Hey guys, it’s Krista with SaddleBox, and in today’s video I’ll be showing you how to grow out and maintain your horse’s mane.
So this Laramie, and as you can see, she has a very long and luxurious mane, and I’m just going to be showing you how I keep it that way and how I help it grow.
So basically I almost always have my horses’ manes in braids. The only time I don’t have them in braids is if they’re going to show or I want it to look pretty, or usually three days before I wash it, I will take the braid out just to kind of let it breathe and hang naturally.
And I find this helps with fall out and it makes whenever you take the braids out easier and the hair can just kind of lay natural and not as much breakage will occur.
Now, another thing I do is I will wash the hair probably once every three months, unless it gets incredibly dirty like we have rain and they roll. But the reason I only do it ever so often is because you want the natural oils to get into the root of their hair and kind of help the mane grow.
If you constantly use shampoo, that will strip them of their natural oils, so you definitely don’t want to overdo it on that. So yeah, now I’ll kind of show you how I go about washing.
So these are the two products I most often use. Pretty much I use the Yellow Out purple shampoo whenever I have a horse that has a white mane like Laramie does and then I always use a conditioner after just to kind of replace the oils and make sure everything is untangled and very smooth and soft.
So I’m first going to go in with that purple shampoo, I’ve already wet her mane, and I’m just going to start at the top here and go down like so. I don’t want to put too, too much. Then I’ll kind of scrub that in, and with this stuff, you kind of want to get it all over, especially because it keeps their color and maintains their color very well. So I’m going to kind of scrub and then I’m going to do another layer down here, but first I’m going to focus on this layer up top.
So now that I have her mane fully saturated with the shampoo, I’m going to go ahead and let that sit for about ten minutes just so the color factor really sinks in. Obviously, if your horse doesn’t have a light-colored mane, you really don’t have to do this step, but this just really makes a difference in how the mane shines and how it stays white.
Now that I’ve rinsed out her mane, I went ahead and put the conditioner in it, and again, I’m going to let this sit for about ten minutes just so it can really work its magic and soften up her hair.
Now that I have rinsed the conditioner out, I will go ahead and put a concentrated detangle product that’s kind of oily, like this one, up on her roots, and I find that this helps her hair grow and it kind of does its job too to replace the oils that we’ve just stripped and it detangles very nicely. So I’ll do that, and I’ll even bring it down a bit to make sure there’s no tangles even though we’ve just conditioned her mane. The more tangles there are, the more fall-out.
So now that I’ve put in the leave-in conditioner oil and have brushed through her mane, I have already braided it. And one thing about the braids, as you can see, I’ve kind of kept them on the smaller side. I’ve found that keeping them smaller kind of helps reduce their urge to want to rub them out.
And another very, very important thing I’ve done is I’ve made sure that they’re nice and loose here at the top, as you can see, and I’ll even go through again and just make sure these are really loose, because when they’re tight, it can make them very uncomfortable and want to scratch on trees and rub them out in their stalls. So that’s why it’s very important that you keep the braids nice and loose so that the horse can be comfortable.
Okay, so now Laramie is done. Really quickly, I wanted to mention that to get a horse’s mane to grow, or mane and tail to grow, you can also use a supplement like a biotin supplement.
This won’t always let you have dramatic results, typically some breeds are pre-disposed to having shorter manes and tails, like Appaloosas, but this can definitely, definitely help, especially if your horse is lacking in biotin.
So that’s it for this one. I hope you enjoyed it and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye guys!