Dreadlocks: How to Start Locs and Protect Your Hairline

Locs are ropes of hair. You can start locs with comb coils, twists, braids, or a crochet hook. You can also simply stop combing and let your hair loc on its own. Every one of those routes ends in the same place: strands of your hair matted together for good, instead of hanging separately.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably trying to decide how to start locs. That decision really has four parts, and most articles you’ll find only cover the first one.

Which method suits your hair. What locs are going to cost you. How long before your hair looks like locs instead of twists. And whether you can undo locs at all if you change your mind.

We’ll go through all four, along with the part almost nobody discusses until it’s too late, which is how to keep your hairline while you wear locs.

What Are Locs, and Are They the Same as Dreadlocks?

Locs and dreadlocks are the same hairstyle. The two words carry very different histories, and that’s the whole reason people are careful about which one they use.

“Dreadlocks” turns up in written English around 1960, coming out of Rastafari Jamaica, and the “dread” in it was doing two jobs at once. Inside the movement, it meant awe, a dread of Jah, and the men who wore locks were the Dreads. Outside it, the colonial reading was blunter, and it meant hair that looked dreadful.

Both meanings traveled with the word, which is why so many people now simply say “locs.”

That word names the same hairstyle and leaves the insult behind. Others deliberately hold onto “dreadlocks” and reclaim it, and they have every right to, so there isn’t really a rule here — only a courtesy.

Well, it depends on who you are talking to and their preferences. I would definitely ask the person which term they prefer, out of respect to the person. We’ve found that the best way to avoid a sidebar discussion is to just ask someone their personal preference.

Throughout this article, we’ll use “locs” in the writing and “dreadlocks” where you’d search for it, because both words bring people to this page.

There’s one more distinction worth knowing, because you’ll hear it from locticians. Some people reserve “locs” for hair that’s deliberately cultivated, parted into planned sections, and groomed on a schedule, and use “freeform” or “dreadlocks” for hair that’s left to mat as it pleases. That’s a distinction about method rather than about the word itself.

Which Method Should You Use to Start Locs?

There are seven ways to start locs, and they’re genuinely different from each other rather than seven names for the same thing. They differ in how long you’ll wait, what you’ll pay, how hard they pull on your roots, and whether you can ever go back.

Answer eight questions below and the tool will tell you which one actually fits your hair. Everything it scores against sits in the table underneath, so you can check its work.

A few things the table can’t hold on its own.

Comb coils are the most common starting point for type 3 and type 4 hair, and you only need about two inches to begin. The trade-off is fragility, because steam from a shower is enough to undo a fresh coil in your hair, so your first month gets spent protecting your new coils.

Two-strand twists want four to five inches of length, and they’re the gentlest thing on this list to do on your own hair at home. They’re also among the easiest to take back out, because the hair has been wrapped around itself rather than woven through itself.

Braids are the durable choice, and if you sweat, swim, or train, braids will survive a week that would ruin a set of coils. The catch is that the braid pattern often stays visible inside your finished locs, which some people love, and other people can never unsee.

Backcombing is where the older version of this page told you “never, under any circumstance,” and that was too broad, so we’ve corrected it. Backcombing is the standard route for type 1 and type 2 hair, which will not mat on its own no matter how long you leave your hair alone. On type 3 and type 4 hair, it’s usually unnecessary work, because your texture is already doing that job for you.

Interlocking pulls a tool through your hair right at the root. It’s the neatest option and the one that survives swimming without unraveling, and it’s also the one locticians most often blame when your roots start thinning.

Loc extensions hand you finished length on the day you sit down, and they also hang new weight from follicles that have never had to carry it.

Freeform is the oldest method of all and the only one that asks you to do nothing. It’s also by a wide margin the gentlest thing you can do to your scalp, for the simple reason that nothing ever gets retwisted.

For a step-by-step on each one, we have a dedicated guide to the seven methods to start locs. The matcher above also lives on its own page, which loc method is best for your hair, if you want to send it to someone rather than send them the whole guide.

How Long Does Your Hair Have to Be to Start Dreadlocks?

This question depends on how you decide to start your locks. You are able to start the locing process with only a couple of months of growth — assuming that you decided to big chop.

Roughly two inches of your own hair opens up comb coils, four to five inches opens up two-strand twists, and backcombing and braids both want somewhere around three.

