Grown folks, into the pool for adult swim!

one of the topics I've seen discussed repeatedly on natural hair sites is how to workout and still manage to keep your hair looking nice and minimize any risk of damage. well, i saw something today that made my secret swimmer's heart race with glee!

turns out there is a way for natural girls to go swimming wihtout ending up with dried out damaged hair in the process. Kcurly over at Newly Natural has cracked the code!! check THIS out:

"So, fast forward to the next time I went swimming. I soaked my twists with conditioner, applied my lycra cap, followed by a silicone cap and furthered secured with the swim band.

"Now this is a winning combination! My caps stayed on, I couldn’t feel any water seeping in, and there was no need for a chin strap! I still looked goofy, but it worked!"

I am just as excited about the swim band as she is! finally, a way to go swimming without wearing that oh, so inconspicuous chin-strap swim cap.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
yeap. that one.
 
happy swimming!!

it's majik!

last year when i began the transitioning process, i would look wistfully at photos of women with comb coils online and say to myself "that really looks nice, i bet i could rock that look...or end up looking like a stick bug trying."

the stick bug image kept any attempts at this hairdo at bay.

well, for those of us who are not as easily frightened by the prospect of looking like bugs, some witches over in the 214 have come up with a product that can give you geeyogious coils in about 3 nanoseconds. something to think about the next time you're about to plunk down DUCKETS for comb coils that are gonna take hours to be placed.



the lotion that is put on the magic sponge is kinda sticky, so it grabs the hair and helps the coils stay put. so you can walk around feeling all Deep and Thorough on Tuesday and then wash it out to be all Free and Cree Summer on Thursday.

if you so choose.

man, i gotta start going to hair shows...on second thought, never mind. the magistrate will not understand that i spent my rent money on hair lotions, potions, and notions.

and no one is impressed by a well appointed homeless woman.

when there is no Plan B!

i woke up late this morning. so late, i didn't have time to go through my wash and go routine.

all i could do was throw some spritz on my hair and slap in a headband.

this is not one of those cutesy stories where i end up saying something darling like "and the hairstyle i created out of necessity turned out to be adorable!"

no.

before the spritz and the headband, my hair looked like this when i cracked one eye open and looked in the bathroom mirror this morning:

funny, that was totally my expression...

the end result was a slightly less thirsty looking still lopsided afro with a black band around it.

by far, today was my greatest hairdo FAIL.

i have got to come up with a Plan B for hair care on mornings when i'm running late...

My Type of Christmas Giff!

ahhhh, the holidays. hot apple cider, Christmas trees, seasonal carols, sugar cookies, and (of course) the age old question most moms ask ourselves:

once it's all said and done, will i at least have enough money to buy MYSELF something that doesn't come on a dollar menu???

as if in answer to that question, i received an email today from a local natural hair care salon here in my city with some amazing news. i'd heard about this sale once or twice over the summer, spoken like an unconfirmed rumor. it is, in fact, a reality:

Miss Jessie's Christmas Special

Buy One, Get One Free for Items of Equal or Lesser Value.

November 26, 2009 - December 31, 2009

The featured products for the 2009 Christmas Special are Miss Jessie's products that are 16 oz, 12 oz and 8 oz in size.

having never tried Miss Jessie's because of the price, this is something i can honestly get behind. i mean, who WOULDN'T feel better about spending $40 for a 16 oz container when you're gonna get two? ....why yes, that was the sound of a needle scratching a record you heard when you read the words "$40 for a 16 oz container."

nonetheless, go forth and have yourself an awesome natural Christmas.

i always suspected Santa was into natural hair...

She said vs. She said.

back in the day when i was in college, i participated in a day long women's conference which focused on black women and issues affecting us. on a condition of attending for free, the conference organizers allowed students to volunteer to assist in some session (checking in attendees, scurrying about with microphones for the q&a sessions, etc.)

one of the sessions i attended was about black women and hair. and i am pretty sure that of all the women in the room, i was one of the few who had relaxed hair.

during the question and answer sessions, i noticed that a common theme kept getting aired by the attendees: natural was way better and relaxed hair was a huge indicator of the state of mind of the wearer.

and that state of mind was a disaster.

i got my turn at the mike and i asked if it didn't seem a little hypocritial to assume that a women who had relaxed hair was brainwashed when we JUST got finished talking about how women with natural hair are assumed to be angry, militant, and political.

the answer i received in return was the sound of crickets.

so here we are a good 12 years later and i'm now wearing my hair natural. and, when i think about it....i only have a few people i know who chemically relax their hair. my mom was natural and a few of my aunts have stopped relaxing their hair as well. and you know what?

