Naturalista experiment part 1

   I’m going to make a confession. For the past approximately 4 years my hair has entirely been in braids. I’d undo one set of braids and get another re-done literally the next day...for four years! Don’t judge me yet because mine is a story many of you might identify with.

    Like most African girls, I was told growing-up that my hair was ‘difficult’ or ‘too much trouble’ and therefore the only way to make it manageable was to relax it. I’ve only relaxed my hair twice in my lifetime and both times it ended with a haircut because the breakage was so bad. The first time was in primary school and the second was in form 2 of high school. You can only imagine how frustrated I was both times. The non-stop braiding regime began after high school. The aim being for me to grow my hair to a certain length then probably relax it (again). It’s not that I have anything against short hair; it looks incredible on some people. It’s just that some girls prefer flowers, others prefer chocolate and I prefer having my hair long. At some point the constant braiding just became convenient. You know, med school= super busy = taking short-cuts.

   But at some point this year I had an epiphany. What’s the point of spending all my effort on growing hair if I never got to rock it in its natural form? An exercise in futility right? I also realized that there were ways to manage my hair that were friendlier to it and that were easy for me. I’m just beginning my hair journey but I’ve already learnt so much:

1.       It’s easier and better to comb natural hair when it’s wet. Less painful, less breakage, less time-consuming.

2.       Find hair products that work for you. I’m currently using everything from Miadi: Shampoo, cholesterol treatment, hair food and braid-spray! They work for my hair and smell great!

3.       Avoid heat as much as possible. Sure you might need it sometimes, but otherwise, it just damages your hair if applied too often.

4.       There are lots of styles that you can do that look pretty amazing.

5.       Google is your friend. And so are you-tube tutorials.

   So last week, undid my hair. Washed treated it and then put it in Bantu knots for a coulple of days because I was going for a curl effect. There’s a step by step video tutorial on how to make them below. 

(Note that her hair is really long hence why her's look like that)

You basically do them while the hair’s still wet, leave them overnight and undo them the next morning for awesome curls (No heat required). Here’s what mine looked like:

Here’s the end result.

I sort of messed one up while I was undoing them so I just tried to flow with it. I’m still figuring this whole thing out, but I’ll get there. I had to re-braid my hair just a couple of days later because I have a busy couple of weeks coming-up and I’m worried about the rainy weather we’ve been having. But they say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Ciao...