To Consider: Dreadlocks
April 2, 2008
Kristin Ramsak
I can’t stop thinking about it. I want to do it so badly, but my friends yell at me for even thinking about such a thing. It would break my Granny’s heart, for sure. And I know it’s a knotty thing to do, but it looks like so much fun! Doesn’t anyone understand my dilemma?
Kris, a 29-year-old working at Knotty Boy, does. She felt those same longings I have. Had those same fears of being called names and given weird glances. The difference between her and I? She did it. For nine months, they matured and then out they came. But, alas, they were too much for her. “I’m bad at commitment,” she explained at the beginning of our telephone conversation. “Aren’t we all?” I asked.
And they are a commitment. Dreadlocks take at least a year to mature and they do require a bit of maintenance to keep them tight and pristine. The good thing about Knotty Boy dreads is they already look about three months old right out of the salon, according to Kris who has worked at Knotty Boy Lock Shop and Salon for a little over a year and who has been a stylist for nine years.
Most people think dread-removal is done only with a sharp pair o’ skizzors, but that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, the reason Kris got dreads was to grow her hair out. First, her stylist put in human hair extensions which were then dreaded and crocheted with the rest of her hair. I’m not going to explain what crocheting is because it would require copious amounts of drawings, pie charts, and bar and line graphs, but feel free to check it out online. However, I will mention Kris’s warning that crocheting is not for the faint of heart. “Sometimes crochet hooks have been known to do some damage…I had some band aids in the beginning [of my career],” says Kris.
Let’s touch on some avenues of dreading, shall we? Kris prefers the popular back-combing technique which usually begins by sectioning the hair into uniform squares at the scalp. Then you grab a section and, using a fine-toothed metal comb, begin to brush the hair towards the scalp starting at the base. Then add dread wax as you twist from the base up. Now it’s time to palmroll which is, quite obviously, rolling your dread between your palms in a Speedy Gonzales fashion.
Then there is the wool sweater method where you rub, well, a wool sweater on your head in a circular motion until dreads magically (and painfully) appear. Actually, there is a lot of tearing of knotted hair into sections and more circular rubbing and more tearing, so it’s not as simple as kneading an itchy garment into your head. But it’s close.
Another approach is that which means, “to be remiss in the care or treatment of:” neglect. (Cue climactic music of a Charlie Chaplin film.) All you have to do for this one is, as the Beatles suggest, “Let it be.” OK, so there’s a catch to this one too. You do have to keep your hair clean.
My sojourn in the dreaded realm has just begun, and my reasoning is solely style. But some people do it for spiritual purposes and others as a result of lethargy. All kinds of people get them. “You’d be really surprised who comes in,” says Kris who has a customer who is a surgeon in his 40s and flies to the Knotty Boy Salon in Vancouver all the way from Texas. A nine-year-old girl with cerebral palsy got dreads because she hated her mom brushing her hair. And then you have the people who are overly excited about holidays. “You don’t understand how many requests we get around Halloween for Johnny Depp dreads. It’s definitely the busiest time for us,” says Kris.
The Knotty Boy atmosphere is a place for community, diversity and acceptance. “People have e-mailed saying people have stopped making fun of them at school after getting dreadlocks.” Stories like this “warm my heart,” says Kris. “We take a lot of pride in being personal with our clients.”
From that 41 minute and 1 second conversation we had together, I knew she wasn’t faking. And in her own words I’ll conclude, “I can’t think of anything witty right now and there’s a lady who’s been waiting patiently to buy a jar of tightening gel.”
Now you go...
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