry. You especially shouldn’t try to detangle your child’s dry hair. You shouldn’t even detangle wet/damp hair without a lot of slippery detangling/conditioning products. Instead, co-shampoo once weekly, always use a leave-in conditioner and use a t-shirt to blot hair after washing. Then, you can finger-detangle wet hair to prevent tangles while it air-dries.
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Tip 5: Styling and make sure to protect the hair at night.
Some best practices for getting started styling biracial hair are:
- Be patient; don’t underestimate the importance of taking an interest in learning (and teaching your child) how to care for and style their hair.
- Make a routine.
- Start with simple styles (find examples by clicking here and here) then add complexity.
- Prevent hair loss by alternating tight and loose styles.
- Bookmark or keep a Pinterest board of style tutorials you and your child want to try.
- Protect curly hair at night by wrapping it with a satin or silk scarf or pillowcase. If this is ineffective or won’t work for you because your child is an adventurous sleeper, try placing the hair in a pineapple to limit friction which leads to tangles and breakage.
Multiracial-looking hair is often invisible in pop culture and the media, so knowing what kind of care and styles are healthy and appropriate for multicultural kids is often hard. If you’re feeling uncertain about how to start, we have one more tool for you: the Colour app exists for the sole purpose of helping you find stylists in your area who are guaranteed to specialize in caring for and styling your child’s hair type. There is no shame, at all, in going to the internet, the library, or to a professional for help!
Related Reading
Why Multicultural Princesses Matter
Creative Kids Culture Blog Hop #57: 10 Books That Feature Biracial Kids
Mixed Ethnicity: The Children of Asian-Pacific Islanders
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Nikita Gupta
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Great info! I’m definitely going to share this with my friend who just had her first baby!