I'm in Recovery...

Me and my over-moisturised hair

So if you read my last post, you'll remember I managed to set my hair retention progress back some months after I deviated from my usual routine in order to experiment with the Maximum Hydration Method. It's a problem I've encountered during my natural hair journey, the tendency to want to try the Next Big Thing thereby becoming inconsistent. Although my hair isn't quite as long as I'd like it to be yet, I think the important lesson to learn is that CONSISTENCY is worth more than the best product you can buy. You can develop a rock solid hair care regimen, using products which work for you but you have to stick to it over time to see results. Within three -six months you should be able to assess whether a routine is working for you or not.

As part of my recovery, I decided to purchase the the Kindle version of the book "Grow It!" by Chicoro. Yes yes there are hair blogs and vlogs and forums, but sometimes I need information in a condensed, organised, published, single-minded format. "Grow It" provides a really simple, solid framework for caring and growing natural hair. If you already follow some of the popular blogs, such as Black Girl with Long Hair, the information won't be foreign. But like I said, I tend to absorb information much better in a book. I was just reminded to return to practices like gently finger detangling my hair, sectioning, washing in braided sections and smoothing hair during conditioning. Smoothing - literally running your fingers from root to tip - was something I had never practiced before, and it has proven to be an amazing technique for closing the cuticle thereby insuring more shiny, moisturised hair. I promise, I have used this technique for about a month and I LOVE it. Definitely a keeper. Another titbit of previously-neglected information which Chicoro writes about is the need to RECORD your hair journey, both in a journal and in photographs. This I found to be very important. Sometimes you think your hair isn't growing, but you look at a photo from a few months ago to determine progress and find that your hair is now thicker or longer. 

One more extremely important aspect of growing natural hair - be it kinky, coily, curly, thick, thin, etc - is to have FAITH. So often when I mention to friends/strangers/relatives that I'm natural, they sigh and tell me they have thick/impossible/4zzzzz/hard-maShona-type (Zimbos will understand) hair that just cannot be managed unless it is relaxed. Well, to that I say what you believe is what you get. When you truly believe your hair is capable of being long, strong and healthy; even when it isn't relaxed; your actions will follow and it won't be long before your hair becomes long, strong and healthy. My story is a case in point. I didn't know that long and beautiful natural hair was a possibility, I thought only relaxed hair could be beautiful. Change your mindset and your world will change too.

So after humbly returning to the drawing board, here is what my new, simplified routine looks like:

Daily Routine

• Moisturise with a DIY leave-in conditioner consisting of  a bit of Tresemme Nourishing Moisture Conditioner, water, glycerine, aloe vera gel, extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) and lavender essential oil. This mixture works well on my hair, but I'm still on the hunt for a good leave-in conditioner. Suggestions are welcome
• Seal with olive oil and DIY shea + coconut butter

Weekly Routine

• Detangle gently, using my fingers. Section and loosely braid sections
• Co-wash
• Deep condition with DIY deep conditioner – I find avocado + EVOO to be a rich conditioner which my hair loves OR use a deep conditioning pack – Palmer’s Coconut Oil Formula is the one I have available now, and I use it every other week or as needed as a protein treatment.

Monthly Routine (every 4^th week)

• Clarify! I make sure to dilute my shampoo in warm water and pour it over my head, gently squeezing it through my loose braids. My hair hates sulfate shampoos, and I unfortunately do not have a sulfate-free shampoo at the moment. The alternative is…bentonite clay. Messy and time-consuming, but highly effective in clarifying as well as conditioning my hair. I mix the clay with apple cider vinegar (ACV), milk, EVOO and aloe vera gel. My hair loves it.

Every Six Weeks? Every two months?

• Depending on the state of my hair, I may start to include hard protein treatments such as Aphogee’s 2-step protein treatment into my routine. It is advisable to do so as a protective measure, but at the moment I don’t have that kind of hard protein treatment available. Also, reading about how they should be done right or you run the risk of serious breakage scares me a bit.

Protective Styling

My protective style of choice at the moment is headscarves. I moisturise and seal, tie my satin scarf then tie a headscarf over it. This works to keep my ends protected as well as to provide protection from The Elements.

At the moment of writing this I have Ghana braids installed. I wasn’t at all happy with the salon experience, and will avoid hairdressers from now on unless they have experience in working with natural hair. However the style looks good, and I’ve had it in for almost 2 weeks. 

So ya, that's where I am in my journey. Lemme know what your tips are for recovering from a setback!

