My 2017 Relaxed Hair Goals

Welcome to 2017! I’m always excited about entering a new year and thinking about how I can make this year better than the previous one. Setting goals is a good way to do that. I prefer to not call them New Year Resolutions because of the connotation of not following through with Resolutions. Also, I’m used to setting goals because that’s a big part of my job - Setting, measuring, and achieving goals for clients and even for my own personal performance on the job.

Related post: Setting My 2016 Relaxed Hair Goals

So here I am setting 2017 goals for my hair. To determine what those goals should be I started with looking back at my 2016 hair goals and seeing how well I did (or didn’t) do with them

Maintain the health of my hair
Enjoy my hair more
Try one new hairstyle each quarter

I’m not going to go into detail on each of the 2016 goals, but I will share that I didn't get an A+ on each one. It probably didn’t help that they were pretty broad and somewhat vague goals. The best type of goals are ones that are specific and measurable.

With that in mind, here are the hair goals I set for 2017.

1. Follow my new wash day plan all year

I had been experiencing a setback with my hair with a lot more breakage that I’d seen in a while. A new stylist I’m going to confirmed that the breakage came from my hair being overprocessed. This resulted in me reexamining the products I used on my hair and when I used them. I then used this info to create the following wash day plan

1 week post - Hot oil treatment and clarify
2 weeks post - Co-wash
3 weeks post - Hot oil treatment and moisturizing shampoo
4 weeks post - Clarify
5 weeks post - Hot oil treatment and co-wash
6 weeks post - Moisturizing shampoo and protein treatment
7 weeks post - Hot oil treatment and co-wash
8 weeks post - Clarify
9 weeks post - Hot oil treatment and moisturizing shampoo
10 weeks post - Co-wash
11 weeks post - Clarify and protein treatment
12 weeks post - Salon visit

Read more: How I’m Restarting My Healthy Hair Journey

2. Finalize my roster of hair products by the end of March

When I re-examined how I was caring for my hair I also took a look at the products I was using and weeded some out that weren’t working anymore and added some old favorites back in. After doing that, and writing a post about it, I discovered that just about every single product had coconut oil as an ingredient.

Now, this could be a coincidence, but the breakage I experienced started around the time I started adding all these products with coconut oil to my regimen. When I realized that I stopped using them. I’m now trying to use products that don’t have coconut oil and have since seen a decrease in the breakage. While it hasn’t completely gone away it is a lot less.

By the end of March, I will have been using these new products for two to three months which is typically the amount of time it takes me to determine if a product is a keeper or not.

3. Try eight or fewer new products all year

This builds off of goal number two. I’ve been bouncing back and forth between products and have bought several new ones this year which costs money. To help me not go over my hair budget this year I’m going to minimize the number of new products I purchase to try out.

What are your 2017 hair goals?