Category Archives: Dilemmas

My latest dilemmas with my natural hair.

Keepin’ trim with me ;)

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Hey Ladies!

So I recently had the honour of being a bridesmaid (yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay) and as part of the role I was weaved up.  A few weeks before getting my hair done, I realised it was the greatest opportunity for me to treat my hair :) I was doing my hair with my hairdresser, who originally advised me to go natural (I’ve not visited him since I went natural though  :-S ). In any case I thought I’d share my experience with you :)

I wanted to get my hair trimmed (more like cut!) because my hair was in a terrible state. My hair was tapering (see below) and in terms of growth, it had stayed the same length for a few months. Check out this post to find out why.

Hair Trim

Tapering Ends

Here I am before my trim and hair treatment.

Hair Trim

Before Trim

Here I am trimmed and ready to start afresh  :grin:

Hair Trim

Hair Blow Dried

My hair was washed, conditioned, put in the steamer…

Hair Trim

Hair Washed – See Shrinkage!

blow dried…

Hair Trim

Hair Blow Dried

Hair Trim

Ooooh Yeeeaaarrr

…and weaved up (separate post)!

Here’s before and after the trim:

Hair Trim

Before & After

 

Hair Trim

Before & After

 

My hair felt great after and I felt abfab because I knew it was a fresh start and now I could really make room for some growth!

Will definitely keep you posted on my progress and I’ll probably be doing a review on the weave so watch out for that :)

What changes have any of you made or feel you need to make at the moment?

 

 

Stunted Hair Growth – My reflections

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In this post I will be briefly talking about why my hair’s growth was stunted for much of my second year being natural. Firstly, here are two photos comparing my length checks at

around 6-8 months and 15 months,

Stunted Hair Growth

6&15mnths

and 15 months and 24 months:

Stunted Hair Growth

15 months and 24 months

It should be quite obvious that my hair growth had drastically slowed down as the time intervals for both pictures are around about the same.

So WHY?!

Confession time. So throughout most (around 3/4) of my first year (or so), I kept my hair in kinky twists (see review ) because I had just started uni and I really didn’t have time to give my hair the proper TLC it needed and I wanted to grow my hair. Before that, my TWA was always moisturised, in that I sprayed it with water and oils etc. So that was great; and I had found a good regime for taking care of my hair. However, 5-6 months later I decided to take a break from the twists because of the massive hair growth I’d witnessed. This was then around 15 months. I made a big mistake: I thought I could get away with treating my hair as though it was a TWA. WRONG! I didn’t realise that this new length of hair came with new responsibilities e.g. protective styling and altering my regime to fit my new hair length. Furthermore, after around 5-6 mnths, I went back to uni and I did the twists again as I was excited to see the growth that I’d observe when I took the twists out. However, to my dismay, when i took my hair out, it really hadn’t growth very much at all and my edges had broken off :( Into the new year, it seemed like my hair was always DRYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! Bitterly Dry! No matter how much I deep conditioned, moisturised, whatever, it would be immensely dry in a few hours. This was a really stressful and frustrating time for me to be honest. I then came across this picture whilst browsing some hair care pages:

Stunted Hair Growth

Tapering hair

Source: Click here

I started to question myself. I then noticed that my hair was TAPERING! You can see a picture of this here. I was puzzled as to why especially as I had trimmed my hair like twice in the space of 4 months. I soon realised that although I had been trimming my hair, I wasn’t trimming ruthlessly i.e. I didn’t trim everything as I didn’t want to lose length. That’s when I realised that I had compromised health for length. It then clicked that, that was why my hair felt constantly dry and brittle.

In any case, I was due to be a bridesmaid and I had to get a weave as it was part of the uniform. I then decided that I would kill two birds with one stone and cut off my hair – that is all the damaged parts. This was actually with the hairdresser who had told me to go natural 2 years ago (I hadn’t been back to him since then because I didn’t need to!). You can see the process and how much hair was taken off here.

So Ladies, what am I saying? It’s great if you wish to grow your hair, no problem, but DO NOT COMPROMISE HEALTH FOR LENGTH. Watch your hair, listen to it. Remember the goal is HEALTHY hair, okay  :wink:

Coming up next: Stunted Hair Growth: The Root of the Problem. Stay tuned and until next time stay beautiful  :wink:

Hmmm what hairstyle to do ?!!

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Hey ladies (and perhaps gentlemen)!

I thought I’d share the events that took place (or more precisely thought processes!) when deciding what hairstyle I’d do for my birthday.

So for my 21st bday I had a nice little up do planned which I stumbled across on YouTube (video to be posted soon!) but then I change my mind and thought hmmm maybe I’ll just do an afropuff. My friends and I admittedly thought this was BORING! So I changed my mind again…and then I saw another hairstyle (by MsVaughnTV – YouTube) I wanted to do:

… But then I changed my mind back to the original hairstyle.

So the Saturday night before ‘D-day’, my friend and I started the prep. Long story short, it all went horribly wrong :cry:  My hair just wasn’t doing what I wanted it to.

So I restyled….
… Then restyled again

[1:40am or around so]

I was about to burst into tears (a slight exaggeration, it was more of a hissy fit tbh) and a thought came to me [lightbulb moment!]:

If you’re not succeeding with all these hair styles (and I couldn’t persist as I had church in a few hours – I needed to do something sensible with my hair!), why not just do what you do best – keep it simple. So I did! Stuck with my afropuff and learnt a lesson:

Don’t be afraid to keep it simple – sometimes it screams louder than extravagance :)

Encouragement to you ladies: if you’re looking for a hairstyle for a special event, there are loads around and YouTube offers a great range but sometimes, what you may find is the simple, everyday hairstyle may just do the trick  :wink:

Oh and some pics :D

 

Feel free to share your own experiences too!! Don’t forget to

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