My reason for straightening

The ends of hair are extremely curly and coil around themselves easily. The picture below shows the curls that form from simply wetting my hair.

As a result of all of this "curliness" I experience a lot of SSKs. Sometimes I feel like I get more than the average curly girl. To remedy the problem (temporarily) I figured I would roller-set my hair for awhile because a roller-set stretches out my curls and prevents them from curling up onto each other. 

Also, roller-sets make it easier for me to identifying split ends and SSKs - then I S&D (it sounds so evil, LOL). By destroying those ends I can retain more length and experience less breakage. I have found that healthy ends are a great contributor to my length retention. I believe that my ends are now suffering as a result of a busy life and lack of proper hair care many times over the last two months. Roller-setting will help whip my hair back into shape for my bunning this winter. I can feel myself getting close to a length in which I will just focus on maintaining and not so much retaining more length. 

Un-stretched

Stretched

SSKs = Single Strand Knots
S&D= Search and Destroy

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Then my hubby got jealous and wanted his own length check, lol (we're racing):