Last blog I decided to do a big chop to remove all/ majority of the heat damaged hair I've been holding onto for the past couple two or three years ( i.e when I first started this blog and decided to stop using heat on my hair altogether). Now, I would like to update you on all of my progress. The good the bad and the ugly!!! (^_^)
First of all... I LOVE LOVE LOVE the new haircut I gave myself!!! It's interesting , because as much as I enjoy having long hair sometimes I just like to start over with a nice cut. I know it sounds counter productive since this entire blog has been devoted to growing my 3b/4a hair to waist length. But , I'll give you a little background story about this that should shed a bit of light on the insanity!!!
Majority of my late teens and early twenties up til now I have maintained what most people would consider long hair by normal standards. It would pretty much hover above or right below bra strap length.
I had been maintaining my hair for years visiting a hair salon and having my hairstylist take care of my mane. But when I started doing my own hair sometimes I would damage it.So I would take some scissors and clip a couple of inches off. In 2009/2010 my hair was uneven and driving me crazy. So I had my sister and her friends cut my hair to the top of my shoulders. I loved it like that because it was a blunt cut and it felt good running my fingers through my hair after I had straightened it. They didn't particularly like the fact that I had cut off so much hair, but I certainly enjoyed the fact that they went ahead and cut off what I wanted anyway!!! Shortly after that I ended up moving to Chicago to work with my producer on one of his friends albums. We arrived in the summer and left sometime during the spring, and in between that time period my hair grew like straight weeds!!! The humidity in the mid west and the moisture that is just trapped in the air helped me 1000% in maintaining healthy hair. Naturally since I was still using heat at the time I was still doing my part in destroying my tresses, but because of the moisture , I was getting some assistance in keeping the damage minimal! As it was , I was chipping away at the health of my hair during my stay in Chicago because when I would use hear on my hair , I didn't just use heat... I used flat irons, curling irons, hot combs and blow-dryers WITHOUT USING HEAT PROTECTANT!!! YIKES!!!
Fast forward to the year 2012, and I had been doing some research , reading magazines, blogs and youtube video's trying to find hair care products that were natural and did not strip my hair of the natural oils and nutrients that most standard hair care products would manage to do the moment I took the cap off the bottle. I had learned during that time that there were products lines like Aubrey Organics, Alba, Jason and Giovanni who specialized in not only natural hair care , but also natural skincare and in some instances other types of natural products for the entire body. But at this point I had not yet discovered how to naturally style my hair without using heat!!! So I searched and searched but I had discovered that my main issue was that my hair texture at the time was mixed up so much because I had 4 different grades of hair for one reason or another. There was the straight hair ( which I later found out was limp and lifeless/ dead hair derived from all of the heat damage), the undefined bushlike hair, the curly hair ( which was my favorite ) and then there was the complete BUSH!!! I didn't even try to attempt a wash and go because I know that I was ill equipped to deal with the ignorance that was my hair at that point in time. So I started doing double strand twists. But now, I can admit that after watching extensive volumes of various youtube video's featuring some of the popular natural women of color that styled their mane and had the perfect routines and the length I wanted, I had figured out what I was really looking for. I wanted to find the products that would define my curls so that I could literally wash my hair style it and leave the house whether it was wet or dry and STILL have a bomb hairstyle that did not explode into a frizz basket. It took quite a while to create the right combination of products and a routine that allowed me to achieve the look I have been aspiring to aquire, but I finally found everything I needed!!! YES!!!!!
Anyway, I bought everything from curlformers which would give me more of a press and curl look which was great, but didn't last very long ( introduction of that product is in one of my earlier blogs in 2013), to Flexirods which would give me the perfect ringlets and has also been my favorite method of producing perfect curls ( also listed in a previous blog in 2013). I even managed to discover the beauty of the super tight coils that were produced by using perm rods. Since chopping more than 5 1/2 inches of hair off, I have only managed to try one of the tools. Here are a couple of pictures from some perm rods and a twistout, but they did not look as good because I did not have the right type of gel in my hair to hold the curls!!!Well, the twistout did, but not the perm rods!!!
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| This is my very sexy twistout using Kinky Curly curling custard!!! It only lasted a couple of days because the gel started to flake on me. |
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| My first attempt at using perm rods... Had the wrong Gel!!! |
