Since reading SBH book I have been very aware of the state of my hair. I have not relaxed again and I think I am about three months post, In fact lets just say that I last relaxed the 1st June 2011. I am not excited with the three months as I have bee here before. I just can not wait for six months to arrive again so that I can start to really enjoy the challenge of transitioning.
So far `I have learned, on refection, that my hair being course and wiry does well with gentle heat to help me manage the density but not very well with air drying and flat ironing. I have an unbelievable amount of breakage on my crown from the bad relaxer I had before my last. I left it for about five weeks before correcting and air dried it lose to try and keep breakage down. Hair always all over the floor I knew something was wrong, however it was not until I tried to air dry a roller set that I really saw the damage as there seemed to be lots of short hairs within my long hair all over my head. My ends are pretty good with just the odd split end but inside my dense hair I would say I have 80-70% breakage at the point of that relaxer application.
I have also rediscovered the very curly tight 'O' type hair on my crown which tends to be the worse for breakage and when fully natural, knots. I have neglected this area and have decided that I am going to maintain my transitioning hair through gentle blow drying only. I only use heat which feel comfortable against my skin and I hold my damp (not wet) hair taught as I dry, concentrating on the roots mainly.
To of set this new addition to my regimen I have decided to try and use less products so that I do not have to wash so often. I mean I have dry scalp and dry hair, so really I am only washing off what I put on my scalp, so to keep my scalp clean I will not add too much product.
I have also been on a search for a creamy leave-in and I found it! Cantu Shea butter Leave-in. £5.50 for 500g, a good price and it offers moisture and heat protection. I used this on towel dried hair before I went to bed, ignoring my healthy new growth. Then I spritzed my roots with water in the morning, added my nexxus heat protection spray and divided it into small sections for blow drying. The result was lovely soft hair that was not weighed down of stick straight. I plan to moisturise every night wear my hair up as it is getting quite long now and can get in the way.
Products:
Shampoo- Nexxus moisturising shampoo, Kelate for clarifying before a protein treatment.
Conditioner- Nexxus moisturising conditioner (managed to get 1 litre very cheap) HSR for pre-poos.
Protein-Nexxus Emergencee my hair loves protein! pree poo GPB if I feel it needs a boost.
Leave in- Cantu Shea butter, this contains glycerin so I hope that it will work well with water spritz.
Moisturiser- water bottle spritz (mineral water)
Sealant- coconut oil, moisturising in its own right and soaks through to the cortex leaving opportunity for further moisture.
Style- NO heat and protective styling, buns, trying to avoid hair bands, pincurls.
Wash every two weeks prepoo and wash day before, sleep in four loose pincurls with leave-in conditioner. Blow dry in morning, moisturise nightly, hard protein every six weeks.
This should save me money too as I have been washing up to twice a week and slapping heavy products on as if there is no tomorrow.
Good news in that my hair is now 21 inches long, only three inches left until bra strap! Six months!
Monday, 29 August 2011
Sunday, 7 August 2011
Yet another revelation and my new method
As I am rebuilding my regimen I decided to go product shopping. I knew what I did not want in my products so I spent a long time just staring at the ingredients looking for the most healthy ingredients for the least money. I was not impressed with organic root stimulator (old staple), I do not know if there is a new formula available in the states but here the line is just full of mineral oil. I decided to get the same staples that I used with success to grow out my damaged hair when I started this journey years ago. I have only ever been patient enough to grow out damage once, The funny thing is that I had a very serious trim before hand and I have started to wonder if that might be in order.
Organics is a line that is not mineral oil or petroleum heavy, they also have an interesting deep conditioner for damaged hair, its a light protein and it states that you should leave it in or rinse it out. I think that it looks like a practical answer to my dryness. I will do a review once I have finished my first jar.
I had a bit of a revelation whilst in the store, I was looking for a moisturising deep conditioner and could only find one and that contained mineral oil. I looked at all the products and noticed that they were all for damaged hair and then it hit me. The companies are selling us home relaxers to inexperienced non professionals in order to fix out "problem" texture. However these products cause us more issues such as dryness, breakage, baldness, thinning, brittle dull hair fibers and then they sell us more products to help manage the problem. This type of back end hair shop is designed to keep us down, if it was aimed at making the our hair moist and healthy they would be doing themselves out of business. At that thought I turned on my heal and left the shop. I only wished I had done this sooner as the last shop where I had made a purchase charged me twice rendering further shopping, difficult.
I am trying a new method at the moment, its not exciting or mind blowing, in fact quite the opposite. Its called being patient, consistent and giving it time. I used to be into quick answers, throwing away products and damaged hair and sporting a short do. It feels good at first but then unwanted attention ensues with a focus on my hair style and my reason behind it. Nothing is going to change for the outside world, my hair will just be up and off my neck, slicked into a bun or roll of some sort .