none of us give a hot damn about how another woman decides to wear her hair. not even enough, really, to see Chris Rock running his trap about wigs and weaves.

yet, i'm noticing something going on amongst we black ladies out here: it feel like we're getting line up to fight about something stupid like hair texture and how we got it.

that all being said, there some i'd like to try to communicate without making people go all crazy:

there is a historical basis behind why black women started relaxing their hair in this country. am i saying a woman who relaxes her hair wants to look white? nope. i'm aware that she's a black woman who wants to look like a black woman with straight hair. but i am also aware of WHY having straight hair was so very important not so long ago in our collective history in this country. take a look at racist memorabilia in this country and see what was done to us. any one of us can tell you of an instance in which the word nappy has been used in our lives, and not in a good ass way.

i recall overhearing a white classmate in middle school who lamented, while staring in the bathroom mirror at her straight hair, "ugh! my hair looks so nappy and gross!"

while many of us can agree that you don't have to have straight hair to be considered attractive, professional, or feminine, the messages about beauty and acceptability in this country that all women receive almost constantly don't honor this idea. we get the same treatment with body type and skin tone.

that being said, I found some blogs that address the opposing sides of the Hair Texture coin and one that happily lands smack in the middle.

She Said: Can I Touch Your Hair? Black Women and the Petting Zoo

She Said: Natural Elitist: Please Sit Down and Shut Up

REF!!: Who cares if you have a perm? I don't. 

i completely agree with Assertive Wit in that we all have WAAAY too much to do than to sit around scrapping and biting at each other over our hair. like raising our children, fighting for equity in pay, getting our educations, lifting one another up, and holding it down for ourselves and ours.

we don't know each other's stories. let's just keep open minds instead of coming up with yet another false construct by which to justify our bad treatment of one another.

When your Conditioner Tries to Give you a Complex

one of the challenges women with natural hair have is finding that *perfect* mousturizing product that's going to help fight back the frizz without leaving a greasy residue. there are various notion and potions from bargain basement prices to sell a kidney prices.

and as fall begins to settle in and winter in at the back of my mind, i'm already thinking about hot oil treatments and deep conditioning treatments. i've already gotten a recommended leave-in conditioner, but i don't understand why it has to talk to me this way....

you see that? right up there...look!...."frizzy...dry...unmanageable hair"

now listen, despite what some may say, i am not a glass is always half empty type of chick. i can totally see the flip side of the coin: you buy a product for dry hair because it's going to give you crazy moisturizing.  but that word unmanageable pushes a button.

the same button that gets pushed when, in the new Starbucks commercial, they show the people who look like their pets and the natural hair sporting black woman owns a black poodle.

some may say i sound paranoid and i'm making mountains out of molehills. but that's the funny thing about being fed a constant stream of overt and covert negative messages about your hair: after awhile, you just start seeing it everywhere.

so, while i will gladly own the descriptor "frizzy" because there are definite moments in which i look like Angela B. Davis....like now.....


i REFUSE to be labeled UNMANAGEABLE! yeah, i'm looking at you, Garnyay!....you're lucky your product is amazing and you smell so nice.

otherwise, i'd totally quit you.

A little ditty for the stranger on the bus.

there is a sort of solidarity one feels when you see another woman wearing her hair natural. maybe it's because you know not too many women choosing to no straighten their hair are receiving positive feedback. when you see other women "doing them" and being completely confident in that, it's an awesome thing.

and that is why i basically wanted to turn into a blathering fan-girl when i saw another woman on the morning express bus with some of the most amazingly spoingy, moisturized, shiny curls i have seen!! I wanted to ask her what she uses, how long she's been natural, what's her care routine, does she wrap her hair, what kinds of reactions have you gotten.....but you know, she was talking to someone and i didn't know her like that.

or at all.

But since i didn't ask these questions, i will instead devote this song to the curly stranger on the bus. Work It, Girl!

ya damn right, what she said.

the NY Times recently ran a piece discussing black women and hair, ostensibly attempting to break down why black women choose to either relax our hair or wear it without chemicals. one of my favorite bloggers at What Tami Said broke this article down like a raggedy lawn chair.

i am really starting to go from ambivalence to annoyance at all the discussion about black hair. when i read some articles discussing it, i keep getting that queasy feeling i had in high school when my english teacher, an older white man who'd never been inside a black church, decided to demonstrate for our class what being inside black churches was like. started off okay, and then veered off into a show of him mocking what he didn't understand, with my classmates happily playing along in the call and response.

and i sat there, the only black kid in the room, shocked and pissed.

i just had a conversation earlier this week with the Mister about black women and hair. he made comments similar to those in the NY Times article, about how all women are constantly changing their hair by getting perms, changing the color, or cutting it. i tried to explain to him that when you live in a society that tells you the hair that grows out of your hair is ugly just because it's not straight, the need and desire to conform to that standard weighs much more heavily than the desire a white woman may have to go from blond hair to red or to get a haircut.

there are plenty of black women who decide to stop relaxing their hair that describe the same feelings: relief. self-acceptance.

and there are plenty of women who relax their hair and feel the same damn way.

i just want to get to the point where we aren't constantly forced to talk about it!!

can't the hair on my head be just that, instead of the dumping ground for others' issues, demand, insecurities, and judgment?

