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year in review
Lessons learnt (Transition talk)
Friday, December 25, 2015
As my transition continues and I fall more in love with my coily hair, the more I realise that this is definitely the right path for me. However, I would never have been able to realise this if it wasn't for the healthy relaxed hair practices I learnt over the course of a year from so many bloggers. This has allowed me to go into the transition with the best quality hair possible, meaning that there is less frustration with regards to various issues. I'm going to break a few of them down in this post.
- My hair type (and I don't mean 4c)
- I have baby fine, fragile but voluminous hair. I'm not sure if it's dense, but it sure is hard to get through. From relaxing and flat ironing, I learnt what exactly my hair can take before it starts to give up. If I hadn't started my healthy hair journey with learning to look after what's already on my head, I probably would have used a lot more heat and caused more damage to my new growth.
- Patience (at least a little)
- I think it's pretty obvious that I am not the most patient of people. I was determined to transition to texlaxed and just... didn't. And yet, I have definitely seen progress, even with the small amount of patience I have been able to apply. Imagine me trying to learn patience going straight from unhealthy relaxed to natural!
- Stretching
- This has been vital. The longer I stretched, the more I was able to see the resilience and versatility of my natural hair. The 4-6 month stretches I did allowed me to slowly become used to handling my natural hair in preparation for the final stretch - transitioning. I learnt how to tension blowdry among many other ways of keeping my hair from tangling. I also started to fall in love with the cute curls, which is important when making the switch to natural.
- Moisture and protein
- I think we all know about why this is important. I was able to find through trial and error the best way to balance this for my own hair. That means that my natural hair will have the best elasticity possible.
- Length retention
- I got over my fear of scissors while relaxing (in fact, became quite snip happy) which means that when I need to trim in order to keep my hair in good nick, I will.
- Product junkieism
- I tried so many products! But recently, I've whittled them down to my current staples, which means that there'll be no wasted money trying the next big thing. I don't care if something is organic and made just for naturals, just if it works on my hair.
- Texlaxing
- Originally, this was a way to get more volume. I didn't like how limp my hair appeared and seeing so many texlaxed bloggers with luxurious hair made me want to be like them. Again, this allowed me to start seeing the versatility of hair that wasn't bone straight and helped me transition my mindset from one of pin straight to voluminous and fluffy. Additionally, I have 4 inches of texlaxed hair which means that there's not such an abrupt demarcation line between relaxed and natural. This (especially recently) has been a godsend.
- Henna
- I learnt about this recently, and it's been a game changer. A healthy way to dye my hair, as well as providing thickness to my fine strands and also smoothing my demarcation lines (I have noticed some mild texture change, especially in my texlaxed hair and fringe section).
So all of this goes together to show that I should be able to have a much smoother transition than if I had tried this nearly two years ago when my mindset was in a completely different place and I had different priorities. My relaxed hair journey has given my natural hair a brilliant fighting chance.
xx Lam
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