The transition is at the ten week point, a hard place to be in as I have roughly one inch and a half of natural hair which is showing like a bit of fuzz at the front of my hair line. Its very hard to slick it down and its disrupting my hair pattern without adding any real waves when worn back. No matter I know that in a month my line of demarcation will shift and it will be plain sailing until I reach six months and then its going into uncharted territory Hoorah!
Reviews, thrills and spills to come, and I must get some images sorted.
Mwaz!
Organics is a line that is not mineral oil or petroleum heavy, they also have an interesting deep conditioner for damaged hair, its a light protein and it states that you should leave it in or rinse it out. I think that it looks like a practical answer to my dryness. I will do a review once I have finished my first jar.
I had a bit of a revelation whilst in the store, I was looking for a moisturising deep conditioner and could only find one and that contained mineral oil. I looked at all the products and noticed that they were all for damaged hair and then it hit me. The companies are selling us home relaxers to inexperienced non professionals in order to fix out "problem" texture. However these products cause us more issues such as dryness, breakage, baldness, thinning, brittle dull hair fibers and then they sell us more products to help manage the problem. This type of back end hair shop is designed to keep us down, if it was aimed at making the our hair moist and healthy they would be doing themselves out of business. At that thought I turned on my heal and left the shop. I only wished I had done this sooner as the last shop where I had made a purchase charged me twice rendering further shopping, difficult.
I am trying a new method at the moment, its not exciting or mind blowing, in fact quite the opposite. Its called being patient, consistent and giving it time. I used to be into quick answers, throwing away products and damaged hair and sporting a short do. It feels good at first but then unwanted attention ensues with a focus on my hair style and my reason behind it. Nothing is going to change for the outside world, my hair will just be up and off my neck, slicked into a bun or roll of some sort .
The transition is at the ten week point, a hard place to be in as I have roughly one inch and a half of natural hair which is showing like a bit of fuzz at the front of my hair line. Its very hard to slick it down and its disrupting my hair pattern without adding any real waves when worn back. No matter I know that in a month my line of demarcation will shift and it will be plain sailing until I reach six months and then its going into uncharted territory Hoorah!
Reviews, thrills and spills to come, and I must get some images sorted.
Mwaz!
Friday, 5 August 2011
The Science of Black Hair, great for transitioners.
Since my last post I relaxed my hair again, I am sure you must be rolling your eyes wondering why I can not just commit to the cause. Well to be honest my hair was breaking from its half processed chemical state. I figured that I could not take the relaxer out so I may as well do it properly and start a fresh, or cut it all off.
After that I sort of stopped thinking about it and started abusing my hair a little, I started to use a lot of serum and heat to create the shine and movement that I craved. However now I have about an inch and a half of natural hair I have had to turn my attention back to transitioning again.
I needed to do something new and fast as I have noticed that I have been on this journey for so long now that I have started to repeat myself. I have really done everything out there but succeed. I had started to see lots of information pop up about a revolutionary new book "The Science of Black Hair" its written by a Scientist named Audrey Davis-Sivasothy. I have read many of her articles over the years and I know that she has helped thousands of women.
I was most excited to read about transitioning, because there is a serious lack of information about how to transition. I find women who have stopped perming all the time but I feel that you can not always trust a video sometimes you just want the hard facts. However once I started to read the book I realised that there was so much that I was in denial about regarding the state of my hair. There was such a wealth of information that the scales literally fell from my eyes and I had to face the truth that my hair was not healthy.
You see Audrey goes into such detail about the hair fiber and its make-up and how it reacts to chemicals and its environment that its very hard to say to yourself "relaxing is healthy". Its possible but without a trust worthy professional at hand you take a risk every time you self relax. I started to see that my hair was dry and that my ends where split, I needed more moisture and less manipulation. All that misinformation that I had absorbed from You Tube had actually damaged my view of what is healthy. Before I read this book my mind was teetering between just relaxing for life and giving up and transitioning or indeed delaying my transition until my hair was longer. I now see that if I had continued as I was my hair would never have reached the length I desired. Not because it can not but because I was not letting it.
I thought that I was moisturising my hair with the serums and that it was better to use a silicone heavy serum than a product containing mineral oil. TSOBH has a list of chemicals and details regarding their properties. These chemicals are actually grouped together so you can easily check your staple products for the right ingredients. It was through this that I realised that there was little difference between a heavy silicone and a synthetic oil, they both block moisture and cause dryness. In fact I was not using a moisturising leave-in conditioner at all and I had stopped sealing moisture in with oil. My hair is damaged which is why it dries so quickly, my cuticles can not keep the moisture in!