Under two inches of hair you’ll need a locking tool to coax a coil that will eventually transform into a loc, and once you’re past a few inches your fingers will do the job with no tools required.

There’s one caveat the older version of this page never gave you, and it genuinely matters. Some methods will let you keep your relaxed ends attached and cut those ends off later, which works mechanically but happens to be the exact combination the hair-loss research singles out. We’d rather you heard that before you booked the appointment than after.

How to Choose Your Loc Size

Size is the decision people revisit most often and can change least, because once your hair has locked into a section, that section of your hair simply is the loc from then on.

If you have fine (thin) hair, your base should be big enough to support the starter loc. Also, keep in mind that your starter locks should be relative in proportion to your base. Generally, ¼ inch × ¼ inch may yield about the size of a standard No. 2 pencil.

The quick reference most locticians reach for is household objects, so your small locs land about the width of a chopstick, medium locs about a pencil, and thick locs about a Sharpie. Below that you’re into microlocs, and below those, Sisterlocks.

Two things follow from your loc size that nobody tends to mention at the consultation.

Smaller locs mean you end up with more locs, which means a longer install and a longer retightening session every single time you sit down. Smaller locs also mean each one is anchored by fewer of your hairs, and that’s the reason the American Academy of Dermatology’s written advice is to opt for thicker braids and locs rather than thinner ones.

Our dreadlock size chart has the loc counts for each size, along with how to work out what your own density will comfortably support.

How to Part Your Hair for Starter Locs

Parting is when you use a smooth rounded tip, like the tail of a comb, to draw a line in your hair and separate it into sections. That line can be straight, curved, or designed, and any length you like.

You can part with your fingers instead, but doing it that way gives you a less defined line and uneven sections. Work in rows, and clip everything you aren’t actively working on.

1. Place the rat-tail comb firmly behind your ear; glide the tail of the comb up and across your scalp to the opposite side. This step creates two sections of hair from ear to ear.
2. Use a duck bib clamp or ouchless bands to secure the front section of hair.
3. Working with the hair that is loose in the back, place the tail of the rat-tail comb along the hairline, at the base of your neck in the center and move the comb upward until the middle part is reached. This step creates two sections (a left and right section) using the loose hair in the back of your head. You should now have three sections: front, left-back, and right-back.
4. Use a duck bib clamp or ouchless bands to secure the hair on the left side.
5. Place the tail of the rat-tail comb ¼ inch or your desired height from the base of your hairline. Glide the comb straight across to the opposite side. Congrats, you have created the first row for your locks.
6. Use a duck bib clamp or ouchless bands to secure the loose hair, so only your first row is loose.
7. Working with the loose section only, part a ¼-inch wide vertical line (or your desired width), near your right your ear. This will create a box that will eventually mature into a beautiful, healthy lock.
8. Use your desired technique to create your starter locks (ex., Two Strand Twists)
9. Once you complete the first starter lock, return to step seven to create another box for the next twist. Steps seven and eight will be repeated until all the loose hairs are starter locks.

On the base. Think of the base the way you’d think about the foundation of a house, where the foundation is what provides strength and stability to everything above it. If your base is weak, it will eventually thin, and under the weight of a mature loc, that loc can pull free of your scalp entirely.

A large base doesn’t automatically mean a better one. Choosing a base that’s proportionate to the thickness of loc you actually want is what matters, so if your base looks considerably bigger than the twist sitting on it, make the base smaller.

Three Things That Make a Twist Hold

• To make a secure twist that will not unravel, twist each piece of your hair tautly around the other using your fingertips. Get as many revolutions as you can, and make sure ample holding product is applied as well.
• Twisting on dry hair can cause your hair to snap, so work on damp hair.
• Once you reach the end of the twist, wrap it around your finger to secure the ends. If you’re unable to create a coil on the end, try a pin swirl with your fingers and secure it with a metal clip.

What Do Locs Cost to Start and Maintain?

The install is the number everyone asks about first, and it’s the smaller of the two numbers you should care about. Maintenance is where the real money goes, because unlike the install, it repeats for as long as your hair stays locked.

A traditional starter set for your hair runs somewhere between $50 and $150 in most of the country. Interlocking and instant locs sit higher, at $150 to $300 and upward, because they take hours and real skill to do properly. Loc extensions start around $250 and climb quickly from there, since you’re buying the hair itself on top of the labor.

