Hairstory

Once upon a time my hair was my burden. It wasn’t an all-consuming burden, just the kind I could ignore until I was out in public and someone commented on it. I say this not to be dramatic but rather to try to give you an idea of how deep/toxic/pervasive beauty standards can be. My mother always told me my hair was beautiful and I tried to believe her, but as soon as someone asked why my hair was so different from my sisters’, I went right back to hating it.

It’s funny to look back and think about how 8/9/10-year-old me was already conditioned to believe that straight hair was beautiful and kinky hair was not. My sister and I believed this so much we decided we wanted to get our hair relaxed*. After numerous objections and cautionary tales about the negative effects of chemicals, our mum finally gave in and took us to get our first relaxer. However, we were only allowed to go for a retouch (touch up) every 6 months which I later realized was a blessing in disguise.

Relaxing my hair made it straight and, in a way, more manageable, but it wasn’t all great. The salon trips were sometimes a little traumatizing either because I was in pain (from the hairdresser mercilessly parting half-relaxed/half-natural hair with a rat-tail comb*) or from watching other people struggle (case in point: a little girl of about 3 years old crying while getting her hair relaxed). These reasons, along with my mother’s consistent disapproval of relaxers, eventually got my sister and I to stop chemically straightening our hair. Making that decision was a step in the right direction, but unfortunately it didn’t mean I suddenly believed my hair was okay in its natural state. I continued to endure painful salon visits to get my hair blown-out, heat-straightened and curled just to have it look beautiful. Enter university.

Having thick natural hair was quite a pain and the number one reason for that was I just didn’t know what to do with it. I kept it braided or straightened for the most part, until I got into my first year of university. This, I think, is when my natural hair journey really began. Natural hair blogs and YouTube channels became my life. Naptural85 and CurlyNikki became my imaginary friends and I went to them for advice when my hair was being rude to me. Eventually I started to learn that my hair was not hard to manage, it was just being managed wrong. I started to realize that my hair was not bad, it just actively resisted Euro-centric standards of beauty. Most importantly I noticed that when I started to appreciate the nature of my hair it began to flourish.

So, why the blog? Because despite the fact that there are quite a number of natural hair blogs out there, I feel that we need more blogs about kinky 4C* type hair. Because as a young East African woman who studied in North America I found that salon trips could very rarely be squeezed into my meagre college student budget. On top of that when I found salons that cater to afro-textured natural hair I would be told that a ‘wash and set’ costs about the same as my grocery budget for a month. So i’m here to tell you about how to care for natural hair and keep it healthy while maintaining a reasonable budget. Addtionally, having lived most of my life in East Africa, Rwanda to be exact, i’ve gained some experience navigating stores and supermarkets in search of good hair care products which I look forward to sharing with you. Along with that i’m here to remind you that your kinky/curly/coily hair is beautiful, because once you realize that, all the voices telling you otherwise will just fade into the background and eventually disappear.

Welcome to my blog and thank you for reading!

Terminology
Relaxer: Chemicals, usually lye-based, that are used to permanently straighten hair.

Retouch: Chemically straightening hair that has previously been relaxed and has new growth. A touch-up only requires applying the product to the roots.

Rat-tail comb: A fine toothed comb with a long, thin end similar to a rat’s tail. See image here.

4C: A term used to describe kinky afro-textured hair, based on a hair type chart whereby type 1 is straight, type 2 is wavy, type 3 is curly and type 4 is kinky. This image gives a rough overview of the categories, but hair types are not necessarily limited to these types. Also, different sections one person’s hair can fall into different categories.