Book Out Tomorrow!

Throughout the process of writing the book, drawing the pictures, and getting it published, it always seemed too good to be true. I kept thinking that at some point Wiley would change their minds, and I would be starting all over again. But here it is! The book is out tomorrow, and I can't even wrap my mind around it. If you get a chance, please stop by your local bookstore and ask them for a copy of the book. Thank you thank you to all of your support and your encouragement, tough questions, and thoughtful comments. You helped make this possible.

Energy and Hair

Most of my life I was obsessed with hair. I'd spend hours nearly every day poring through magazines for pictures of people with curly hair like mine, for information. I'd cut out those pictures and study them for hours trying to figure out how the models got their curls to look so lovely. I filled binder after binder with the pictures and spent hours going through them looking for clues. I'd try all the suggestions they gave for "kinky, curly, frizzy" hair, but none of them worked. I spent almost an entire day as a teenager every weekend, for years, miserable, trying to wash and set my hair. Every night I tried to set it so it wouldn't embarrass me the next day; every morning was a soul dampening exercise trying to style it in a way that made me feel less ashamed. It seemed like my hair fell outside of the realm of help.

Of course, there were things I didn't know at the time I do now. That my hair was so damaged from chemicals back then that very little could help it. And that the instructions the magazines gave were really for wavy hair, not hair like mine. And over the years I began finding pieces on my own how to care for my hair, the biggest of which was simply to stop putting lye-like chemicals on it.

Many years later I was working at a lab, and I loved my hair, and it was to my waist, and it struck me: I hadn't actually thought about hair in years. I hadn't cracked open a hair magazine, no longer hung out in beauty supply stores, no longer looked for books on hair care. I didn't talk about it much to anyone. Apart from the time I spent washing, conditioning, and combing my hair, I didn't think about it. My hair was simply no longer a big deal to me. It was my hair, I loved and accepted it, and that was it. And it was then I began thinking I might want to share what I'd learned, because apart from maybe a tiny piece here and there, I hadn't found any of it in one easy to reach place.

And it hit me also that my true goal was to help others have their hair no longer a big deal. That they could do their hair, and be done with it. That they could spend their energy and time focusing on something more important to them. I mean, it's one thing if you truly love obsessing on hair. But what about those of us who didn't really want to obsess about it?

So the site as well as the book are focused more for people who want to get in and get out. People who want to know what the heck to do with their hair so they can move on with their lives. That instead of using precious energy fighting their hair, that energy is used to create something wonderful and positive in their lives. And finally, not having to care that much if they get caught in the rain on the way there.

New hair tool!

In Bellevue there was recently a small arts fair. I wandered around for a while, and a girl who looked alot like me caught my eye. She had her hair pinned up, and it looked much like mine did when I wore relaxers, except hers looked way better than mine ever did back in the day. So I stopped to catch a closer look at her hair. By then, she'd gone into a booth, and when I made my way up to it, she was letting a vendor demonstrate a hair comb on her hair. Heck, I hadn't even noticed the combs, but he had one wall of his booth covered in large, shiny metal combs in all kinds of beautiful metal-worked designs, in bronze, copper and silver (as well as combinations of all three).

As I watched, she undid her hair, and he began to style it. At first I was struck that he didn't try to run his comb through her hair. He simply twisted it gently up, and slid in the comb. It went in easily. It stayed in. She commented how light it felt, how secure it was. Then he slid it out, and did another style. And another. And another. Each time the comb came out easily. There was no frizz. And the comb was sturdy enough to hold her hair. I was impressed. But cautious.

The woman and I bonded over our hair for a while and marveled at the combs before she headed on her way. I cautiously entered the booth, and looked over the combs. I asked what they were made of, and the guy said they were actually made of copper, bronze, or German silver (which he said is a very strong type of silver). He said there was a lifetime repair on these combs. I touched one. It was smooth and heavy. He offered to do my hair, but being not only stubborn but paranoid, I declined. No one touches my hair. But I had liked what I saw, so I picked out a comb to buy.