After that, every four to ten weeks depending on your method, you’re either retightening your locs yourself or paying someone else to do it. Across a year, that second number comfortably dwarfs whatever you paid to get started.

There’s a fuller breakdown, including some realistic ways to bring the cost down, in how much starter locs cost.

The Five Stages of Locs

Your locs won’t travel from twists to mature in a smooth straight line. Your hair will go through a stage that honestly looks worse than where you started, and that stage is where most people give up.

Starter, or baby. Your loc journey begins here regardless of which technique you chose, and it won’t resemble mature locs yet. When starter locs are first installed there aren’t any knots, tangles, or matting happening at all, but over the next few months, as your hair is allowed to set, the inner strands begin to knot and tangle on their own.

Budding. Knots are a very important step in your journey, and it helps to think of these knots as a seed that’s been planted. On the outside, your hair is continually wrapping itself around neighboring strands, and that intertwining creates a kind of cocoon around the inner knots. Handle your locs with care at this point, because they’re still getting set in their ways.

Teenage. Your locs are not really starter locs anymore, but they aren’t mature locs either, so they’re caught in the middle and searching for their way.

As those internal knots expand, your locs will stand up and out, look shorter and unruly, and flatly refuse to lie down with the others. This is the stage where your locs show their personality.

Frizz is the other defining feature of this stage, and you’ll have the urge to beat it by twisting your locs continually. Don’t. It’s a short-term fix that creates a disastrous future of thinning locs and a weak base, and it’s the single most expensive mistake in the whole journey.

Mature. The outer cocoon has formed and completely encases the internal knots, and the frizz finally settles down. Your locs are heavier by now, which is what makes your locs lie flat rather than stand out the way they did before.

Rooted. Your locs hang with real weight, your roots have thickened underneath them, and the whole thing stops being a project and starts simply being your hair.

We have a longer walk through the five stages of locs, including how long each one tends to last.

How to Protect Your Hairline With Locs

This is the section the loc-product sites don’t write, and if you only read one part of this page, read this one. Your locs will outlast almost every other decision you make about your hair, and so will the damage if it goes wrong.

Three things stack the risk, and it’s worth knowing which of these three apply to your hair.

Tension at the root, repeated. Any maintenance that pulls at the base is pulling the same follicles every single time you retwist. Retwisting too tight or too often can thin or weaken the base of the loc, so you’ll need to experiment to find the right stretch of time to leave between retightening sessions.

Weight. A long loc is a heavy loc, and it hangs from a fixed number of your follicles that never increases. That’s why dermatologists say to keep braids and locs short, in those exact words, and it’s why loc extensions carry more risk than the same style grown out naturally.

Relaxed hair. Chemical relaxing breaks disulfide bonds and weakens the hair shaft, and adding traction on top of hair that’s already weakened is the specific combination the literature singles out. The public-education slogan that came out of that research is blunt: no braids or weaves on relaxed hair.

So if you’re transitioning and thinking about starting locs on relaxed ends, that’s worth a conversation with your loctician rather than a booking.

The reassuring part is the arithmetic of catching it early, because early traction loss is non-scarring and it does grow back. There are documented cases of regrowth with topical 2% minoxidil at three, six, and nine months even in patients who came in late. What doesn’t come back is a follicle that has scarred over, which is what happens when the pulling carries on for years.

And if you do notice something, the move is a board-certified dermatologist rather than a forum thread. Hair loss in Black women has several common causes that look similar from the outside, and telling traction alopecia apart from CCCA or female pattern hair loss is a diagnosis rather than a guess.

As the AAD puts it, don’t blame yourself for your hair loss.

If your roots are already thinning, we have a dedicated guide to stopping dreads from thinning at the root.

Can You Wash Locs?

Yes, and the myth that you can’t wash your locs is easily the most persistent one about them.

Locs or dreadlocks should be washed at regular intervals to remove dirt and odor, just as you would loose hair. In fact, wetting the hair encourages the hair to tangle more.

For tightly coiled hair in general, dermatologists tend to suggest washing about once a week rather than more often than that. With starter locs, there’s a competing pressure, because washing disturbs a loc that hasn’t set yet, so many people stretch to every week or two early on and then tighten the schedule up as your locs mature.