The Maximum Hydration Method Didn't Work For Me

Cheers! A tasty-looking Cherry Lola Caramel Treatment

My 2015 natural hair journey began really well. My hair was full, moisturised for the most part, tangling and breakage were at a minimum and I could see good growth quickly. In my mind I had carefully planned how long I would keep in protective styles so that I would reach my goal of at least armpit length by the end of the year. However realistically speaking, I get distracted rather easily, and enticed by the gorgeous images on Instagram and the internet in general, I decided to try out the Maximum Hydration Method. 

The Maximum Hydration Method (MHM) promises to increase moisture in your natural hair, transforming dry kinks into moisturised curls and coils. It's an intriguing idea - who doesn't want moisturised hair and 'popping' curls? As with most things, there are arguments against the MHM, the main argument being that using baking soda may ultimately be damaging to the hair because it's abrasive and also quite alkaline, whereas hair is on the acidic side of the pH scale. The other common argument is that the MHM feeds into the curly hair idolatry linked to 'texture discrimination,' which plagues the natural hair community. Those who support this argument state that the main attraction for the maximum hydration method is the promise of curls or coils as opposed to well moisturised hair. The final argument against this method is simply that the process is much too long for people who have lives. 

I didn't go into the MHM blindly, I read and considered all the criticisms. However I didn't want to side with any arguments without testing it out for myself. So in April; knowing I had plenty of time available; I decided to embark on the Maximum Hydration Method journey, following the 7 day challenge. 

I gathered all the necessary supplies, which included:

• Ingredients for the Cherry Lola Caramel Treatment - liquid amino acids*, un-sulphured molasses, a banana, avocado, baking soda, apple cider vinegar, Greek yoghurt, honey and whatever else you have in your fridge (joking!)
• Baking soda
• Organic apple cider vinegar with the Mother enzyme
• Sodium Bentonite Clay (bought at Dischem)
• Earthsap Pomegranate and Soy Moisture Conditioner (a completely natural conditioner). Bought at Pick 'n' Pay. Earthsap products were the first ones I ever used when I got serious about my natural hair. I like them, and they make me feel nostalgic for those early days when I was eagerly hoarding knowledge...
• Botanical gel - I used Enchantrix Nourishing Hair Gel, which I purchased online from faithful-to- nature.co.za. This gel has a lovely orangey scent and doesn't really leave a crunchy residue, unless you use too much which they advise against. 
• Dr Miracles Leave-in Conditioner, which I bought at Clicks

A few things before I get into the results of this experience. I normally use Tresemme Naturals Nourishing Moisture Conditioner to co-wash (I shampoo about once a month). I love it because it's thick with good slip. Secondly, I hate using gels on my hair, except for DIY flaxseed gel. I find that most gels, even the ones that claim not to, leave my hair feeling weird and crunchy-like. 

Thirdly, I prefer to use coconut oil/olive oil/avocado oil and DIY 'shealoe' (shea butter and aloe vera) as my leave-in. I tend to shy away from commercial leave-ins because most of them leave my hair feeling greasy and dry, and sometimes just plain mushy. So straightaway the MHM required me to use a lot of things which my hair hates. 

In any case I decided to try it out to the best of my ability. On the first day I did the Cherry Lola Caramel Treatment, followed by a co-wash and finger detangle; then the bentonite clay mask; followed by applying leave-in conditioner and finally botanical gel. From the second day onwards, I did a clarifying treatment with baking soda, followed by co-washing and detangling and so on. On days when I was feeling lazy, I opted to leave the conditioner overnight with a plastic cap and resume the following morning, per the recommendations. I liked the overnight conditioning, and particularly liked the bentonite clay masks. However  I found that as the day progressed my hair became drier, and I found myself missing my oils and butters.

What I liked:

• Moisture! I enjoy getting my hair wet
• An excuse to wear my hair shrunken
• More 'hang time'
• More curl definition (especially after the Bentonite clay step)
• My twistouts seemed more defined 
• I was able to display length better

However, there was a shadow side which emerged in all this...

What I didn't like:

• Breakage! Whereas before I would rarely see little c's and o's when I handled my hair, I started seeing them everywhere! And it didn't stop! I've already had to trim my hair TWICE since! My heart is broken. I suspect the breakage was due to a combination of hygral fatigue; i.e. weakness in your hair because of too much water (hair becomes too elastic);  mechanical damage due to having to shingle conditioner and clay through my hair everyday and, based on my research, there's a possibility that baking soda could also have been responsible seeing as it's pretty abrasive. Perhaps I should have tried using apple cider vinegar to clarify? 
• Thin frizzy hair! Although I have very high shrinkage hair, the coils do tend to define themselves and when my hair is healthy the coils are well clumped and full. The MHM seemed to give me more definition in the beginning, but left me with frizzy, thin coils.
• Time. This took up so much time. I love playing with my hair as much as the next girl, but this really requires dedication. Even I started to feel a bit ugh about the whole thing. I suppose as you become accustomed to the process you become more efficient, but seriously...Clear out your calendar.
• Dr Miracle's leave-in. For some reason this particular leave-in just disagrees with my hair
• Restricted creativity - I love my essential oils, my DIY concoctions, my monthly shampooings and weekly deep conditionings. I've found what works for me and am returning to that. 