This was a wake up call to me and to be perfectly honest I do feel like having a massive hair cut and starting a fresh, but I know from experience that as my natural hair grows out the more length I have the easier it will be to wear more styles. I have very thick wire like dense hair with an S/O pattern, recognising your hair type is detailed is detailed in the book too. My hair grows long easily as it is quite tough, however I will not be able to get it past arm pit length whilst it is damaged.The downside to my hair type is that it is a nightmare to handle when short as it is so dense that you need double the amount of braids to protect it when washing or at night. Two strand twist take days, but when my hair is longer it has the length to balance the density and is actually easier to manage.
I would relax my hair again if it was just about the hair fiber but the scalp is a whole new issue. There is a chapter on how to have healthy relaxed hair and this details how to go about self relaxing safely. I thought I was pretty good at self relaxing, even if I bent the rules from time to time, however when you see on a scientific level how relaxing affects the scalp it really puts you off. I always looked at relaxing as a styling choice that looked a bit dodgy but I could not work out why, this book confirmed my suspicions, relaxing is a dangerous game of Russian roulette. I no longer think that I can be bothered to play this game of chance, I would rather take a chance on my natural hair.
So armed with this new knowledge and having rebuilt my regimen from scratch using this fantastic book, I will now enter my fifth transition. In FACT I will declare this my FIRST, serious, well informed transition. I now know what my hair is like as I have already seen it on previous big chops. Its not about self discovery, this is about discipline and patience. I hope that you have all remained patient with me as I been going along on my journey.
BUY THIS BOOK!
After that I sort of stopped thinking about it and started abusing my hair a little, I started to use a lot of serum and heat to create the shine and movement that I craved. However now I have about an inch and a half of natural hair I have had to turn my attention back to transitioning again.
I needed to do something new and fast as I have noticed that I have been on this journey for so long now that I have started to repeat myself. I have really done everything out there but succeed. I had started to see lots of information pop up about a revolutionary new book "The Science of Black Hair" its written by a Scientist named Audrey Davis-Sivasothy. I have read many of her articles over the years and I know that she has helped thousands of women.
I was most excited to read about transitioning, because there is a serious lack of information about how to transition. I find women who have stopped perming all the time but I feel that you can not always trust a video sometimes you just want the hard facts. However once I started to read the book I realised that there was so much that I was in denial about regarding the state of my hair. There was such a wealth of information that the scales literally fell from my eyes and I had to face the truth that my hair was not healthy.
You see Audrey goes into such detail about the hair fiber and its make-up and how it reacts to chemicals and its environment that its very hard to say to yourself "relaxing is healthy". Its possible but without a trust worthy professional at hand you take a risk every time you self relax. I started to see that my hair was dry and that my ends where split, I needed more moisture and less manipulation. All that misinformation that I had absorbed from You Tube had actually damaged my view of what is healthy. Before I read this book my mind was teetering between just relaxing for life and giving up and transitioning or indeed delaying my transition until my hair was longer. I now see that if I had continued as I was my hair would never have reached the length I desired. Not because it can not but because I was not letting it.
I thought that I was moisturising my hair with the serums and that it was better to use a silicone heavy serum than a product containing mineral oil. TSOBH has a list of chemicals and details regarding their properties. These chemicals are actually grouped together so you can easily check your staple products for the right ingredients. It was through this that I realised that there was little difference between a heavy silicone and a synthetic oil, they both block moisture and cause dryness. In fact I was not using a moisturising leave-in conditioner at all and I had stopped sealing moisture in with oil. My hair is damaged which is why it dries so quickly, my cuticles can not keep the moisture in!
This was a wake up call to me and to be perfectly honest I do feel like having a massive hair cut and starting a fresh, but I know from experience that as my natural hair grows out the more length I have the easier it will be to wear more styles. I have very thick wire like dense hair with an S/O pattern, recognising your hair type is detailed is detailed in the book too. My hair grows long easily as it is quite tough, however I will not be able to get it past arm pit length whilst it is damaged.The downside to my hair type is that it is a nightmare to handle when short as it is so dense that you need double the amount of braids to protect it when washing or at night. Two strand twist take days, but when my hair is longer it has the length to balance the density and is actually easier to manage.
I would relax my hair again if it was just about the hair fiber but the scalp is a whole new issue. There is a chapter on how to have healthy relaxed hair and this details how to go about self relaxing safely. I thought I was pretty good at self relaxing, even if I bent the rules from time to time, however when you see on a scientific level how relaxing affects the scalp it really puts you off. I always looked at relaxing as a styling choice that looked a bit dodgy but I could not work out why, this book confirmed my suspicions, relaxing is a dangerous game of Russian roulette. I no longer think that I can be bothered to play this game of chance, I would rather take a chance on my natural hair.
So armed with this new knowledge and having rebuilt my regimen from scratch using this fantastic book, I will now enter my fifth transition. In FACT I will declare this my FIRST, serious, well informed transition. I now know what my hair is like as I have already seen it on previous big chops. Its not about self discovery, this is about discipline and patience. I hope that you have all remained patient with me as I been going along on my journey.
BUY THIS BOOK!
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