My story: Why I started embracing my natural hair

It's become popular. Some people think it’s just a trend. That soon enough, like bad flu it will pass. Natural hair this natural hair that! It gets tiring, right? More so because we are not trend followers but trendsetters right?

Well no!! natural hair is not ‘just a trend’ and it will not just ‘pass like bad flu’. Not for me, it won’t! To me, my hair is who I am. It represents me. 

Day in and day out I learn a whole lot about myself and about hair itself. Having to follow a regimen gives me some sort of discipline. 

I get extra motivation to eat well and take care of my body just for my hair. I could go on, but then I’d lose the purpose of this post.

before the knowledge of taking care of afros

I am not going to judge you about what you choose to do with your hair here. at the end of the day, it is how or what you feel comfortable and beautiful in that matters. 

Incurred benefits

I can only assure you, having been in both worlds, that being natural is very rewarding given you take proper care of your hair and yourself. 

You do not have to worry about a lot of things anymore, water being one of them!

It can also be very challenging and frustrating especially if you get too obsessed with getting the exact same looks as the people on YouTube.

 

Otherwise, there isn’t much to it.

 ‘Taking care of your hair’ might be easily overrated while it can just be simply applying water and a sealant to your hair every day and washing it at a regular interval suitable for you.

I grew an afro once and I did it with no clue at all about how to take care of it. I did not know about the fancy products and intricate ways people use to style their hair. But my hair still grew.

permed hair

Before the change

I was not always a natural. My natural hair journey started as an accident—and what was that they say about accidents again? Not all of them are bad right? Well, this one was not all that bad. In the end at least I did not know that black people’s hair could grow to certain lengths. When I saw people with an afro, I saw people with small fluffy, puffy hair that stays the same for years on end. I was not prepared to have that. I wanted waist length-white people hair and afros just did not seem like the way to go.

I was never going to go natural. Besides with my round face and chubby cheeks, it probably would not even look good on me (I could not have been any less wrong).

What changed?

I was doing my matric when I encountered a major hair disaster. When I say disaster, I mean DISASTER!  No exaggeration here.
Easter holidays were coming to an end and I had to go back to school. My hair was looking dull, brittle and like it was ready to fly off to someplace else better than my head.
It was no brainer that something had to be done to it and I had only two options. Either get plaited or get relaxed. Relaxing was always a very simple very appealing choice, so I went for it.

All that was not a problem since my hair had been relaxed my entire life. So, everything was fine…

NOT!

I disregarded two precautionary measures of the relaxer I was using that I later discovered to be very important:

Spend approximately 72 hours after washing your hair before applying  relaxer

    -I’d just washed my hair the day before

 

Make sure you haven’t applied the relaxer over the previous 8 weeks

     -I’d just applied the relaxer a little less than two weeks before.

You don’t blame, right? I  mean who knew those warning they put on the labels are actually keeping us from potential danger? Why would they even sell me something that could potentially harm me right?


Like always, my hair was beautiful after my last relaxing experience, however, my scalp wasn’t. I got chemically burnt around the crown of my head. The result was a big gooey zit that kept flowing to my face. When it got to my face, it formed another gooey zit. As a result, I had big gooey zits on my face for that part of my final year in high school.  I was not having the time of my life.

The zits healed in a few weeks, my aunt is a nurse, so she helped.

I did not cut my hair that year though, I still had to go to my matric dance and the lord knows I could not go bald.  However, immediately after my last paper of the final examinations I gave in to the fact that I needed a new start and relaxers were not going to be part of the regimen. That was 2014.

As I said, I had no idea how to take care of my natural hair, but it grew anyway and that was when I discovered how utterly wonderful natural hair is. I had another big chop in 2016 and this time I’d learned how to take care of my hair.


I realize that the damage done to my hair was because I was rather careless and did not follow the correct procedure of my relaxer. I had relaxed my hair many times before and never had any significant amount of damage. However, it did open my eyes to the fact that I needed to rethink my hair goals…or if I should be having any at all.

I made a few mistakes that lead me to discover a wonderful side of hair life. I’ve had a lot of good hair days with my natural hair than I did with relaxed hair. Natural hair life is awesome. So awesome that I even got my sisters to join!

I'd like to hear about your journey started down in the comments, or what you think of natural hair overall?