Tutorial: Make Any Synthetic/Kanekalon Braiding Hair Into Type 4/4C Texture

Hi, okay, so i haven't done a tutorial video in probably god. I don't know some years now um, but i am working on a wig that is actually tangled in the cords to my ring, light and camera. So i can't show you the wig but um the wig. I am incorporating marley here, i'm doing the wig in locks, and so one of the problems that i was having uh with sourcing hair was that i could of course not find the colors of hair. I needed in a similar texture, like i think, for marley textured hair. Specifically, i could only find things like natural and blue, which my own hair is. What gave me the idea to do this wig anyway um. So i was thinking about some tutorials. I had watched in the past and um looking at how hair is textured typically and i had an idea to texture the hair i intended to use, and so i'm going to show you how to do that. Figured it's as good a tutorial as any um. So the first thing you want to do is take about a lock or braid size like if you've ever done, your own braids uh. You would take about that much hair uh, probably about half the thickness of your pinky finger, it's a good size and that size chunk of hair. You can do i'm doing this in locks um. You can do this to a wig like an entire wig in pieces. Um the things you're gon na need, of course, are your your hair um. I have two. This one is awfully shiny, but it's like a light: olive green and a regular olive green. I'M going to blend those together to get the color that i want um you're going to need um some pretty long, hair pins. These are, would you just they're three inches long? I don't know if i could actually get the camera to show it. Oh, whatever there we go three inch long, hairpins, not bobby pins, the hair pins, the kind that you use to actually get a wig to stay on. They look like this um and you'll need probably about two per length of hair. The first thing i do is pull them apart, so it's a wide v as opposed to the narrow v. It normally comes in and okay. So now i'm going to take my hair, i'm going to shuffle blend the fibers which, if you've ever done like multi-colored locks or multi-colored braids, where you have like two or three colors in the same braid. You might be familiar with this uh, but yeah. You just kind of finger, spread them pull them apart, put them back together. So the lengths are about the same. Oh crud, all right, so that's good and uniformly blended, more or less all right um. So you can start this with. Hey, probably wants rubber bands too. Um you can use these or the vinyl ones, um, the actual rubber ones hold up to heat better. So if you're using a loose hair loose fiber, you probably want to do this just to have something to um like mark where the loop is oh credit. I forgot to split this. This is about two braids worth i just okay, so you probably want about this much hair. You see like how thick that is compared to my thumb i don't know um so there's that um and so what you want to do. You want to take one of your pins. This is actually, i believe, close to and you're going to wrap in a figure eight around the pin and then push it down as you go, so figure eight and you're going to push it down, figure eight and push it down. You'Re gon na keep going like this, tell you about uh with the compacting about three quarters of the way up the pin and, of course doing this. Oh fudge. Of course doing this is going to cause the pin to pull together. So when you get probably about a third of the way up - or you know close to half just spread the pin apart again now, if you want the texture to be even tighter, you can um kind of twist it, but that just adds to the complexity. So this is too much hair for one pen, of course, um so you're gon na take a second pin and you're gon na line it up with the first pin and that'll, give you a little bit of extra length to work with, and once that's set up Now, like i said you can do this on a wig. If you do this on a wig you're not going to need the rubber band at the end, because of course uh, the ends of the hair is are are anchored um but yeah. You do this until you get down to probably like the last. I don't know as long as your pinky and then very tightly wind the ends, so you wind up if you're doing this with loose hair, you wind up with something that looks like this and it holds on to itself pretty well. But if it starts unraveling at the end, you can try twisting it sometimes that helps and if it really insists on not holding you can use a rubber band to secure it now. The reason why you want this to hold up to heat is because you're going to take these and you're going to dunk them in a pot of boiling water um. So i've already done a couple um just as a test, so this was with the um. The lighter of the olive green that i was using and it does make it a little less shiny um. I don't know if that's the boiling, it's probably the boiling um but um you're going to take this off. This was one of the ones that um i was able to secure without a rubber band, but i think i might have wrapped the ends too tight. Okay, i'm gon na fight with this a little there. We go all right there, we go okay, so you very carefully are going to pull this off and you can either slowly unwrap it or you can try and pull it, but, like you probably want to go slow for this there we go all right and, as You can see already it's in a pretty tight curl, all right, yeah, okay, now this is going to take some doing to get it off the pins there. We go all right, okay, so that's one pin out and the second pin usually comes out fairly easily. So now we have shrinkage um. This is typical of the shrinkage um. The ends are not going to be great, so what you can do - and i had these just a second ago - um - is get your hair scissors wherever my hair scissors are. Ah here we go. Okay and cut like the fried looking bits off uh because, like natural 4c, natural type 4 hair doesn't really taper like that. At the end, usually, the curl pattern is pretty uniform. So that's one of the giveaways of um artificially textured type for hair. Is that usually the ends are kind of they have the curl tapers the curl pattern, tapers, so yeah undoing this uh just finger detangling if you're familiar with that um. This is definitely textured and like what you can um like your detangling brush, probably or a cone, and you just undo this or you can start from the loop if you feel so daring and kind of just pull it apart. Be careful, though, because it can um it can tangle on the way down and that'll be fun. Yep like it just did right here: whoops, okay, i'm either gon na have to cut that off or very carefully comb it out, and there we go. So now you have a full length of type 4 braiding hair that is very similar once i stretch it out to the texture of these of this pre-purchased marley. Here it's actually like a little tighter, but it's softer. This is really crunchy, and now you can get this in any color. You can find synthetic hair. That'S it