Figuring out my hair care regimen...
So, I never really ever took care of my hair. My mom relaxed my hair quite a few years ago. I imagine I was eight or nine when she did. Because I'd been natural until then, I had some pretty long hair. At the time I was all "OH MY GOSH LOOK AT MY HAIR." I remember when I was 12 my mom commented that I had finally come to terms with the fact that my hair wasn't a white person's hair.
I didn't really take care of it, and I all but let my mom stop touching my hair. I hated it when she put it in braids, but I wasn't willing to do anything to it.
This more or less continued to last year. Occasionally I would read this or that about hair care and be inspired into taking care of my hair, but after the wayward deep conditioner, I would give up the whole thing and hope for the best.
Needless to say, my hair broke a lot. I never got it to grow past my shoulders from when I was a little kid. A couple years ago, I started to really like extension styles and my mom is rather good at them. So I wore them all the time. It would be wear them for a while, unbraid and relax, marvel at hair growth, not take care of hair, hair starts breaking, rebraid, in that order. That continued until VERY recently. I had my mom braid my hair at the end of March 2013, she relaxed it and braided it. I decided in June that I didn't want to relax it before rebraiding it (my mom commented that the roots wouldn't look nice if they had natural hair growing, but I couldn't care less) because I wanted to maximize my growth this time around. At the time my hair was just reaching my shoulder, so I figured when I took them out I would finally get the longest hair I've ever had.
Most recently, like, end of August, I started looking up natural hair. Now, natural hair has always been a kind of obsession for me. I say kind of because whenever I got my hair braided, I couldn't wait for it to start growing because I loved just rubbing my hand along my curls. The texture and feel of them was (and currently is) fantastic to me.
Anyway, about that time, the braids in my infamous 'kitchen' had begun falling out. When they had all fallen out, I was shocked to find that all my relaxed hair went with them. All I had were my naps. Having read up about natural hair and unconsciously having unconsciously transitioned for 6 months, I decided that as soon as my mom was able, I would big chop. Thing is, I got so excited to have natural hair that I went and did it myself with the help of my sister. My mom hasn't seen it yet.
tl;dr: My mom took care of my hair, and I never touched it, ever. I didn't have a regimen to take care of my hair, but I also didn't like my mom doing it. The results were more breakage than an old New York street filled with potholes. I also have always loved touching my natural hair.
ANYWAY. Now I have my natural and I can't stop touching it! At all! I'll be sitting in class and just put my hand in my hair, and just feel it because I love these curls so much. (It doesn't help that I've read that after you moisturize you shouldn't touch it to keep all the oils on the hair and not your hands.) I find it easier to want to take care of my hair now because I love it so much.
As I've only been natural for three weeks (20 days, actually) I haven't found out all my hair wants to tell me. I also am living on a college student budget, and am trying to buy the all natural stuff, but haven't yet because I have $0.
However, we did have some stuff lying around the house. Cantu shea butter leave in conditioner (which the internet tells me is really good), some castor oil (not the pure stuff, but this stuff really makes my hair soft) and I went to my local Wal-Mart and bought some pure coconut oil in the cooking section (which my hair actually doesn't seem to like :c).
Nightly water spritzing and sectioning with shea butter and the castor oil then braiding or twisting seem to work well for maintaining moisture, then shea butter in the morning without spritzing to maintain the style (learned the hard way after thinking my hair was looking awesome all day and finding out it had reverted to my shrunken twa XD). Also, I'm really really bad at cornrows, they're something I've only done to my hair myself a number of times I can count on two hands before now, but they're getting better!
CO wash every two or three days and shampoo wash then deep condition once a week or so. Always braid or twist after. I have an ooold head scarf and am wanting to buy a new one, anyone know where I can get a legit one? Mine doesn't even cover my whole head.
This seems to be working for now, but until I get my all natural ingredients, I can't know if there's something better.
Also, I had extra virgin olive oil sitting around in my house, and I've read it's good too, but I can't seem to figure how to use it. Anyone got any input?
gummygunk
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