I took it up to him, and bought it. It was pricey—I won't lie. But worth it. Then he asked if I wanted to put it in a bag, or wear it. I hesitated for a moment (since I'd seen how gentle he and the comb seemed), and then I decided to live a little , and said "wear it". So he had me sit in his chair, and he began showing me many of the styles for this comb. He didn't even try to comb my hair. The styles easily went from one to the other. The comb slid in easily, held firmly, and came out without catching. Usually my hair is too heavy for me to put up comfortably. But this comb was big enough to evenly distribute the weight of my hair, so my hair actually felt light. He showed me about 6 styles in 5 minutes. He would have shown me more, but when he asked "Can your hair be separated?", I said that it couldn't (it can, but not easily, and I didn't want to take the chance of it being pulled apart). But I really appreciated that he asked. I had seen the half up, half down styles he'd done on a few other people who stopped by his booth, though.

He asked what style I'd like to wear out, and I chose what he called The Figure Eight Bun, which I'm calling a Split Bun. He simply swirled my hair into a high bun, split it in half, and slid in the comb. Below, I'm including some pictures of this style, along with a few others so you can get the idea of what this comb can do. (The first four photos show the Split Bun at different angles, including from the front. Two are the right and left sides of a French roll, and the last one is a loose bun I swirled around and pinned with the comb.)

Down the road, I'm thinking of collecting a few more of them. They are more like works of art that will most likely last me the rest of my life. For more information, you can check out his site (where you can order a comb, as well as check out many styles and the instructions for creating them) at www.simplistic-designs.com.

Product quest

One of the missions I had going to Kentucky (besides, of course, visiting my family) was to look for hair products there that I haven't been able to find here. I looked for the beauty supply shop I used to go to many years ago when I was living in Louisville, and was happy to see it still there. It used to be a big highlight of my week to shop for new hair products back in the day, hoping that maybe that trip I would find a miracle product that would stop my hair from breaking and get it to grow. Well, I never found that miracle product, but I sure enjoyed looking for it.

So this time I spent about an hour looking at all the hair products in the Beauty Supply store in downtown Louisville. On the three or so blocks before you reach the store, there are at least two wig shops that I counted, anyway. Inside this beauty shop I visited there was an entire isle devoted to weaves and extensions. I used to buy my extension hair there (mostly nylon), and when I wore weaves, I bought the hair at a store across the street.

It was fun picking up products, looking over all the shampoos, conditioners, hair dressings and lotions. I read through their ingredients and looked for products I might be able to try out so I could recommend them. I located about five possibilities. I know many ingredients to avoid, and many I like to see, by heart. But there are probably tens of thousands of ingredients out there, so I never know about every ingredient in a product, and therefore if a bad ingredient or two has snuck in, until I look them all up at home in my books.

I crammed the new bottles of products in my suitcase and brought them home to Seattle, eager to perhaps find a new one to use. I brought each one in to the room with my reference books, and began to look up the ingredients that weren't yet on the site. And wouldn't you know it, one by one, all of them had at least one ingredient that turns out I don't trust. Almost all of them had one sticky ingredient lurking under a poly- something. Some poly- somethings are okay, and others are sticky. And due to a bad experience I once had with major product buildup when I was a teenager, I always try to avoid things with these sticky ingredients in them (unless they're supposed to be there, like in a gel). Also, by avoiding sticky ingredients, I can use a very mild shampoo because there isn't that sticky buildup that needs removing by a stronger shampoo (or I could use a conditioner-wash, but I break out when I don't shampoo. Otherwise I'd go that way).

So with a sigh, and a realization I am truly paranoid and stubborn when it comes to my hair (well, more than just about my hair, but in this case, it's about my hair), my search continues for finding products I trust enough to use.

Cornflake

My hair has managed to tangle around some impressively odd things. I've tangled myself into buttons, my bra strap, rings and earrings. I've gotten caught in the wood grain of cabinets at work as I passed, and it's nearly guaranteed I'll be caught in shrubbery when I walk in the woods. It catches on items on store shelves and knocks off onto the floor what it can't hold onto as I go by. It catches in notebooks and pens. But just when I thought I've gotten my hair caught in about every surface it can get caught in, my hair surprised me once more.

The other day I was peacefully eating a bowl of cornflakes while reading. I put a spoonful in my mouth, not paying attention, and discovered hair in my mouth, too. This is normal (it often sticks to my chapstick or gloss). But when I tried to pull it out, I found it stuck fast inside my mouth. The only way I was able to get my hair out was to open my mouth, and when I pulled out my hair, a cornflake came out too, still tangled in my hair like a crunchy fish on a curly fishing line. The cornflake rotated slowly at the end of my hair until I untangled it. Then I tucked my hair safely behind my ears, and went back to eating.

Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner

When I left off last post...

I had found the Alba Botanica coconut milk extra-rich conditioner to be not only drying, but when I added enough product to clump my curls, it got flaky. I wanted to see if it was the guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride that was causing this. So I decided to try Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating hair conditioner, which had nearly identical ingredients, except that it was missing the guar hydroxypropyltrimonim chloride.

So a few weeks later, I tried the Alba Botanica gardenia hydrating conditioner. Just like the coconut milk version, things started out fine. The combing was nice, and it clumped okay. It was a bit light, and when my hair dried, I added more product to my ends. And sure enough, this time it didn't flake or glob! So I knew that guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride, though a fine ingredient for a product you will rinse-out (as far as I've been able to find), was not ideal for a product you were going to leave in your hair. This was fair.

Now the real test: was this ingredient also to blame for my hair feeling dry? Or because it was included in the ingredients, I wasn't able to use enough product to keep my ends together, and that just made them feel dry? Or was/were there other ingredient(s) lurking in there that caused the dryness and matting?

As the days wore on with the gardenia conditioner, my hair felt dryer. I'd put a generous amount on my ends, but when the product dried, they felt even dryer. Not good. By the end of the week, it seemed like I had little matted areas in my hair.

At the end of the trial week, when it was time to wash and re-comb my hair, I decided to comb with a stand-by very slippery conditioner, and used Paula's Choice Smooth Finish Conditioner. To my surprise, my hair took even longer than the usual two hours to comb and smooth. It was really matted. I grumbled to my guy, Jon, about how long it was taking me to get through my hair, and he said he'd noticed my hair had looked sort of matted this week. So that decided it. There was something in those products that was drying, and I needed to find out what it was! This way I could avoid it in future products and save my money.

During that time I was doing some reading and stumbled upon a mention that pineapple was drying (per Don't Go Shopping Without Me by Paula Begoun, pg 352), mostly because it has the enzyme bromelain in it. I know when I eat lots of pineapple, my tongue gets really raw. It's mostly from the the acidity, but also the enzyme action. So I checked back over the ingredients in both bottles of Alba conditioner, and saw that they not only had pineapple, but papaya as well (a source of the potent enzyme papain). I'm thinking this product is pH balanced (it says it is on the bottle—though I haven't used litmus paper on it to make sure)— so it's probably the enzymes in those two ingredients that made my hair dry and matted, not the acidity.

However, these two conditioners also have citric acid, which puzzles me: Citric acid is used to balance the pH in products that may be too alkaline by making them more acidic. Hmmm. I think I will get some litmus paper. If I find out anything, I'll post again about the results.

So from what I can tell, the pineapple and papaya were mildly exfoliating my hair, which was what was causing it to feel so dry. So now I know to avoid them in future products.

I do want to say I use Alba's cocoa butter hand & body lotion and am happy with it. It's just that products have to go through a much more rigorous process when it comes to my hair. I'm much easier going when it comes to lotion for my skin than for my hair.

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

Alba Botanica coconut milk extra-rich hair conditioner

I do tend to find a few products I love, and then stop looking. Lately I've been trying out different combing/ leave in conditioners so that I could offer a wider range of conditioners I recommend. Before I recommend a conditioner, I check out the ingredients several times. If there aren't ingredients I know to be bad in the product, I look to see if it has ingredients that look moisturizing, will give my hair weight, and seem like they will help me comb through with my Denman with little friction. If the conditioner seems to pass these hurdles, it's only then that I'll use it. I comb it through my hair after washing, use it to define my curls, and use it to smooth my hair every day for a week, until it's time to wash my hair again. The conditioners that work, I recommend on the site.

I often get asked about what I think of other conditioners that didn't make the cut. So I decided I would write about the ones that seemed like they would work, but for one reason or another didn't.

The first one I tried was Alba Botanica's coconut milk extra-rich hair conditioner. I have a special weakness for tropical flavors like coconut and mango. On looking at the ingredients, it seemed to have good weight ingredients, good moisturizing ingredients, and lots of slip ingredients. I don't have a very sensitive scalp, so I generally don't worry about extracts and essential oils. Everything seemed good to go. I figured it would be a bit light, going by the ingredients, but that just means I'd use a bit more. Sometimes I wait until my hair is dry, then go back over the ends, putting in more product to keep my ends together.

