Will blunting or rounding your tips cause dread rot as the Lock Blockers say? - Dreadlocks FAQ's

Short answer is...No. Blunt round tips are made of dreaded hair and dreaded hair dries at the same speed provided that it's clean and free of residue. Thank God cause I'd have dread rot along with just about everybody I know if it were true! lol

Water drips from blunted tips just like it drips from paintbrush tips. When you blunt a tip you don't create a "stopper", it's just dreaded hair like any other part of the dread. A locked paintbrush tip is just like a locked blunted tip, except it has some hair sticking off the bottom. While it's true that the water does follow down and drip from the paint brush tip if it happens to be there, the paint brush doesn't help the water exit. Squeezing the locked bit above a  paintbrush while the dread is wet will make the water drip out faster - same as with a blunted tip. It's also true that the tips are the last part of the dread to dry. This is due to gravity pulling the water to the tip and the wicking action that occurs in clean dreads. So squeezing water from the tips of your dreads to help them dry is something you do whether you have nice smooth blunt like tips or whispy paintbrush tips.  

That said, thicker dreads always dry slower; so it stands to reason that if you managed to blunt the tips in such a way that the tip got much thicker it could increase drying time. This isn't a concern unless residue is left in the dreads (which slows drying through the entire dread) or the dreads are VERY thick to begin with. Very thick dreads would have to have their tips pulled in before they mature because they will eventually get so tight that the tool will not pass through them. And since they would still be maturing after the tips were pulled in it's very unlikely the tips would end up noticeably tighter than the rest of the dread after everything matured. (In other words it's not like it was rock solid tight and then the tip was pulled in making it even tighter than before).

I suppose if you were trying to find a way that this technique could be misused to create problems you could pull the tips way up in to the dread and then pull them in again, making huge balls at the tips. These tip balls would dry slowly which would make them prone to sitting wet, but even if in this extreme case dread rot would only occur if you allowed your balls to sit wet for long periods without squeezing them dry. So even in this case you're far more likely to experience rot problems if you use shampoos with residue - blunt tips are quite harmless.

In other words if you follow the instructions on our site and the video below there's no way your blunted tips will do anything but improve the look of your dreads. The bottom line is, if you're drying your dreads and the body of the dread is getting dry the tips will too - blunted or otherwise. If you let your dreads sit wet you're going to have a problem whether they're blunted or knot.  Get your dreadies dry and you'll have no worries!