Edit 08/10//2015: I noted that after I started the MHM my hair colour seemed to turn a lighter brown. I thought I was imagining things, but my new growth is the normal deep brown/black colour and it actually looks as though I dyed my hair a lighter brown shade. I wasn't sure what the cause was, but someone on a hair forum mentioned a change in hair colour after beginning the MHM, and attributed it to baking soda. The commentator also noted frizziness and dull, dry hair. All this to say I'm definitely not imagining things. 

The verdict: it's all fun and games until the breakage starts. There were some definite perks, but I won't be trying this again any time soon. It set me too far back. Am I saying the MHM is bad? No. There's the chance that the products I used were just plain wrong, or contained ingredients which I should've avoided. Perhaps my technique was lousy. Many ladies try the MHM and it works out beautifully for them. However it set me back in my journey, and I personally don't think I want to dedicate so much of my time every day to doing my hair - it's not that serious. I'm now on a journey to recover my length and health after I trimmed off about an inch or two...or more (I'm a bit scissor happy OK?). So in the meantime I'm putting my hair into braids and will be following some techniques I've used in the past to grow my hair. I'll keep you updated on my progress. 

The moral of the story is: if your hair is thriving with your current methods and you want to reach your goals on time, then keep doing what you're doing and don't be distracted like me and end up with a thousand unhappy coils (you see what I did there? Sorry not sorry). 

Have you heard of the Maximum Hydration Method? Have you tried it? Did it work for you? Let me know what you think in the comment section below.  

Much love, 

Fadzi

*I bought Braggs liquid aminos from a health shop called 'The Good Stuff' in Cape Town, and I think they have an online shop too. Faithful-to-nature also stocks this product.

My Hair Story: Naturally Clueless

When people ask me "so, how long have you been natural?" they're usually met with blinking and sputtering until I eventually manage to squeak out "well uh...it's complicated...er...five years?" I'm embarrassed to say because my hair doesn't look five-years-natural-long.

I've been natural for five years now, but I had no idea about how to look after my hair until about three years in.

Let's start at the beginning. As a child, my mother was the caretaker of my hair. It was her responsibility to make sure it was washed and neat for school, and that it didn't misbehave in public. I remember how I hated the Sunday evenings spent seated on the carpet as she tugged at my hair with a comb then wound a double-stranded piece of black thread around a section of hair when all I wanted to do was to go and play with my dolls. My dolls, of course, had long blonde hair which could easily be combed. And comb their synthetic blond hair I did, and with great enthusiasm for one of them ended up bald.

Anyway, at school there were girls with real, long straight glossy Barbie hair. It wasn't a battle to look after; it didn't need to be ordered to stay down. It was admirable. 

So with a few words whispered here and there, commentary on my 'difficult' hair, admiration for another girl's straight blonde locks; images of supermodels with the same straight, flowing hair..I began to understand some things about hair.

Firstly, I began to understand that hair had high value in the language of beauty.

Secondly, I understood that the longer, glossier, softer and straighter your hair was, the more beautiful you were considered to be.

And lastly, I understood that I did not have that kind of hair. 

So even though my hair grew well, relaxing eventually presented itself as an option. I remember my first time having it relaxed. I was sitting in a ‘home salon.’ Basically a lady down the road had converted part of her house into a hair salon. It was full of noisy women and noisy music. I remember noticing a container of relaxer (that relaxer, you know the one) with a young girl on the cover, probably around my age. Her hair was long and straight and glossy. My mother followed my gaze and she gently told me that I shouldn't expect the same.

I understood then and I understand now that she was lovingly trying to manage my expectations, to spare me disappointment. I understand that she took me to have my hair relaxed because it would be easier to manage in that state. She was a working wife and mother of two…who could blame her? It was either my wilful hair which would take a long time to do, or easy-to-manage hair which only needed to be touched up every few months. I couldn't articulate it in so many words, but I understood that my kind of hair – the hair that I was born with –  couldn't be managed. It couldn't look pretty. It was a problem to be solved by the magical process of relaxing.

