PrintTop braider Nancy Henson shows you how to make even the most difficult mane braidable.
For pictures to guide you on the way to a perfectly pulled mane, download the pdf.
Creating a perfect row of braids is hard enough in the most perfect mane; when it seems like there’s a toothbrush sprouting out of your horse’s crest, or he has a wispy, thin mane, it’s even harder.
The key to putting beautiful braids into thick or thin manes isn’t in the braiding but in the pulling of the mane.
“The main thing you want to do in pulling a mane is to make it possible to braid it,” said professional braider Nancy Henson. “Some people say, ‘My horse’s mane should be 4 inches long or 6 inches long,’ but if you’re just measuring the hair without taking into account its thickness, it’s wrong.”
Theoretically, said Henson, any mane can be braided. “It’s just whether it’s going to look good or not. You want the braids to be proportional, width versus length,” she said. “You don’t want long, skinny braids or short, fat ones. What I want to do is to have the mane the same thickness and the same length all the way down the neck.”
As a general rule, Henson keeps her thick manes longer than she would a mane of ideal thickness and her thin manes shorter.
While there are some tips for manes at the extreme ends of the thickness spectrum, there are also somegeneral principles about mane-pulling that hold true regardless of how thick your horse’s mane may be.
“If you’re not experienced at pulling manes, you should stop before you think you’re done. You can always pull more later, but you can’t put the hair back in,” Henson said. “What I generally do is find the thickest portion of the mane, which is usually about a third the way down the neck, and I pull that to the length I want. Then, I match up the other portions of the mane through a combination of pulling and cutting.”
Henson recommends pulling just a little bit of mane at a time but doing so frequently. “The bad thing about pulling it all at once is that it’ll all grow back at once, and then you end up with a mane with two levels,” she said.
Pulling a little bit a few days a week helps keep your horse’s mane at its best all the time. If you have to tackle a mane that hasn’t been pulled and has grown to the bottom of the horse’s neck, devote a number of mane-pulling sessions to the task rather than pulling all the hair out at once.
Above all, remember that it always grows back! “So, if you screw it up, it’ll come back in a few weeks and you can try it again,” said Henson.
Thick Manes
If your horse has coarse, bristly hair that grows on a thick crest, creating a thick toothbrush of a mane, Henson advises avoiding the temptation of pulling too much.