The combing went well. I was feeling excited I'd be able to recommend another conditioner that I found at the health food store. The clumping action also seemed to go well. So far, so good. As I suspected, it dried a bit light. No big thing, I'd just add more to the ends to keep my curls together. It was at this point the conditioner started to go a bit wrong for me.

When I added more, it started drying up as a rolly white film that flaked out of my hair. Instead of keeping my ends together, it seemed to ball up in confused little particles. Not a good sign.

I tried for a couple more days to smooth water and this conditioner on my ends, but my ends ended up looking dry and covered in little flaky globs. I finally stopped using it and switched to smoothing a tried and true on my ends.

So then I was puzzled. What ingredient caused this product to gunk up? The next week I used one of my regular conditioners I love to give my hair a rest. The week after that I tried Shikai Natural Everyday Conditioner. It was wonderful. And it's basic working ingredients were similar to the Alba. What gives?

After comparing the ingredients of lots of products that worked, I saw a few things that this conditioner had that others didn't. One was guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride. My research of as many objective sources as I could find all seemed to agree that this was used to condition hair, and so far, I haven't found anything to say this is a problem ingredient. Which makes sense, because if I were to rinse it out, this wouldn't have been a problem. It's just that I leave good products in.

So to experiment, I decided to try another Alba conditioner that didn't have this ingredient, but was basically similar otherwise. In this way, I could see if this ingredient was the culprit, or if there was another ingredient in there that was making my hair feel so dry. I wanted to get to the bottom of the flaky bits that occurred if I used enough product to keep my ends together.

To be continued on the next post...

*Note: I understand that this product (as are nearly all the conditioners I review) is meant to be rinsed out. And there are plenty of wonderful reviews for how this product works when it's rinsed out. However, since my method involves leaving the product in our hair, I review how a product functions this way.

The Nylon Mullet

Recently, I was in the shower washing my hair and I got a surprise: My hair has grown to the length where it reaches about mid-biscuits when it's wet. This means that when my hair gets wet in the shower, it slaps me between the cheeks. The first time it happened, it startled the heck out of me. It's just not something you're expecting in the shower during a routine hair washing.

At the same time, it was a huge moment in my hair saga. That soggy smack was like an announcement that my hair was finally long. My hair is now long enough to give me a friendly slap on the cheeks as if to say a cheerful "hello".

This made me think of one of my many misguided hair attempts from long ago. When I was wearing my hair texturized in my mid-twenties, as always, it never grew past my shoulders because of the chemicals. And I really wanted that long hair to swing over my shoulders dramatically. In my weave days I discovered I wasn't coordinated enough to pull off a whole head full of weave: I tended to put weaves in wrong, so my head was Elephant man lumpy. And when I put all my hair in extensions, it tended to mat up by the time I got a chance to redo them. So my big idea at this time was that if I added hair that matched my color and curl patten—but just in the back of my hair only—that would give me realistic-looking length. I reasoned that the extensions would give the back of my hair time to grow long itself, and when I took out the extensions, my own hair would be the same length. That was the theory, anyway.

I spent hours, days, and many trips going to various wig shops and reading hair magazines looking for hair to match mine. Real hair that was curly and sold in bulk generally wasn't available in a long enough length for me. So I ended up checking out the bags of nylon hair. I tried to be clever. I'd buy two differently colored packs and textures of nylon hair to try to make them seem more realistic. Then I'd braid them in the back, and sort of comb the nylon hair to try to get it to lose the fake doll-hair shine. The plastic hair hated that. It matted together into odd, multi-colored puffs, giving me a tortoiseshell-cat fur appearance. I had to replace the extensions frequently because they snarled so badly.

Still, for it to look realistic, I couldn't venture very much longer with the extension hair than my own broken hair's length. For the most part I kept the fake length just long enough to peek out from beneath my texturized waves. But one time I became frustrated and hair hungry. I wanted me some long hair darnit. So I bought some new, tightly s-waved nylon hair. And in the very back, I put in about five of those long extensions, just in my kitchen area. These few strands were long enough to brush my lower back.