The Big Chop...2 weeks later

so about a week and a half ago, i ended my weeks...nay...months of torture and cut off all the relaxed hair on my head.

all of it.

and i gotta admit, i don't regret it in the least.

ok, ok, let me step back a moment from my billy bad ass steeze and say how it all REALLY went down:

i went to the hairdresser with the intention of getting my hair set on small rods again. but i knew that i was in a little bit of a jam with my hair because a lot of the curls had come out and the relaxed hair was a wee bit matty.

it had been two weeks since i'd combed my hair. the situation was grim, my friends!

walking to my car, i was talking to a friend and i bounced the idea of just cutting the hair off. she cautioned me from doing something too extreme and suggested i just trim some of the perm off until i'd grown my hair some some more.

i took that into consideration, but i still planned on talking to my hairdresser about going ahead with the big chop. my main questions were this:

how much unprocessed hair do i actually have on my head and can i pull this look off without looking like The Brown Hornet?

once i got in the chair, however, i was still undecided about what to do. i was still a little skittish about getting the big chop too soon, but i was devastated about how my relaxed hair lost curl and refused to regain it, leaving me these Sylvester the Cat wings hanging off the sides of my head.

you really really really start to resent your relaxed hair while you are transitioning. funny, because it used to be that you couldn't live without your perm, every 6 weeks. now, the same thing that made your hair more manageable was fucking up your life!

....anyhoo...

any wavering i felt completely melted when my hairdresser sat me in the shampoo bowl. and started washing my hair.

well, we all know what happened next, right? large matted clots of relaxed hair. and who do you think really felt like submitting to getting those mats combed out, mats of hair that you had no intention of keeping anyway, mats of hair that betrayed your best efforts at a decent hairdo??

well, i can tell you who definitely didn't feel like it. and so i asked:

"Fran...what do you think about just cutting it off to my new growth?"

she was very positive and very supportive. and she cut my hair.

and i love it.

a quick note on my daily routine:

wet hair in the shower, apply Marc Anthony Strictly Curls Frizz Sealing Conditioner, running my ringers through to detangle and clean. let sit for about 15 minutes and then rinse with lukewarm water. shake excess water out of hair and then apply Vigorol curling mousse all over.

let air dry while getting me and kids ready for day.

it's that simple. this is my result!

if i had known how much easier cutting my hair was going to make my life, i swear i would have done it a long time ago. and at this point, i honestly cannot remember why i was so frightened.

and that is the very real, super true story of how i stumbled my way into a Big Chop.

anyone fearfully considering the Big Chop, you can do this. do your research, look at videos and photos online, and believe you can do this. you will not regret it.

before i cut my hair, i told a coworker how much i liked how Solange had cut her hair. she asked me "why don't you just go ahead and cut your hair too?" and i replied "because i'm not that brave."

huh. turns out i was.

Let's get this party started!

ok, actually, i got this party started in February. after a false start. see, what had happened was....

I was talking to a friend of mine around January. she was telling me about how she'd decided to go natural. this was something i have toyed with on and off since 1993, and i decided to make that move too. and i totally invited myself along for the journey. and i felt pretty good about that choice, too.

And so, on a cold day in February, i went to my my hairdresser ...The Miracle Worker...for my usual appointment and to inform him that i was not going to be getting anymore relaxers. i was RESOLUTE, i tell you!

So much so, that as i sat in the chair and he looked at me and asked "what are you getting done today," i opened my mouth and loudly, proudly proclaimed

"....i need a relaxer!!!!"

Yes, i cracked just that easily. i think my heart was even racing. i know for sure one eye was tearing up.

And that's the thing i want to address out the gate: i'm not making this change because i have a generalized, wide-sweeping opinion about whether or not black women should relax their hair. but i do have a pretty strong opinion about whether or not i need to continue to relax MY hair. i'm making this move for myself and i have concrete reasons behind it. more on that in a few...

So that is how February 20th, 2009 became the date of my last relaxer. and now that it's been almost 4 months since then, things on my head are really starting to get interesting.

stay tuned....