How To French Braid Hair | Real Simple

French braids might look fancy but they're actually a lot easier to pull off than you might think. I'M Chris, at the real simple studio and along with my new best friend April, we're going to show you how to French braid so we're going to get started by brushing through the hair. If I could, please have the brush April there you go. Thank you and we're just going to smooth it out and make sure we have all the knots out of here. You can hold that. Okay, thank you and then we're going to pull back a section of hair from the top of the head, and you can really start as close to the scalp as you wanted to, and you're really going to start off by making a regular braid of dividing the Hair into three equal sections and the left side goes in your left hand, the right side and your right hand, and then that middle section can be held between your thumb and just one of your fingers. It doesn't matter which one and then you take the left side and cross it over the middle section and then the right side and cross it over. But one of the tricks is, you have to keep smoothing the hair a little bit with your fingers. As you go and make sure that you don't have any lumps or bumps so now comes the fun part, alright, we're about to cross the right section over the middle, but to make the French braid we're going to add more hair into it. So you're going to pull a new section of hair into this, and it's going to join this right-hand section and just come right over the middle like that and now you have a new middle section and you hold it as tight as you can and then you're Going to pull from the left and let it join that section like that and now you're going to pull in some more hair here, take it across the middle and just keep repeating this. This actually works much better on hair, that's a little bit dirty, because if the hair is just washed, it's going to slip a little bit. This gives it the traction that it needs. But if you did just wash the hair, you could just spritz on a little styling product, and that would work well also just to give it a little bit of grip. And so you just keep crossing over. And you add that hair as you go and now there's no more hair to add in you're just down to doing a regular braid in April. Do you have another rubber band there? Yes, I do perfect I'll. Take it now: hey thanks a lot and it just tie it at the end and there you go a great-looking French braid