The thing is, as I remember it, this couldn't have been a good look for anyone. Hadn't I basically given myself a terrible, terrible mullet made of scraggly nylon pieces? From the back view, my head must have appeared shaped like a bell of texturized fuzz with about five octopus tendrils of fake hair hanging down from out of it. I must have looked like either a crazy hair person, or a person who had forgotten to remove the last few pieces of her extensions. At the time I was giddy with hair and it impaired my judgment.

I remember taking it out for a test drive. I walked around in downtown Louisville during a summer visit with my mom. I remember having two opposing feelings as I walked around: As I moved, I could feel the nylon hair gently swaying against my back. I had never felt that before, and I was exhilarated. It was the nicest feeling I could imagine at that moment. What I wouldn't do for real hair like that! Yet, on the other hand, I knew those extensions were too long. I knew there was no way anyone was buying it. I kept waiting to be called out. I almost wished someone would say something to yank me back to reality.

No one said anything to me, but I took them out that night anyway. I consoled myself with the bittersweet memories of feeling the soft swish of hair against my back; the stuff of dreams.

So when I felt that cold wet smack of hair in a very personal area the other day, I realized my real hair is now much longer than that fake hair I couldn't pull off wearing years ago ever was.

And now, things are so different. In a tank top I can feel my real curls gently swish against the exposed skin on my back between the top and the bottom of my pyjamas. And though it's now been several years that I've been able to enjoy the swoosh of my hair against my back, I still get that rush. Like having been hungry for so long, and now I'm eating my favorite food and I'm still grateful for it. Like I still can't get over that I don't have to go home and take out all that phony hair in shame. That I don't have to walk around obsessed with whether my fake hair could be detected or not (that one was easy—it could be). And that I actually get to keep this hair, and it didn't come home with me in a crinkly plastic bag.

How I Escaped the Relaxer

Up until I grew out the chemicals, my only run-in with my natural hair was what I considered my troublesome new growth's waterwaves peering out from my crunchy straight hair, signaling it was time again for a touchup.

At twenty-six, I didn't know what my real hair looked like. My tightly curly hair had been permed since childhood. And the only time I thought I'd experienced it was as a Frankenhair mixture of a Jheri curl over a straightener over my natural curls, giving me the fabled Mushroom Head that grew larger and larger like a swollen sponge over the summer I had it.

After this experience with my hair, and the sinking feeling I got as a young, easily mortified teen when looking at the photos of my giant balloon head, I wasn't too eager to go through that again. I really hated the relaxers and how they made my hair break apart, but I felt that my own hair would erupt as it grew out, exploding open in slow motion frizz until I couldn't get through doorways anymore. Basically, I felt I had no choice. So I spent most of my life looking for wonder products to undo the damage the chemicals did. But the reality is there is nothing but scissors that can take away the fatally damaged hair once the chemicals have been used.

My mom, who is African-American, could grow her permed hair down her back when she was younger. So I thought I just had to find what she had done, and I, too, could have long, straight hair. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember how her mom (who took care of my mom's hair because it was such a procedure to wash and care for it) got it to grow so long. What I didn't realize is that my mom has individually thicker strands of hair that can better withstand the brutal chemicals than mine. I, on the other hand, have spiderweb thin individual strands of hair. So they literally partially dissolved when I put on the chemicals.

The thing that changed it for me was finding the book Good Hair: For Colored Girls Who've Considered Weaves When the Chemicals Became too Ruff by Lonnice Brittenum Bonner. Here was a woman with hair curlier than mine, and she grew out her chemicals (luckily, I didn't notice at the time her mentioning she still used a texturizer in her hair). I figured if she could do it, so could I.

In Good Hair, Bonner cut off all her permed hair and started fresh. Definitely the recommended way to go. But I didn't want to have such short hair. Hair was (is) a big part of my identity, and I didn't want almost no hair. So I chose to grow it out. How hard could it be? I thought cavalierly to myself. I'd been dealing with the chemical hair all along. That was a known quantity. This process would just introduce a new kind of hair in addition to the familiar hair. That didn't seem so bad.

I washed, combed, and set my hair every week in about twenty or so two-strand twists. I'd let them dry, sleep in them overnight, and untwist them in the morning for a headful of spirals the rest of the week. At night I'd pull my hair back in a bun—not too tight—for fear of smashing the spirals.