By the time I was in my teens, I was still relaxing my hair out of habit. I didn't see an alternative, and frankly I was never one to spend time...cultivating my appearance. But, no matter how much I wished and hoped, my hair just wasn't long and it never remained straight.. 

Instead it would break, it was dry and it was dull most of the time unless I had just left the salon, in which case I looked like a penguin caught up in an oil slick. I avoided water like the plague, believing it to be my hair’s worst enemy, or so it seemed. In addition, I was lazy to care for my hair. I may have had hopes and dreams, but I honestly didn't put in the research or work to truly care for it, even when it was relaxed. 

At the age of 19, I was finally bothered by the state of my hair. It was a time when I was starting to question a lot of things about the world, and who I wanted to be in it and I started to scrutinize my appearance and the interlinked identity. I remember feeling second-hand embarrassment for a future, alternate version of myself who would year after year relax her hair in the quest for the 'ideal' kind of beauty, even when her hair never ventured past shoulder length. I didn't want to become that person.

Relaxing for me started to look more like a desperate knock-off of something I was never meant to have: straight hair. So with these thoughts at the forefront of my mind, I marched off to the nearest salon and demanded that they cut off my hair. All of it. I didn't have a road map or an instruction manual. I just knew that I wanted my own hair, and I wanted to start afresh. 

I'd never heard of transitioning.

I didn't want locs. My mother had had those for 9 years so I had experienced them vicariously.

I didn't even know if I wanted my hair to grow long, I just wanted to claim it as my own, to wear it how I wanted to and how it was meant to be. I wasn't inspired by the ‘natural hair movement, and for a long time I shunned the YouTube videos and hair blogs, dismissing them as an "overload of information supplied by vain women with too much time on their hands."  I wasn't trying to make a fashion statement or a political statement. I was making a personal statement. I was choosing to be my own definition of beautiful and appropriate.

And I still didn't know how to look after my hair.

So for the first 2 ½ years, I happily did what I felt like doing. So prepare to be horrified:

- I used to wash my hair with bath soap. Several times in a week. Then comb it wet with an Afro pick until it looked neat. Sometimes I left it unkempt, wild and tangled for days on end. I slept on a cotton pillowcase without wearing a scarf. Then in the morning I would dry comb it until it looked neat. It was painful, and breakage was business-as-usual.

- I used to blow-dry on a whim...rather frequently.

- I broke all the rules of safe protective styling, wearing braids and pretty much forgetting about my hair.

So although I was natural, I'd transferred the same lazy habits from my relaxed days, and there was a price to pay for being careless. I was deeply ignorant, not even knowing what I didn't know.

It was no surprise therefore, that after almost 3 years of being natural, I started to notice that my hair wasn't growing as much as I'd have liked it to. Flashbacks from my childhood suggested that it was capable of growing well, so what went wrong? I wondered.

So I tentatively dipped one toe into hair blogs, vlogs and forums, then another and another until I was completely immersed in the online world of natural hair care. I  started to learn, picking up the lingo rapidly and experimenting with styles like Bantu knot outs. I remember devouring Naptural85's videos in a weekend, fascinated by this world which I had previously shut out.

I started to learn my hair's personality - and am still discovering things. One of the first things I discovered was how much my hair loves water, and how water is in fact, essential for my hair. Where there were only tangles and knots there suddenly emerged coils and curls; softness and elasticity where there was brittleness and dryness.

I wish I could say all my little hair experiments turn out well, that my two-strand twists always look good or that my ends are split-free, but I'd be lying. I have the attention span of a flea, and I learn through trial and error, trying to have fun in the process. My hair goes through seasons and I constantly need to change things up to find out what I need to be doing. It's a lesson in patience, endurance and flexibility, but the rewards are rich, so I make sure to celebrate new growth and good hair days too. 

I know that there are many natural hair blogs out there, and honestly I think there should be even more! The day there'll be 'enough' hair blogs is the day you Google 'beautiful hair' and natural-haired ladies pop up in the image search results alongside the usual glossy-straight-haired women. Each head of hair is different and each person brings their own experiences to the table. My progress is the result of watching a diversity of vlogs and reading many different blogs. So this particular blog is a place for me to chronicle my journey and to let you know what has worked for me or what hasn't. I know I can't be the only one who started out lazy, crazy and clueless, and who is slowly working their way out of that state. That's OK, I hope this can be a safe place to be honest, have fun and maybe even learn a thing or two! 

So welcome, and enjoy!

Much Love,

Fadzi