Experimenting with your natural hair is always a fun time, whether you are transitioning from a relaxer or have been embracing your texture for as long as you can remember. While we adore more intricate hairstyles like designer cornrows, Fulani braids, and knotless box braids, sometimes you just need an arsenal of easy natural hairstyles that require no professional expertise. Aside from just being a general confidence booster, having easy braided hairstyles on hand for when you can’t decide on what look to do next takes the guesswork out of your maintenance routine, is less costly, and gives you time for other things.
However, we do recognize that depending on your hair type or texture, the quest to find quick and easy braided hairstyles for natural hair can be a bit daunting. Naturally curly hairstyles may look different on type three versus type four hair, what you thought was a quick braided hairstyle may actually be much more difficult because of the length of your hair, and hairstyles for short natural hair may feel impossible to replicate. We get it — not all “simple” braided hairstyles are created equal.
What we can say is that during our quest to find easy natural hairstyles, we want to protect our hair in the process, and one of the easiest ways we’ve found to do that is to incorporate braids into our preferred styles. So we went ahead and rounded up some of the cutest natural hairstyles that you can achieve at home, ahead.
— Additional reporting by Ariel Baker