And this was fine for the first few months.

Then The Mat arrived.

When I combed my hair, the comb halted at my scalp and wouldn't budge. Every week it got thicker and stronger, as if it were calling in reinforcements. It grew ferocious and puffy at the back of my head. When I prodded it back there, it seemed like something had decided to build an insulated nest, especially packed at the top, back of my head. Now it took me three hours to get through my barely shoulder-length hair, and put it in twists. Every week was a painful session to work my way through the mat, slowly, toes clenched from the pain of having to comb out something so tightly tangled, so close to my scalp. What if this was my natural hair? If it was this bad at two inches of new growth, what would six inches bring?

I'd heard that there can be severe breakage where the two textures meet when growing out a relaxer. Maybe this was another consequence of having two extremely different hair types joined? I tried to pull the hair in the back more firmly down into my bun at night to prevent it getting so riled up, and determinedly hoped for the best.

The mat was tenacious, but so was I. And a few months later I noticed a change. My Denman would glide for a brief moment through the hair closest to my scalp, and then halt abruptly as it landed into the mat. That meant the mat was slowly inching it's way down my hair. The new hair coming in above the mat was slippery and glossy. Now I was interested. I began touching it all the time to feel it. I had no idea something so soft and smooth could grow out of my head.

At about nine months, I pulled open my hair, and looked at the hair growing behind my ear. And there I saw it. A curl pattern instead of chaos. An S shape instead of fuzz. I saw my real hair, strong and sure, coming in over the confused noise of the chemical hair.

From that moment on I was hooked. I took a pair of scissors, and cut off the chemical junk hair (saving two pieces to tape into the Good Hair book—see Curlocide for a photo of them).

I loved my new hair. I still had a way to go towards figuring out how to keep if from growing horizontally rather than vertically, but this was my hair, and we were finally a team.

Introvert to Extrovert

Looking back, it's almost as if I were a flower opening in reverse from childhood to adolescence. That by the time I stumbled, dazed, out of adolescence, it was as if all my petals had folded in on themselves.

And now I am trying to reverse the journey, to reconnect with my childhood chutzpah. Not to say I was always a well-behaved kid. Honestly, I was known to border on downright obnoxiousness. So maybe not going so far as to be a wild child, but enough to jump into the middle of the stream and be okay watching the current I create. To participate instead of lurking and watching voicelessly.

I've been trying to think what it was about turning twelve that made me change into an opposite person from what I started out as. Well, I know a big part of it was the hair. It was about that age that it got cut off, leaving me mushroom-headed. At the same time I went from an environment of few rules to one of many. I went from a place where things were easy to where they were hard. And I went from one where I was closer to society's ideal of beauty, to where I was planets away from the beauty ideal compared to those around me. Plus that whole puberty thing. Man, was I awkward! Braces, big 80's glasses, bad skin, no clue about clothes, and broken, frizzy hair.

And boys. Lots of energy went into trying to catch one of those (no success in highschool, which is just as well. Just like a dog chasing a car, I don't know what I would have done had I actually caught one).

Teenage years are the years that you try on different yous, like dresses, and see which one fits, and which one the world around you responds to in a way that you feel comfortable with. I spent many of those years trying on conforming outfits. Trying to not be odd. Trying out the combination lock to the door of normalcy. Sometime around sixteen or seventeen I gave that up, and got quiet instead. By eighteen, I wrote much more than I spoke.

Then over the years, another change happened. I figured out my hair, and now have the long mermaid hair I'd dreamed of. My curly security blanket. And I've made peace with so many of the things that kept me quiet all those years. And I'm surrounded by wonderful people.

And with the site has come new lessons. Lessons that it's time to have a voice again. To learn the lessons that come with communicating, with having opinions (and actually saying them out loud). Having started the Biracial Hair site has been like finally stepping out into the stream and watching the currents I myself create. Because I have stepped into the water, and put up the site, I have met so many wonderful people, been exposed to many great ideas and voices, and found new friends from all over the world.

I have discovered that the more I've thrown myself to the universe, the more it has given back to me.

Curlocide

Yes. I know I can be paranoid. Especially when it comes to tightly curly hair. That being said, I was looking at a magazine for African-American hair last night. It had been a while since I looked at one (since I'm happy with my hair and don't want to change it). And I saw something I remembered I kept seeing over and over again when I used to read them for real (and in the adds supporting them): Our curls are treated as if they must be "cured" rather than embraced.

