People around campus may know me as “the girl with the huge afro,” but my hair hasn’t always looked this way. My hair has been straight, curly and everywhere in between, but getting it to look the way it does now took years of education and experimentation.
Growing up, my mom had no idea how to take care of my natural hair (read: she didn’t feel like dealing with it) so she gave me a relaxer when I was five years old. My hair grew out to be very thick and long, but when I was 10 or 11 I grew out my perm for no particular reason. I didn’t have to personally deal with the transition to natural hair because at the time my mom was still handling my hair. She styled my hair in roller sets, box braids, and Bantu knots (a style that involves coiling the hair around itself until it forms a bump, resulting in spiral curls when taken out). I guess my mom slowly cut off my hair, or eventually all my relaxed ends broke off.
I started middle school with a fully natural head of hair and my mom would style my hair in variations of small box braids or mini twists about once a month. I was slowly beginning to style my hair on my own, which pretty much entailed me just throwing my hair into a puff. Because I didn’t moisturize my hair on a daily basis or ever condition it while it was natural I was left with thick, dry hair that seemed to be impossible to manage. I eventually got tired of putting my hair in a ponytail after a year and got a relaxer again in the 8th grade. My hair was still thick and long for a while but after sleeping with my hair wrapped in the same direction for almost three years I noticed that my hair on one side was thinner than on the other. I started researching how to better take care of my hair, and then I came across tons of hair care forums and YouTube channels dedicated to Black hair. I started following the YouTube channels of women with long relaxed hair and I started stretching my relaxers, moisturizing daily, doing more roller sets and letting my hair air dry more. I eventually learned about tex-laxing, which is relaxing the hair to the point where it’s not bone straight. I liked the idea of having texture in my hair without having to put it in rods or rollers and sit under a dryer for hours. I was about two months into stretching my relaxer and my new growth felt wavy – something I never took the time to notice before. I started watching more videos on transitioning to natural hair, videos by women who had recently gone natural. I was watching a girls’ video detailing her Wash n Go, a style that involves washing the hair and leaving it curly, and noticed that her hair looked as frizzy and unruly as my own; however, with some moisturizer, Eco Styler gel and water, she was able to transform her hair into uniform curls that framed her face. It was at that point that I realized if my hair could do anything similar to what hers had done then I should stop wasting my time tex-laxing and let my hair grow completely naturally. So in March of 2010 I officially decided to go natural, with my last relaxer having been done in January 2010. I started doing more braid outs, Bantu knot outs, and roller sets. I made the decision to cut my relaxed hair off on my 19th birthday in May 2011. I hoped I would have a good amount of hair at that point because there was no way I was cutting all of my hair off. However, the two textures of my natural and tex-laxed hair were so different that I had to Bantu knot my hair at least every other day to keep my hair presentable, which led to many headaches. One Saturday night I was way too tired to Bantu knot my hair. Every style I tried to do the next morning wasn’t working because of the two textures of my hair. Styling my hair took way longer than usual, and I only ended up with a mediocre bun. On that day, I realized I was not going to have time to fight with my hair every day before going to school, so it was time to BC, or big chop. That same week, with the support of one of my friends, I cut my relaxed hair off. I was left with really dry natural hair and it was something I wasn’t used to. I conditioned and moisturized my TWA, teeny weeny afro, daily. I eventually started doing twist outs a couple months in and over the course of the next two years I figured out what my hair does and does not like, and how to take care of it. The journey to learning to love my natural texture has been a hard one, but one I’m glad I took!
