Incase you don't remember, here's my hair story from last year:
I'll
start by saying, my mum has never known how to take care of hair, I’m
not talking bout just natural hair, I’m talking about all hair types. My
mum has naturally curly hair, but ever since, like, well…err….for over
19 years, my mum has had relaxed hair, she gets perms and all that
because she doesn’t know how to work with curly hair. Okay! so she
married my dad and then my brother was born then some years
later, I was born. My bro and I weren’t born with hair manuals and like
we both had curly hair so…you can guess. My dad always makes my bro cut
his hair so low that it’s hard to guess that it’s curly, because my dad
thinks his hair is unruly. When my bro moved out, he grew his hair out
and like had a HUGE mass of curls, when he sat in a car, his hair was
practically touching the top of the car. So, my dad made him cut it all
off. My bro doesn’t know how to take care of his hair, I might add, but
still… Okay! so me, I had natural curls till I was….err…7? My parents
had always complained about it, my grandmother (dad’s mum) tried
whatever, but they were just doing everything wrong. Washing my hair
with (harsh) shampoo often, getting petroleum jelly into my hair,
combing from the roots to the ends, pulling at my hair. That combing
stuff made all the combs in the house break apart from my dad’s so, I
asked my dad to help me detangle my hair once and his comb broke so he
asked my mum to take me to a hair salon to get my hair relaxed which she
happily did. I must say,then, my hair was well…if I wore a bra then,
I’d say bra strap length at the back and the hair at the front ended
below my chin.
When
I got my hair relaxed, I started suffering from breakage. Yeah, it was
easier to get a comb through, though combs still broke (even with
relaxer in my hair! My hair’s extremely thick and people just don’t know
how to comb it!). So, when I was like 8, I got a BC (big chop) and grew
out my natural hair till I was almost 10 then, my parents relaxed it
again because they still didn’t know what to do with it. My hair broke
till it was like shoulder length (or a lil above) and never grew longer
than that because as it grew, it broke. My mum relaxed my hair once a
whiff of natural hair showed up at my roots, but when I turned 14 (or a
few days before my 14th birthday), I told her that I didn’t want that
anymore, I told her that I wanted to transition back to natural. She was
like, “you don’t know how difficult that is,” “you’ll give up after a
short time,” “your hair is so tough,” she brought up the prom thingy
about how I won’t be able to style my hair easily and what’s not, but
read this, if you can style super straight hair, what stops you from
finding a way to style curly hair, or even, the curly hair already looks
great, so you can choose to or choose not to style. She started
complaining and stuff so I told her, “just leave my hair alone, I’ll
take care of it by myself,” which I did. While transitioning, I stumbled
on a treasurefortots blog and saw pics of a little girl’s hair and her
mum talked about how she cared for her daughter’s hair and the products
she used. That led me to another site which helped me out too. I kept
mental notes from when my natural hair starts growing out again. Then, I
stumbled onto tightlycurly.com, Teri LaFlesh’s website and learnt a
lot too. I went through her Ingredients page and started checking the
ingredients on products mum made me use (I stopped using them, because
she was buying nonsense…. seriously, those products were full of harsh
chemicals, I don’t know how I still had hair on my head after using
those). Shortly after, I stumbled onto one site that has helped me the
most - naturallycurly.com. I have a couple of inches of natural hair now
(my hair hand-stretched is a little bellow collar bone length) and some
(most) of the relaxed bits have weakened out and fallen out. I'm not
getting a big chop or small chop or whatever anytime soon even though it
looks kinda weird with the curly bits and then some straight bits. When
my hair grows a bit longer, and is about say, somewhere down my back,
maybe not mid-back or about that (almost there), then, if I still have
relaxed bits, I’ll trim them off.
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So, my hair's a couple of inches down my back (not midway to BSL yet, though). I love my hair so much right now. I never thought I'll love my hair this much. When I posted the above, I barely had much of my natural hair out. As a matter of fact, I heat damaged the little I had then because I didn't know much about the dangers of heat, I didn't know how to make the two very different textures work together, and the two textures just bugged me (yet, I didn't want to get a big chop).
Till summer, last year, I was a 100% mixtress. I made my own DCs, conditioners, scalp cleansers, tonics, everything! My hair sorta loved all the natural things going on it because I didn't really notice when my hair got this long or as long as it was before the summer.
I'm in my last year of high school right now (yay!) and well, I'm so busy nowadays. I ordered some BeeMine products during the summer, they arrived alright, however, when I was returning to Africa, I had to send them back home (I did a lot of shopping and the BeeMine products made every bag to heavy to get on the plane). I started using the Tresemme Naturals shampoo and condish when I got back. They were pretty good. The shampoo made my hair feel weird though. However, my hair seemed to like the conditioner even though it had ingredients I didn't like going on my hair. In November, I returned to England for a little over a week. I wore my hair in my signature hairstyle everyday and like I was the only person with hair like mine where ever I went then. However, I lost quite a bit of hair from having to braid my hair every night to stretch it then comb it out into an afro then hold it up in a puff. Once I got back to Africa, I went straight back to my weekly regimen of flat braids for at least 5 days every week and I gained some of the length back. I had picked up my BeeMine products and brought them back with me while I was in England in November. My hair loves those product. From the day I got back, I've been using them. I like the sulphate free shampoo and the condish. Some times, I co-wash, but not with the BeeMine condish because it doesn't help clean out my hair as much as I'd like so, I replace the shampoo with the Tresemme Naturals Silicon Free Conditioner then I use the BeeMine conditioner. Those together have made my hair so soft and nice. However, I noticed that I continued to lose hair. So, I tried out a protein treatment and now, most of my hair is staying on my head.
I finally trimmed my hair for the first time in 2 years on Saturday. It seems like my hair's thanking me for that now. As usual, I have my hair in my flat braids. I'm taking them out on Friday, giving my hair some TLC with my homemade avocado DC, washing it out on Saturday then wearing it in my famous puff on Sunday then on Sunday night, I'll be back in my braids.
My hair is a few inches down my back now. My goal is BSL by December, and, well, I'm getting there. :)
