Holiday Vacay

New hair styles and products, the Lakers, Pistons and Kobe Bryant, shopping, shopping, dinner with my girls, hanging with my girls, Avatar, Avatar and more Avatar in 3D on Imax.

Aahhhh it was great Christmas vacay home. Pictures are below, followed by transition update:

Natural Hair Transition Update:

Okay, so there are one or two changes I've made to my method in the last few weeks.
1. I now massage my scalp nightly with 100% coconut oil.
2. No longer using flexi rods for my twists, which made them huge. Now there's a simple twist and roll process using bobby pins.
3. My oil formula now consists of: 100% shea butter, 100% coconut oil, jojoba oil, avocado oil and 99% aloe vera gel. I removed the vegetable glycerin from my oil concoction because I really felt like it dried out my hair.
4. I have fallen in love with Trader Joe's Tea Tree Tingle conditioner and am now using it to co-wash instead of HE Hello Hydration. This conditioner has made my hair feel so much softer to deal with and worked through really well when detangling.
5. I'm now using Miss Jessie's Curly Meringue instead of the Curly Pudding to set my twists. The pudding was fine and didn't have a smell. It did it's purpose, but I love the meringue. The smell is intoxicating.

Courage to BC

On my transition road, it's been difficult to find other women who are doing a long term natural hair transition. Just recently Curly Nikki debuted a new blogger who is a year into her long term transition and also found a lack of other women going that route.

One reason people choose not to BC, also known as Big Chop, (my reason), is fear of the unknown.
As a black woman, I've grown up knowing that long and thick was beautiful. Yes, short cuts were cute... but only for awhile. But after years of relaxers, straighteners and heat, in order to transition completely you really have to cut off the relaxed hair. For long term transitioners, that means waiting two or three years down the road. But for short-term trainsitioners, they've found the courage to buck the norm and chop it all off.

There's an abundance of YouTube videos showing young black women at their local salon getting it all chopped off. Some find it liberating, others emotional.

Recently one of my best friends and sorority sisters did the big chop. She's been natural for about three years now (having made the jump, back when I was shouting about never being able to get rid of a perm). When I saw her cut, my first thought was how beautiful she looked and how amazing she must feel to be liberated from the burden of maintaining a 'do. No more styling, flat ironing or forever blow drying.

Whenever I think of BC'ing, I have a slight panic attack. How do you know what's under all that hair? Would a TWA (teeny weeny afro) even fit my head? How would people react? Would the opposite sex view me differently?
But there in lies the problem. If the decision to go natural, my decision, was to lift the burden of relaxing, re-claim my true self, express my beauty on my terms and feel uninhibited about my hair, then is my choice not to complete that decision and BC negating those factors. There is no doubt that at some point, in order to go completely natural I will have to cut off the relaxed part of my hair, but by prolonging that process I can't help but feel that I'm not truly embracing what I'm searching for in this process. By waiting two, three or more years I'm still living by the code that more hair is better than less hair, and that is not what I want.
My friend, Hanya, did it and happily. She thought about it and like Solange she let it all go. Just like that. In the age of "Good Hair", I hope that I can express that courage in the same way.
Here's before and after photos of Hanya:

Transition Update

So it's been four and a half months since I made the decision to go natural and six months since my last relaxer in July. I've changed my process since first describing it, but here are some photos of how I wear my hair sometimes and what the transition process is looking like: