Type 4: Coily Hair

The tightest pattern on the chart

Stretch a type 4 strand out and let it go: it draws back into very tight coils or sharp zigzag angles, the smallest curl diameter of any family. Air-dried, the hair contracts into those coils and zigzags and appears far shorter than its stretched length.

Reading 4a, 4b and 4c

• 4a: tight, springy coils that still show a visible S-shaped curl pattern.
• 4b: sharp Z-shaped bends and angles rather than rounded curls.
• 4c: the tightest, most densely packed pattern, with little visible curl definition and the greatest shrinkage of all.

Follow the geometry along the row: 4a still loops, 4b trades the loop for angles, and 4c packs the pattern so densely that definition largely disappears.

The care convention: keep moisture in, handle gently

This is the driest and most fragile family, and every strand carries bends where breakage tends to start. The convention is therefore maximum moisture retention paired with gentle, low-manipulation handling, protective styling included.

Shrinkage is the headline

Shrinkage is the difference between hair’s stretched or wet length and its apparent length once the dry coils contract, and it is most pronounced in type 4, followed by type 3. In practice, dry length tells you very little about actual length here. A coily head can hold far more length than it shows on any given day.

Porosity, with the usual caveat

Porosity is how readily the hair shaft absorbs and holds onto moisture, set by how tightly the cuticle layer lies. The popular float test drops a clean strand into a glass of water and reads floating as low porosity and sinking as high, but it is widely regarded as unreliable, because surface tension, product residue and natural oils skew the result.

One head, several patterns

Coils in one section and sharper zigzags in another sit together on the same head all the time. Many heads carry more than one pattern, and the finder shows its point spread for exactly that reason.