I love my hair, I love to take care of it, play with the texture and the colour as much as I can.
I use my hair to dismantle decades of negative messaging and wrong ideas coming from my family or society itself: black hair doesn’t grow, black hair can’t be beautiful unless it’s long with loose curls.
My mother always relaxed her hair and she decided to relax mine when I was only 8 years old. I was happy at the time as I could finally have hair that was similar to my white friends.
However, after a burning accident I had to big chop. Growing my hair in a confident manner wasn’t easy as people remarks would have a strong impact on me. This is what unfortunately pushed me to wear extensions for years instead of letting my hair be.
Progressively, I started to feel like wearing extensions meant that I wasn’t being true to myself, I almost felt like I was nothing but a lie.
Youtube was a revelation to me as it encouraged me to “educate” myself about my hair, helping me to love it progressively.
However, it’s important to mention that in the natural hair movement, the majority of women we see are light skinned with loose curls.
I can imagine that women with darker complexion and very kinky hair struggle to feel represented within this movement because of that.
We still have a long way to go in regards to textured hair acceptance as society is still telling us that long straight hair is the norm, is the condition to beauty.
This, and nothing else.