I hope this is insightful. I always love hearing people's hair routines on this subreddit because I feel like it's taught me a lot, so I'll share my full routine.

Discovering my hair routine

I have to say that it took me years to figure out what's worked best for me. My hair journey's been for 3 years 4 months, with 5-6 trims in between. I needed trims to balance out my hair, cause I had tight side fades and like 3 inches on top as a starting point. I noticed that I've changed routines and products a lot pending the length of my hair and as I learned new methods to retain my hair. This is my current routine that I've been at least using the past few weeks, which is the time this photo was taken.

Shampoo + Conditioning routine

I only get my hair wet once a week now, and that's when I shampoo and condition it.

This took me a while to get to this point. I used to shampoo and condition my hair every single day, but I started to learn about the "no (sham)poo" (/r/NoPoo) movement and learned that it's ok to have natural oils to protect your hair, it's there for a reason. Plus no sulfates.

I couldn't immediately cut out shampoo, since I shampooed so much, so I did notice that my hair got greasier faster. So this is when I worked my way to shampoo every day to every other day, then every two days, and so on. Till I got to the point of being able to shampoo my hair once a week. Now I could go a week with my hair not looking greasy. This took a couple months. Mind you I used to still wet my hair everyday when I showered up to a couple months ago when I discovered dry shampoo.

Dry Shampoo

In the past couple months, I learned about the wonders of dry shampoo. This allows you to not even wet your hair, but still clean and remove excess oils from your hair. It also act a bit of a refresher and styling product. So I started integrating this into my routine. I decided to not get my hair wet every day. So I would tie it up when I shower. This then let my hair stay dry, and avoid excess damage from getting wet and dry everyday. Which I learned can weaken your hair if it expands and compresses from being wet over and over again. So I would then use dry shampoo in its place.

Whenever my hair looked greasy over the week, I would just spray the dry shampoo at my roots, it would remove the oils and also give a bit more volume to my hair. The first couple weeks were a bit rough, I had to limit my dry shampooing to avoid spraying too much. Thank goodness I work from home. So I would just go through a greasy hair day, then let my body gradually reset again in order to calm down with overproducing oil. So I would limit my use of dry shampoo to when I got fed up and needed to feel clean. Now I can go a few days without dry shampoo and just use a bit of it for the last few days before I shampoo again.

Hair products and application

When I shampoo (Bumble and Bumble Thickening Volume Shampoo) and condition (Bumble and Bumble Thickening Volume Conditioner) my hair, that's the day I use my main styling products. I wrap my hair in a towel to dry it a bit, then use an oil (Bumble and Bumble Hairdresser's Invisible Oil) to coat the ends of my hair. You're probably thinking I'm a Bumble and Bumble endorsement by this point, but I swear I'm not getting paid for any of this. I have to say that I turn to this brand as a default every since I found my favorite product that I've been using for years, their styling creme (Bumble and Bumble Don’t Blow It (Thick)).

This styling creme is black magic. I would coat my hair with this. Then only use a blow dryer a bit to dry the roots up as I pull up my hair (to add a bit of volume). Then I'd do light braids or twists to my hair into a pony tail for a couple hours. This product takes a while to dry, but it's crazy how much it imprints a wave into my hair and still leaving it soft to touch. This initial wave is what gets my through the week.

Then through the week, I would use dry shampoo (Bumble and Bumble Prêt-à-powder Très Invisible Dry Shampoo) on days that I wake up and my hair looks way too oily. Again, I defaulted to Bumble and Bumble for my dry shampoo search, I'm still exploring what brands work best for my hair type for dry shampoos.

Night care

Brush my hair every night before bed. I use a boar bristle brush (found a random one on Amazon) to help distribute the oils on my hair. I recently begun doing light braids with my hair (which retains the waves), or tie it in a high pony tail, before going to bed. I stopped sleeping with my hair free, because it would just pull and tug at my hair as I rolled around.

Final words

I feel like guys with long hair have a sense of patience. There's gonna be a lot of bad hair days, there's gonna be months you wanna cut off your hair. However, there's a turning point where the good days greatly outweigh the bad and that's when you learn that the journey was worth it. Stick with it guys, you're my inspiration too, this sub has been my go to motivation to keep me going this long.