Butterfly Locs: Everything You Need To Know, Per Hairstylists

Just make sure your hair is hydrated prior to installation and you know how to properly take them out, and butterfly locs may be your new favorite protective hairstyle. After barely a week of wearing my locs, my scalp started feeling extremely itchy and tender. Many are allergic to the formula, which can cause small bumps on the scalp, extreme itchiness, and tenderness. Soaking the extensions in something acidic prior to installation, like apple cider vinegar, can help strip the hair of alkaline lye. My shoulder-length, jumbo butterfly locs took almost two hours to install at the salon .

Faux Locs are incredible but a messy bohemian version of the hairstyle is having a moment. If you were thinking of rolling out of bed and straight into the salon chair, you might want to reconsider your game plan. Carter notes that arriving at your appointment with your hair washed, deep conditioned, and detangled makes the process a lot easier on the stylist.

This also allows you to style them in a lot of different hairstyles. Butterfly locs don’t hurt since they’re done using the crotchet method which is tensionless. The speed at which it’s completed depends on your stylist, the size you want, and the length of your locs. On average, it can take anywhere from three to six hours to install this style. Just gather your hair at the nape of your neck – leaving out 2-4 small locs in front to frame your face – and secure it with a large elastic.

With butterfly locs, you are not limited to black and white when creating stunning contrasts. The butterfly locs of this bob got additional bents to create better fullness and bounce. The next picture shows that short hair is not an obstacle to installing playful butterfly locs. If you are not sure how to style butterfly locs, you can steal this classy look. Now, let’s move on to learning cool ways to style butterfly locs of various lengths and sizes.

Here, you’ll gather the top half of your hair and then split it down the center into 2 equally sized sections. If you like to wear your hair parted to the side or down the middle, you need to ensure the base braids are properly sectioned to make it happen. If you have long hair, we recommend creating more small braids to keep your locs from becoming too heavy. We’ll cover the details and get more specific in the how-to section of this guide so you can try this style out. First, let’s take a look at how it differs from some of the most similar styles and look over the pros and cons of this protective style.

Controlled frizz is an integral part of the casual, messy-textured look, so if you can’t embrace a little frizz, skip this hairstyle in favor of neater faux locs. Butterfly braids or locs are a type of protective hairstyle that safeguards natural coily or kinky-textured hair from all types of damage. Your natural hair is safely braided and contained inside each loc to protect it from heat, chemical, environmental, and physical damage for the duration of the style. The Braid and Wrap Method – For this method, start by section and braiding your hair. Start off wrapping it firmly and then loosely as you continue down each braid. Select a few strands at random to pull over your thumb, adding in the curly “butterfly” loops.

Below’s how The Chic Natural’s no fuss way to remove her locs. Voluminous, lightly textured marley hair is great to use as filler if you need to achieve longer or thicker locs. You can feed-in marley hair at the base of each braid to achieve thicker locs, or add it only to the bottom of your braided natural hair to achieve extra length. It’ll all be covered with water wave hair in the wrapping step. If you’ve been wearing different protective hairstyles for a while, you know that installation always takes time. Butterfly locs are gaining more and more popularity these days and no wonder.

You can also use pre-looped butterfly locs crochet hair to achieve this style. To make your locs, you’ll need between six and eight packs of water wave hair. If you want longer locs than your natural hair, you may also use marley braiding hair to add thickness and length before starting the procedure. They’ve risen in popularity because they can be styled in different colors and lengths, and they keep your hair safe from damage and over-manipulation if properly maintained. Now grab the shorter piece of the water wave hair and hold it with your braid.

Secure each section with an elastic and let the ends hang freely or swirl the ends up into small buns for a different look. This look adds volume to the top and sides of your face, so it’s perfect for a round, diamond, triangle, or oval face shape. Butterfly locs, on the other hand, are sealed at the ends to keep the style intact.

You will need 6-8 packs of water wave hair so that you can create the signature loops on the style. They are also called distressed locs because they aren’t meant to look as neat as regular faux locs. Most people use around six-packs of hair when doing butterfly locs. However, we still recommend get curly hair without perm getting eight because if this is the first time you make these locs yourself, you will mess up a few times. The most common technique used to achieve the butterfly loc look is braid and wrap. When doing this, a lot of people choose to use the 22” FreeTress Water Wave Braiding and Crochet Hair.