I first got my hair chemically altered around 2001, with a mild texturizer. Unfortunately I do not have pictures of my texturized hair but it was basically straight with a lot of texture to it (kind of how texlaxed hair looks when it is left to air-dry). Instead of my usual braids, and twists, I wore mainly buns with my texturized hair and that made life much easier. I started swimming in high school and so I stopped using any form of chemicals for about two years. I got my first relaxer (I do remember having trouble with the chlorine but stopped swimming shortly after this anyways) around 2003 and I was in love! My hair was very thick and bouncy and it was somewhere beneath my shoulders, which is longer than I thought it would have been. This is the best picture I could find of it.
For the first few years, my hair prospered because I did not mess with it much (It was not intentional back then but I now understand how important low manipulation is). I roller set at night, combed it down in the mornings and went to the salon on the weekends. At the time, I was, however, misinformed about black hair, and so I thought my hair was at it’s longest point and genetics simply would not let it grow any further. I did not know about deep conditioning, protein treatments or anything of the sort. I got relaxers every six weeks like clockwork and trimmed every time. Miraculously my hair somehow remained healthy on this schedule (my edges were always thin though so maybe over processing caused this) but no wonder it never grew past a certain length. I was obviously cutting away all my precious new growth!
The first time I experienced severe damage was approximately 2006 and it resulted from me washing and impatiently detangling my hair by myself for a few months one summer. I was swimming a lot that particular summer and so I saw no point in going to the salon. My “regime” was to go swimming, wash it with whatever shampoo and conditioner I could find then rip through all the knots. The next time I went to see my hairdresser; she took one look at the matted mess on my head and told me it was about to be a very bad day. I will never forget because I lost about 5 inches, which was a very traumatic experience. It was still very thick once she was done cutting away the damage (no pics sorry) but I wanted length! That’s when I bought my first $20 flat-iron and used it everyday simply to get my hair to show as much length as possible. Needless to say,it gradually got shorter and thinner. My hair went from being so think it was almost impossible to neatly put it all in a scrunchie to stringy and sparse
After becoming very frustrated with fried, dead hair and desperately wanting to get it back to where it once was, I started doing research on growing longer healthy hair and learned why my hair was so damaged. From incorporating the simple step of limiting heat usage to once per week, it quickly began to thicken up and started growing again. When I started college (2008), it was back to being healthy and doing well.
After the haircut and new color.
Shortly, after the bob I literally woke up one morning and decided I wanted to go super short and went to my stylist for the Rihanna cut a short while after. I loved my short hair and of all the experiments, I’ve done, this was by far my favorite! It made me look and feel much more confident and was somehow very liberating. It was extremely easy to style, low maintenance and extremely versatile. I needed fewer relaxers and could simply slick it back if I did not have time to actually style.
I loved my hair but missed having longer hair to twirl around my fingers and play with and so I decided to start growing it out again. The last time, I got a shape up for the Rihanna cut was in December 2011 and I have been on my hair journey to long healthy hair since then.
