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,

6&15mnths

and 15 months and 24 months:

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:

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 

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