Actually, there was almost no African-American hair in there. These magazines would be more appropriately called "Hair of Any Other Race (Provided It Is Not As Curly), Yak Hair, Nylon Hair, and Lots of Chemicals—Anything Other than the Curls You Are Born With".

I understand not all magazines are this way. Maybe I have a knack for picking up the ones that are. And I understand dissatisfaction is big business...you don't make any money if we are happy with what we are born with. I guess it's a huge issue with me because I used to feel exactly that way about my hair. I spent my teenage and early adult years ashamed to have the hair I did. I was blind to the beauty and joy in each of my curls. I couldn't appreciate how our hair is unique, fierce, proud and stubborn.

Why did I want to break my curls' spirit? Why did I settle for broken strands of hair that were a chemically induced imitation of someone else's hair, rather than wear the glossy spirals I was born with? Feeling shame for my natural curls was what I was taught in childhood, since my hair had been straightened ever since I remember. My African-American grandmother hated curls, so she painstakingly straightened my hair and set my straight hair every night. I guess there seemed to be something shameful in them to her, like a dirty secret growing from our scalps.

So I guess I felt afraid of the hair that might erupt from my head without chemicals. The message I got was that it must be some terrible stuff I grew naturally, otherwise, why would we use lye-like chemicals to "treat" it? Almost as if we were using the most powerful disinfectant possible to kill them. Like a virus. And all the magazines I read seemed to nod their heads in agreement, and sidle up to me to tell me my curls were unacceptable.

The photo above is the hair I saved when I cut off all my chemicals, after finally catching a glimpse of what my real hair looked like for the first time in my life. I saved the two last pieces I chopped off, and taped them into a book. A dozen years later, even protected within the pages, that processed hair still breaks apart. I used to think this was the only way I could wear my hair.

The photo to the left is of my hair now. It's the same hair, but after I learned to love it, to celebrate it, and above all , let it be what it needed to be. I feel like I cut off a stranger, and grew back a friend.

Our curls are perfect just as they are. I believe that if there were more images out there of how beautiful our natural curls are, the more we will see them as a wonderful, affirming option for us. And less little girls like me will think destroying their curls are the only option for them.

Every year that I used chemicals, my hair continued to grow back in good faith, giving me yet another chance to do right by it. It took decades, but I finally stopped hurting it and began to take care of it. I came to treasure my curls for the curls they are. I know my hair has forgiven me for what I did to it. It will take me a while longer to forgive myself.

The Mushroom

My hair became a mushroom when I was about eleven. As a child I was obsessed with having long hair. Since it was so curly, the only thing anyone knew to do with it, on my mom's side of the family, was to straighten it. My grandmother spent an hour every night setting it in about twenty little buns all over my head and smoothing in French Perm hairdressing.

I don't know why we decided to go to a salon. Maybe I was constantly hounding people (as was my way) about why my hair wouldn't grow any longer than a little past my shoulders before petering out. Whyever it was that I wound up in the salon, I did. A woman took me into the back room and had me look at some photos in a book. I said I liked one of them (I think I picked the prettiest looking girl with the front of her hair flowing in the wind) and before I knew it, she'd cut off a chunk of my hair in the front (in sort of a mullet). Then put a Jheri curl over my straightener (which was over my very curly hair). She loaded me up with Activators and Moisturizers and Deep Conditioners, and sent me back, stunned, to my mom.

Once home, the consensus among my mom and grandmother was that the rest of my hair was now too damaged. So they cut off the remaining longer mullet hair in the back, and thus began the Summer of the 'Shroom. Soon after, I went to visit my dad for the summer. He took one look at all the greasy activators and moisturizers, and forbid them. So I was left with my round head, no hair dressing, conditioning or activator. All I knew to do was to brush it every morning, and pat it into as round a shape as I could. And as the summer progressed, so did my mushroom. By the end of the summer (looking back at the photos taken from that time), my afro had grown to an impressive girth.

When I returned to Kentucky for school, my hair was quickly straightened again, and this time set in curlers every night, giving me more of a cake-frosting look, with stiffly molded flips all over my head. Thus ended my mushroom hair, and I rapidly entered a Very Awkward Adolescence.