Big haired and beautiful …

I woke up this morning big haired and beautiful :-).

Two months in and I am beginning to appreciate what was given to me by my Creator. As time has gone on my curls have found themselves and are starting to look better by the day. Don’t get me wrong there are still the bad days where my hair just won’t listen and many days where I wake up looking like Mufasa with my huge mane (this is everyday actually), but through it all there are those moments where it does exactly what I want it to do when I want it to do it … and for those moments I am eternally grateful.  Also, its all about perspective. I mean what is one bad hair day when you are happy and healthy?

Right now my biggest challenge is finding a decent hair product at a good price. Hair stuff for curly haired girls is rather expensive. I have found hair products that work and shared them with my fellow curly haired friends and they love them too.

I am at the point in my journey where my curls put a smile on my face and a spring in my step, and I would not have it any other way! I no longer like the way my hair looks after it has been straightened, because that is just not me!

I will not give up, I will not give in and I will not surrender. I will win this battle of learning to love and accept myself as I am, as this is what it ultimately comes down to.

Big haired and beautiful.

Love,

Charlie

xoxo

Love the good hair days …

Finally brave enough to upload pics of myself …

A month in and still going strong… well, curly, actually

Success! We’ve made it a whole month (and some) rocking our naturalness and let me tell you that it was definitely no easy feat.

I am still trying a host of products – from scrunching mousse to restoring placenta and the ol’ faithful – leave-in conditioner. Charlie has some secret serum that she uses, I’m sure, because her curls have been looking beeyootifullllll for weeks now.

It’s easier to brush my hair these days, well, when I get around to taking on the challenge. We’ve both discovered that we possess a perfect curl. Singular. One happy little twirly spiral of joy located underneath… at the back… where nobody can see it. I feel a bit like Dory when she found that squishy little jelly fish. I digress. Anyway, the ‘Great Hair Days’ are certainly on the rise and I’m feeling more excited about being wild and free. Actually, more confident.

Before, us big haired folk spent so much time trying to tame the mane that we hid all it’s big and beautiful glory in industrial hair-ties and a gazillion bobby pins.

Now we enter a room and our hair says “BOOM, we’ve arrived!”

I love it!

2 Weeks down … 50 more to go *eeeeek*

It has been two weeks since I have taken up the challenge of no “taming the mane” (which is what I call straightening my hair). It has not been an easy two weeks. Due to the amount of straightening that I have done over the years the first few days resulted in my hair curling at the roots and then remaining straight at the ends (my colleague Carmen requested that I mention this as she found it hilarious). There were so many occasions in the first week where I just did not feel comfortable or happy with the way I looked. Waking up every day and literally looking like a ray of sunshine thanks to all my “fly-aways”. I almost wanted to stop looking in the mirror for a year, too. My parents are mortified that for the next year I will be walking around with big hair. People have made bets that this cannot last a full year. Needless to say I wanted to give up. I decided to push through and the most amazing thing has started to happen. I am learning how to manage my hair, I no longer spend hours doing hair and I am genuinely starting to appreciate my big hair. Now that my hair has found itself again and gone back to its natural state, curling as it should, so many people are complimenting me on how amazing it looks. Don’t get me wrong there are still bad days but I just keep on keeping on remembering that I am not in this alone and that my sidekick Lola is right next to me (I would not want to disappoint her). I definitely can get used to this “big hair don’t care” attitude. Who knows maybe after this year long journey I will continue to keep the curls.

The bad hair day

You know, this whole thing about giving up the hair dryer has resulted in a significant increase in bad hair days.

For example, this morning I woke up looking like the love child of Edward Scissor-Hands and Diana Ross – again. Trying to get a comb through my hair was like digging to China with a teaspoon – a fruitless exercise. I was sporting all kinds of styles – dreads, curls, crimping, and fly-away straight-ish bits that looked like antennas a la Alfalfa from The Little Rascals. Facial expression and everything.

I contemplated calling in sick. Seriously. Because it’s bad enough that it’s Monday without having to look like the struggle is real. So, I tried to do some damage control, and this is the whole point of going natural – to do something about the damage, but that’s going to take a while and I actually cannot wash my hair EVERY day, and now I’ve got my hair pinned up in some obscure looking bun with what is supposed to be wispy tendrils cascading from it… but no, it looks like a thorny tumble-weed that got the short stick when a tornado came swooping by.

Anyway… it’s almost home time. Sorta. My wish to be sitting at my desk with a brown paper bag over my head is still a real one. But … a luta continua.

The day I banished the GHD…

It started out as a conversation about damaged hair (the GHD’s fault, obviously) and the embarrassing moment I had just experienced at my local salon where my stylist guffawed at my request for a trim, implying that some axe-wielding would have to go down in order to fix the mess perched upon my head. And as the longest tendrils of hair fell to the floor around me and I tried to be a big girl about it, biting my trembling lip, I realised that now would be the perfect time to embrace and, more importantly, enjoy the fact that I am a naturally curly-haired chickita bonita mamacita and that is what the Good Man upstairs intended.

Then, Charlie said to me that she echoed similar sentiments. Why not, for one year, give up the hairdryer and flat iron and just rock our curls in all their big (always) and beautiful (occasional) glory? Why not, indeed.

So here we are. Big-haired and blogging about it.

Diana Ross ain’t got shit on us!

— Lauren aka Lola