Sad News...

It is quite sad to say that on the 9th of April, the natural community has lost our beloved Domineque Banks. Some of you might not remember her by hair actual name, but by her YouTube channel's name which is, "LongHairDon'tCare."

After many years of fighting this, Domineque died from Lupus, which is an autoimmune disease that causes the immune system to fight the body's skin cells and tissues.

I am using this blog post not just to let you all know about the passing of Domineque, but to also create an awareness of lupus. The more we mention it, the more we create awareness of it and this is the key to finding a cure for it. I have an aunt living with lupus. I would love for her and other people living with this disease to have a cure for it.

May Domineque Rest in Paradise.

She helped so many of us and she brought such joy and happiness to people.

My sincere condolences to her family and loved ones.

To help donate to her funeral and cremation please follow this link: https://www.giveforward.com/fundraiser/rmd4/in-memory-of-domineque-banks

My Hair Story 2.0

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. :)

My Dilemma x_X

*sigh*
This sucks.

Okay! so I needed to braid my hair because I didn't really like having to manipulate/touch/style it daily. So, because I couldn't go to the hair salon where I like getting my hair braided (there's a lady there that actually listens to me when I talk about how I comb my hair and so on), well, my mum had to braid my hair for me. I was going to wait till I could get to the salon, but like my dad was getting upset because I had to detangle my hair, comb it, when it's humid, it get's huge and he doesn't like me having a scarf on everyday. So, today, I combed my hair out then tied a scarf round my head and pushed it up so it was like a head band. My hair was alright, but then my mum was like, "I'm going to braid your hair," my dad was like, "yes," agreeing with her. Both of them don't know jack about hair! My parents think CG is gross, my dad called me a 'dirty girl' and some hurtful things because I went CG. My parents believe that deep conditioning is like feeding your hair, it's nonsense and there's no point to it (they also think it'll make your hair fall out. Another thing is, my parents don't believe in detangling your hair from the ends up to the roots.


Now, that's what I have to talk about. MY DILEMMA. My mum told me to shut up, smacked my hand with a comb and so on because I told her not to comb my hair from the roots down to the ends. That's not the only problem, my mum combed my hair with a rat tail comb! Yes! a rat tail comb! When she was getting my hair done, I gave her a comb, you know the kind with like three rat tail thingies at the end, a wide tooth side and a not so wide toothed other side. Okay! so she was like, "do you still have the blue comb (rat tail) that you lent your dad yesterday?" I said, "yes" and she was like, "can I have it." (not a question). I gave it to her and yup! you can guess what she did. She combed my big hair, not in sections, I might add with a rat tail comb and she combed it from the roots to the ends. I was in pain and she didn't care. She was like, "I warned you when you said you wanted to start this natural hair thing," and she was also like, "I can't believe I'm touching your hair. This hair that you don't wash!" I was like, "I wash it, but I only wash it with shampoo once a month." She did not care. She still called it gross. So...I managed to keep some of the hair lost before my mum was finished braiding a quarter of my hair. I'm going to take a pic and put it up here.*sigh* I hate having to go through this. I've lost so much hair. I'll add that I also do not like how she flat braided my hair. It's terrible, hideous, tight (and hurts, I can't move my head fully), who thinks of doing such a thing to someone's hair? *sigh*

(most of the straight bits here or the ones with like super tiny curls in them are relaxed hair (I have/had about a little less than an inch of relaxed hair at some of my ends)

*sigh*

If this has ever happened to you, just know, you are not alone. It still upsets me, how much hair I've lost. When mum was finally done, there was hair on the floor, hair on the pillow I was sitting on, hair all over my shirt (and some on my shorts), hair on the chair she was sitting on and well...the obvious...hair in the comb. x_X

And this is..... my dilemma.

:(

*heavy sigh*