When you wash, wear a stocking cap, which will help maintain the integrity of your starter locs. Reduce lint in your locs afterward by drying with a dark-colored microfiber towel, so that any lint left behind is dark rather than white and far less visible.

The real risk inside a loc isn’t dirt at all, it’s whatever stays behind. Your loc is a dense mesh, and anything that doesn’t rinse fully out will sit inside it where no amount of surface washing is ever going to reach it. That’s the entire reason residue-free shampoos exist for locs, and it is the one product category worth being fussy about. Look for a residue-free shampoo rather than whatever is gentlest, because gentle and rinse-clean are not the same thing.

There’s more on frequency, including what to do if you work out, in how often you should wash your locs, and we took apart the other myth in are dreads dirty.

What Products Should You Use on Locs, and What Should You Avoid?

Think of your locs as a finely meshed net. The job of this net is to filter everything that you put on your hair. As a rule of thumb, do not use products that will get visibly caught in the net. Gravitate towards oils, clear shampoos, and clear gels.

That’s the best one-line test anyone has written on this subject, and it does the work of an entire ingredients lecture. Two specifics sit underneath it.

Beeswax and petroleum jelly. Avoid both of them, and the reason is mechanical rather than moral. Neither one is water-soluble, so neither one rinses out, which means they stay inside your locs collecting lint and dirt for as long as those locs exist.

Creamy conditioners. The older version of this page called conditioner “taboo,” which overstates it, so here’s the actual tension. Conditioner adds slip, and slip is precisely the opposite of what you want while your hair is trying to mat, so it really does slow your hair down early on and can leave residue behind.

But the ends of your hair are the oldest part of it and they need the most care of anything on your head. The workable answer is a finishing rinse on your ends rather than a creamy conditioner worked through the whole loc.

Can You Take Dreadlocks Out?

Yes, dreadlocks or locs can be removed. For this answer to be true, take two things into consideration: (1) the technique that was used to create your starter locks and for dreadlock maintenance and (2) how mature your locks are. More mature locs may be more difficult to detangle than the younger portion, so you may decide to cut the oldest part off first before detangling.

Comb coils, finger coils, and two-strand twists are easier to take down because the hair has not been manually woven and manually intertwined.

That last line is the one to weigh up before you start rather than after. Anything that weaves your hair through itself, meaning interlocking, backcombing, or crochet, is far harder to reverse than anything that simply wraps your strands around each other.

So if there’s any real chance you’ll want out, that difference should drive which method you choose more than the finished look does. Expect a comb-out to take many hours and to cost your hair some length, and we walk through the whole process in removing dreadlocks.

How to Make Dreadlocks for Type 1 or Type 2 Hair Types

If your hair is type 1 straight or type 2 wavy, the technique shifts slightly from what type 3 curly and type 4 coily hair needs. Your hair will not mat on its own no matter how long you leave it alone, so backcombing has to do the work your texture would otherwise do for you.

That is the one case where backcombing is the right call for your hair rather than the wrong one, and the full walk-through for every texture is in our guide to the seven methods.

Dreadlocks: Step-by-step Video Tutorial

How to Get Faux Dreadlocks Tutorial

Faux locs have become really popular for those who simply want to try dreadlocks for a relatively short period of time. 

Faux locs (temporary dreadlocks) use extensions or hair weave to create a beautiful natural hairstyle that emulates real locs.

If you’re interested in trying faux locs before you make the leap to real locs, check out the tutorial below and our full faux locs guide.

Where Do Dreadlocks Come From?

Locked hair isn’t any one culture’s invention, which is part of why the conversation around it gets so heated.

Several African ethnic groups wear locs, although the significance changes from group to group. Maasai warriors are recognized by their long, thin locs colored with red ochre. Children in Nigeria born with naturally locked hair are called Dada, and Yoruba priests wear locs too.

In Sanskrit, matted hair is jaṭā, and Shiva is depicted wearing it. The Rigveda describes long-haired ascetics centuries before any of the modern terminology existed.

Ancient Egypt comes up constantly in this conversation, and it deserves a caveat. Locked hair and locked wigs genuinely do appear on Egyptian remains and in Egyptian art. But the very specific claims that circulate online, the ones with an exact date and a named pharaoh attached, trace back to blog posts quoting other blog posts rather than to published Egyptology.

