Ladies -- have you always been relaxed or have you alternated between relaxed and natural? What made you decide to get relaxed?
I'm just curious -- I've been relaxed for a long time.
I’ve been relaxed since I graduated high school in 2014.
Before I graduated I was natural pretty much my entire young life, Although I never called it that for a while. I just called it my hair lol. It was kept in a loose banded ponytail or banded pigtails most of the time for as far back as I can remember, because I told my mom it was my favorite hairstyle that she’d do for my hair. She kept it trimmed around shoulder blade length and shampooed and conditioned my hair every week and a half or so and would put detangling cream in my hair when she would re-do my styles.
Some months before middle school I asked my mom for my first relaxer, that I tried to maintain for Somewhere around a year (I asked my mom to let me start doing my own hair at a relatively young age), and failed miserably because I constantly flatironed it. It was always right in the middle of my neck.
I decided relaxers were too hard of work to maintain, and let my hair grow it’s curls back. This was also my “Express Myself” phase. The first couple years of me being natural I got my hands on box dyes and went crazy. I switched from Turquoise blue, hot pink, magenta, sea foam green, neon orange, blonde, platinum, jet black, and rainbow colors frequently. My hair stayed at shoulder length for most of me going through that typical middle school “try everything out” phase. After that I started reading articles and skimming hair sites and started co-washing and damp wrapping my hair up at night because I still hadn’t figured out how to work with my curls at that moment. I saw BSL while doing that. This was also where I started referring to my hair as natural, due to other people categorizing it as that.
Some more years went by and I had a good regimen going, I would protective style mainly with twists, DC, etc. For a couple of years I remember never doing much of anything with my hair, and after some point in time during my senior year I reached somewhere between MBL and possibly brushing waist.
For graduation I wanted to change everything up and get a relaxer, but about 6-7 inches of my hair from the tips was still dyed some sort of fire red color that I let grow out, and I figured I should just chop everything off and start fresh since I probably would’ve found some way to mess it up if I relaxed with Almost foot of old bleached hair.
Got my hair cut in a chin to semi neck length bob for graduation, relaxed it all with my moms help since I hadn’t familiarized myself with one in years, and I’ve been relaxed since then.
Currently I’ve gotten everything pretty much down to a science although I’m always learning new things. At the moment this is the longest my hair has ever been, and I’m having to rearrange how I do things almost completely. I can’t treat my hair how it was at BSL with it being longer now, and I also realized sometime last year just how fine textured my hair truely is. Which is fine because I’ve come to love and appreciate it regardless. Other than that it’s mostly just been a balancing act of, “calm down, it’s just hair, don’t obsess”, and “I’ve never had this experience before, I wanna learn more! More! More! Buy all the products! Check my length every single day!” Lol.
I have a tendency to want my experiences to be even across the board if it’s something I take a lot of interest in espeacially if it’s more than one thing I’ve delved into. I feel like I learned my natural hair, loved it (still do), cared for it, and understood it and took care of it enough to watch it flourish, and I wanted to do the same thing with relaxed hair, since I failed miserably the first time.
I become weirdly attached to my hair in whatever state it happens to be in, so I’ll probably be relaxed for at least as long as I was natural (almost 10 years? Something like that), just to say I’ve had the experience of taking care of my hair in its different states for a decent amount of time. Heck, maybe even longer.