Hair!!!
Does that scare you? Did you feel butterflies? It can be a dirty word in many households, or your literal favorite thing. Either way, we are all struggling with our own follicle follies. Some of us do the damage ourselves (see me, pictured all over this article), some are striving for a popular unnatural look, and some have fallen victim to predatory salons who insert secret relaxers into their products. Yeah, that’s a thing. Why do we strive to kill our natural hair patterns for something “more manageable?” Is “more manageable” code for something more nefarious? That’s a tale better told by someone who didn’t accidentally find out their hair was curly (I had it easy!). How easy? Pandemic-lockdown easy.
Here’s pixelated me from the before before times- before smartphones. That hair looks hecking wavy and I would have SWORN on it for years. What was I doing regularly though? Blow outs, because my hair was just a big tangled cloud otherwise. I was looking for shiny manageability. It’s pretty elementary that heat can hurt your hair, but once a week wouldn’t… CHANGE it would it? Who cares, less tangles! Well I was NOT about to find out, because for the last decade or so I moved into my pixie phase. A pixie and… LOTS of bleach (see a pattern here?)
Someone out there is pounding on their screen, telling me to stop before it gets worse, and fortunately it never got bad-bad. My hair just pretended to be straight for a few years like my best friend in middle school. If you say you’re straight, I believe you. So I thought I just grew out of having wavy hair (that’s not a thing!). 2020 came knocking eventually and you remember the drill: no salons, pandemic cuts, lots of mullets, extremely intense roots. It was time to do some research on my favorite educational platform as my hair was getting longer… Reddit. That’s where I found my favorite community of women on the hunt for the right bra (more on that later) and r/CurlyHair. Ah, I love the internet. Apparently the overarching secret on r/CurlyHair was air drying, no combing, and a moisturizing set of products. I had been using products for volume and quickly towel dried because… a pixie’s gonna pixie. Anyway, the change wasn’t overnight, but I saved a ton of time by no longer combing my hair. I trusted the internet, and after about a year the internet eventually delivered. Now, a grown-out pixie is heavy in the back so most of my hair texture was visible to everyone BUT ME. I finally saw the result of my efforts in security cam footage, YEAH- like Bigfoot. Behold- the best curls of my life:
Now, if you ask my parents, my hair was ALWAYS like that when I was a toddler. Well, why the heck are toddlers stealing the best hair and why can’t we be kinder to our natural hair textures? I was lucky the path to my natural texture was essentially, don’t touch it, but I’m hoping that less products and processes can help others find their hair at its most natural and happiest. Now to get the most gorgeous pictures of the back of my head…