We’d rather tell you the evidence is real and the specifics are shaky than repeat a number we can’t stand behind.

The Rastafari association is the most recent layer and the one that gets garbled most often. Rastafari emerged in Jamaica in the 1930s, after the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie, rather than during the slave trade. Its principal founder was Leonard Percival Howell, who began preaching in West Kingston and later built the Pinnacle commune.

Marcus Garvey’s Black-nationalist teaching was foundational to the movement and Howell was himself a Garveyite, but Garvey was not a Rasta and he rejected the deification of Haile Selassie. And not all Rastas wear locs.

Locs went mainstream through music. Bob Marley carried locs onto a world stage. Whoopi Goldberg helped popularize locs through the 1980s, and Lauryn Hill and Lenny Kravitz wore theirs through the ’90s. Locs were picked up in the West by the 1960s and ’70s counterculture, and later by New Age Travelers, crust punks, goths and the Rainbow Family.

People increasingly wore locs as a fashion choice rather than for cultural or religious reasons, and the beauty industry followed that demand with product lines, salon services, and synthetic versions of locs.

Our full history, with the sourcing laid out properly, is at where dreadlocks originated.

Can You Wear Locs at Work?

Legally, in the United States, it depends on your state, and that’s a genuinely unsatisfying answer with a very specific cause behind it.

In 2016, the Eleventh Circuit decided EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions. Chastity Jones was offered a job and then had the offer pulled when she declined to cut her locs, and the court held that pulling the offer did not violate Title VII. It drew a line between hair texture, which is immutable and protected, and a hairstyle, which it treated as a mutable choice.

The CROWN Act exists to close exactly that gap. California passed the first one in 2019, and more than half of US states now have some version of it, protecting natural texture and protective styles including locs in both workplaces and schools.

Counts differ between trackers, running from roughly 27 to 30 depending on whether partial statutes get included, and Pennsylvania’s took effect in January 2026. A federal version has passed the House but has never become law.

The practical read is to check your own state, and to know that a grooming policy aimed at your locs stands on much weaker ground than it did a decade ago.

For military grooming standards, which are their own separate rulebook entirely, see can you have dreads in the military.

Questions to Ask Your Loctician

You’re hiring someone to make a decision about your hair that will last for years, so ask before rather than after.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles

• Different Ways To Start Dreadlocks
• Are Dreadlocks Dirty Hair?
• Why Do My Dreads Smell?
• How To Get Congo Dreads
• How To Get Lint Out of Dreads
• How Much Do Starter Locs Cost?
• Starting Locs With Two Strand Twists
• Microlocs vs. Sisterlocks

Sources

The dermatology, legal, and historical claims in this guide trace to these sources:

• American Academy of Dermatology. “Hairstyles that pull can lead to hair loss.” The source for the tension guidance in this guide, including the warning signs and the advice to opt for thicker, shorter locs.
• American Academy of Dermatology. “Hair loss in Black women: Here’s how dermatologists help.”
• American Academy of Dermatology. “Black hair: Tips for everyday care.” The source for the once-a-week washing guidance.
• Billero V, Miteva M. “Traction alopecia: the root of the problem.” Clinical, Cosmetic and Investigational Dermatology, 2018;11:149–159.
• Samrao A, Price VH, Zedek D, Mirmirani P. “The ‘Fringe Sign’ — a useful clinical finding in traction alopecia of the marginal hair line.” Dermatology Online Journal, 2011;17(11).
• EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 852 F.3d 1018 (11th Cir. 2016). NAACP Legal Defense Fund case page.
• The CROWN Act. Legislative status by state.
• “Dreadlocks (n.).” Online Etymology Dictionary.
• Hutton C, Barnett M, Dunkley DA, Niaah JS, eds. Leonard Percival Howell and the Genesis of Rastafari. University of the West Indies Press, 2015.

Two things we deliberately do not source, because no one can. There is no controlled study measuring how long hair takes to loc, and there is no published figure for how many loc wearers develop traction alopecia — the prevalence studies measure mixed styling populations, not loc wearers. Every timeline and cost range on this page is field consensus and a market survey, and is labeled that way where it appears rather than dressed up as data.