Long hair is a two-part process.

I have AuDHD and the very literal thinking that goes with it, and even I am confused by how many people are getting incredibly literal about hair growth, to the point where they're dismissing products and techniques that work because they're not for "hair growth" specifically, but for "length retention."

Let's start with the basics. Hair grows from the scalp. To grow your hair, you need:

• Proper nutrition and hydration. Particularly note your iron levels, anemia will not only stunt hair growth, but also cause your existing strands to break and shed. And if you're over 40, I cannot recommend supplementing collagen peptides and vitamin C enough. It's made a hugely noticeable difference not just in my hair growth, but in my nail growth and skin quality, too.

• Regular scalp cleansing and exfoliation. Shampooing has conditioned (pun intended!) us to focus on cleansing the strands, but it's your scalp that needs the focused scrub-down and exfoliation to clean the follicles out for growth.

• Scalp oiling. Some folks find scalp serums work better for them than an oil. A dry, crusty scalp isn't the best environment for your hair to grow, and proper scalp cleansing will dry your scalp more than you're used to. The stimulation from massaging the oil in also stimulates growth.

That is what you need to grow your hair. That's it.

And that doesn't address my fine, highly porous strands that literally dissolve at the slightest hint of environmental stress. I can grow that all I want, but no one will know how fast my hair grows if I lose the hair just as quickly as I can grow it, which has been my problem all my life. This is where length retention comes in.

Now, as I write this there's three camps when it comes to how to retain length:

1. Expensive protein bonding treatments and salon hair care systems.

2. The "Abbey Yung Method," a drugstore products version of the above.

3. The "LOC" or "LCO" method (that's Liquid or Leave-In - Oil - Cream) that was popularized about 10 years ago by the natural hair movement, which is being modified today with products like chebe butter from Chad.

I'm in the third camp. I've been using the LCO for 10 years successfully even before the "modern" (which are actually millennia old) modifications, we all know I was raised crunchy af and stuck with it, and I still have trauma from 30 years of using "white" hair care products and looking fucking godawful no matter what I did because they ruined my hair over and over. Never again.

So, when it comes to my length retention routine:

• Start with wet hair. This is important, many people start with dry or slightly damp hair. This method has the opposite intended effect if you do it on dry or damp hair. It has to be wet, slightly dripping even, to work.

• Apply your favorite leave-in conditioner. It took me a whole year to find one with no nut or soy oils that works for my hair.

• Apply chebe butter over your leave-in. A decent amount. I'm using a good 2-3 tablespoons on my shoulder-length hair right now. Make sure you concentrate the application on the ends.

• Put on a steam bonnet, and settle in for at least a half-hour of heating all that moisture and oil and butter and resin up so your hair can best absorb it.

• Your hair will be just as wet as when you started at this point, so here is where you dry your hair and style it as usual.

• And finally, wear a silk bonnet to bed every night.

I do both my scalp care and my length retention routine every 2-3 days on average. Up to once a week when Life or Health gets in the way.

I should note that I'm working with "virgin" hair - uncolored, never chemically processed, never heat styled. I kept my hair dyed since I was a young teen to try to hide all of that product damage, which of course provided its own damage... the last box went in July 2021, right before my first professional photo shoot. The headshots on my About page were taken in 2023, two years into the growing out process, which took three full years all told to grow my hair to shoulder length. This was before I discovered scalp oiling and chebe steam treatments, this was also before I was diagnosed with food allergies and started supplementing iron and collagen/Vitamin C.

The 2026 Hair Growth Challenge starts in a week and a half, and I'm planning to go from shoulder length to somewhere from bra strap to waist length by February 2027. That's how fast my hair has been growing since I started using this two-part method in September 2025.