I want to take a break from posting about my own hair to share the journey my fiancée has been undertaking. 🙂

First of all though, I want to mention that her hair is insanely tough and practically indestructible. XD I often (lovingly) joke that she has horsehair! While the toughness of her hair may seem like a disappointment for an article like this–isn’t the whole point to show how to get hair from short to long through difficult odds?–it actually provides an interesting opportunity. This is because her hair is able to withstand more than mine can and can demonstrate the effects of harmful shampoos and chlorine and sun and lack of oiling in ways that mine simply cannot. Mine would would just break and fall off under all that pressure, while hers doesn’t. Thus, though her hair is very different from mine, at the end of the day it still comes back to changing haircare methods and watching the results blossom.

When the journey to better hair began in February 2024, she didn’t realize it, but I had plans. XD She had already grown it to a solid 12 inches, but it was a dry 12 inches. So very dry. Her camera had a hard time showing it, just because her hair is so dark, but it was just full of split ends. The hair looked dull, not shiny or smooth at all, and she often had the challenge of trying to wrangle it against its high volume and stiffness.

Several months later, she got a friend’s help and bleached and dyed it using IroIro’s “red”. For a hair dye, it was definitely safer than a lot of box dyes on the market. However, not surprisingly, the coconut conditioning effects didn’t last that long and the hair was left even drier than before. Now it wasn’t just the follicles that were damaged but also the core of each hair. She knew that her hair needed a reset. Still, she just wanted to go ahead and dye it for the first time, seeing that she was going to go see Twenty One Pilots’ “Clancy” concert and wanted her hair to match the red color that drummer Josh Dun had used.

After a few months the color began to fade, and with it, a lot of breakage along the ends. I periodically gave it cuts and trims to progressively work the bleached ends out of her hair as new growth came in. It effectively meant her hair never got past a certain length, but it did mean it was a gradual hair reset, unlike what I had done when I just chopped mine all off. During this time she wanted to try out some different colors of the IroIro dye while she still had some of the original bleached sections. Note how even the blue ends look compared to the red, and previously black, ends.

Also, a funny shot of images-within-images that she took that February. Her hair has the same dark blue dye as the image above. She would tell me during this time that her hair was so much easier to detangle and brush through now that the ends were behaving a bit more, post-trim and oiling. It was around then that she had started to use some coconut oil, especially along the ends, where it was driest. This did cause some of the dye to run a bit, but it was worth it.

Between February of 2025 and September 2026 I finally convinced her to try out some of the methods I used, like MSM, boars hair bristle brushes, scalp massages, and satin/silk pillowcases. Most importantly, she switched her 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner set to the Castor Oil line of Shea Moisture, all jumping several steps closer to going no-shampoo and restoring the health of her hair.

Fast-forward to this September and this is what her hair looks like now. 😀 It’s soft, shiny, and without a bunch of split ends (where no bleach ever was). You can see just a little bit of the bleached hair that used to be up by her ears. Instead of using more synthetic dyes, we’ll be using Henna to re-color it as well as to condition the rest of her hair and scalp. In a couple of weeks she’ll also get to try my hair powder for the first time, which we’ve both been looking forward to for some time now.

We had meant to trim the ends back in August, but life got really busy with my move into a new apartment with a couple of friends. So, it will be in a few weeks, when we use my hair powder and her pick of a henna color (Light Mountain brand), that I’ll also apply some of my JoJoba oil to her hair and finally trim off all the remaining bleach damage. Yay. I have a hunch it may be the Spicy Cinnamon color of henna, but we’ll see. Thanks for joining me!

Btw, she wants to grow her hair down to the floor, just like I do. Let’s gooo!