mizChartreuse!

For me, the blustery, Chicago-cold new year of 2010 rang in with my head feeling a whole lot colder than I’ve EVER been used to.

On December 31, 2009, I stripped my hair of all the weaves and extensions and wigs and relaxers and products that I have used for pretty much my entire life. I took out all my tracks, washed and conditioned my own hair, twisted it to dry, and fluffed it out for the New Year’s Eve festivities.

“FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST! Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last…”

Surely Martin Luther King, Jr. meant the above statement in a different manner, but it still applies, and it’s how I felt. And while getting rid of the extra hair on my head may not seem like a big deal to some people, it REALLY was to me.

As a young child, my mother did my hair in the usual twists and puffs and braids and plaits and beads, typical of many

young black girls. As I grew older, my mother would press my hair to make it straight, also known as “hot combing.” Hot combs can be electric (plugged into an outlet like your curling iron), or put on the stovetop for maximum heat (because densely coiled African hair takes a LOT of heat to straighten). It was always painful and a LONG process, because in order to reach the desired straightness, you’d have to grasp each and every single tiny little baby hair curl. And my hair has always been thick, so despite my mom’s gentle touch, my hair had to be pulled in order for the blazing hot comb to “tame” the masses of natural tresses.

There were also the instances where I, trying to hot comb my hair myself, burnt off INCHES of hair, sometimes leaving nothing but a half-inch crisp of brown fried bangs where there were, seconds ago, longer locks. That SUCKED. And EVERY black girl has done it at least once, I promise.

Painful the hot comb was, but my younger sister and I always LOVED the results: smooth, straight, shiny hair that sometimes blew in the wind (even though a lot of the time, it didn’t).

I suppose becoming accustomed to the pain of the hot comb in order to achieve white-girl-straight hair became embedded in my psyche, because from that era on, dealing with my hair was nothing but a pain. And I embraced it.

But why?

So WHY don’t we wear our hair as it is? And why did I finally decide to strip everything down and just be me?

It does go a lot deeper than the surface.

“Charlotte, please, I’m begging you!” My boyfriend Sean pleaded with me on December 30th. “I just want to see your real hair. For one night? You can put all the hair back in if you hate it.” For MONTHS, Sean had been on me about me rockin’ my natural hair. He said stuff like, “I’ve been with you for so long and I haven’t seen ALL of you” and “I’m not marrying a woman if I haven’t seen something as simple as the real hair growing out of her head.”

Yikes. I thought. I want this man to marry me. Shit.

From him, it was coming from a place of love and wanting to understand. I always either dismissed him when he inquired about my hair styling processes, or gave him simple, dumbed-down answers about black hair so that “white boy” could understand. Because I didn’t ever believe he possibly could.

And possibly, it could have been because I was ashamed of what I had to go through to achieve the “ideal” hairstyle.

And anyone who knows me knows that I’ve had MANY over the years.

Sean and I live together, and he works from home a lot of the time, but occasionally goes into his office. I would only do my hair while he was away, washing my real hair and frantically putting in new tracks of extensions while locked in a room, praying he wouldn’t come home early and see me in the act. The whole process took me an average of at least four hours, but I was always very proud of the finished product, displaying my cascading waves or silky-straight tresses, fresh out of the package.

A quick explanation about extensions for the uninitiated: tracks of hair, or weave, whatever you want to call it, and basically like false eyelashes, but imagine the base of the hair as much thicker, and the hair itself much longer.

The ones shown above have clips attached to the bases so they can easily be placed into the hair. That’s what white women do; black women either sew or glue them in with a special hair glue (that damages the hell out of your natural hair if you use it).

Below is an example of my hair with tracks:

And below is an example of my hair with a full sew-in (which cost $300 for the procedure at the Time Hair Gallery salon, and over $100 for the hair I purchased). Sew-ins can last for up to THREE MONTHS, as long as you maintain your hair underneath.

Aaaand…below is a wig. I don’t think much of an explanation is needed for wigs:

When I went to Africa for a month, I left looking like this below:

And came back looking like this:

I must just say, white women today are about 20 years behind black women, because they’re ALL about the hair extensions, whereas we’ve been using them for years. When I Google Image searched “black hair extensions,” the first FIFTEEN PAGES of results all showed white girls and their hair, save for literally three photos of black women. Incredible! But now, the “movement,” if you will, toward rockin’ it natty has REALLY grown…I have spent HOURS perusing natural hair blogs and Youtube videos (check out my blogroll for a few examples) and I no longer have the excuse that I “don’t know how to manage” my natural hair.

And that was always my excuse. Key word: excuse (but more on that, later).

Ironically, the night before New Year’s Eve, Sean and I went out to Simone’s with my girlfriend Jaley and her boyfriend Brendan for a chill night and some good beers. We talked about Jaley’s Halloween costume from 2008. She dressed as a black girl from the 70s (a la Foxy Brown) and I dressed as a wannabe Tyra Banks.

Jaley went from this:

to this, via the power of a fabulous wig:

And during Halloween night out at Lincoln Park Tap:

So anyhow, we were discussing her great Halloween costume and how she looked more “black” than I did that night, and everyone said in no uncertain terms, “You should rock an afro!” I laughed: “I don’t even know when that’ll ever happen.”

Little did I know that the very next day Sean would ACTUALLY convince me to rock my own hair, after months of trying.

*****

On New Year’s Eve day, Sean was busy working and running errands, so I decided to JUST DO IT while he was out and about. I was so nervous and anxious as to how it would turn out that I could barely eat; only stress about finally revealing my OWN HAIR which had not really seen the light of day since 8th grade.

Think about it: your hair has always been straightened and braided and weaved and never in its natural state since you were 11 years old (yes, I was 11 in 8th grade), and you finally decide to let it all out after YEARS of believing you could never look remotely attractive without doing SOME sort of damaging process to your hair.

This was probably the last time I ever relaxed my hair: The photo below was taken in 2007, and I added a ponytail to the back for more length (but you can clearly see where my hair ends and the fake pony begins….carefully observe the hair textures and look for where it changes from more textured to silky smooth):

This was mid-2008. My hair was shiny and smooth, but at the same time brittle and breaking. It looked pretty good on the surface, but in actuality it was unhealthy after years of chemical processing, and thinning out in the spot on the back of my head where I stuck the wad of hair extensions to make the ponytail.

Looking at the picture above now, though, I just wonder WHY I STILL OWN THAT BRA (because all its elasticity has dissipated…I barely wear it though. Probably just on laundry days).

AnyHOW,  after this phase, I stopped relaxing my hair and got the full sew-in, which my lovely stylist told me would help to grow out my brittle hair, which was breaking more every single day.

There was one day in December 2009 where I took all the extensions out, and before adding new ones, I had a little photoshoot in my bedroom:

But shortly went back to more fake hair:

So I wore full weaves and extensions for the time being, with the exception of one jewelry photoshoot I did in January 2009 with Jaley, in which I took my half-relaxed/half-new growth hair out and hot combed my natural roots to straighten it and added a ponytail once again.

So as you can see, I’ve rocked all sorts of styles.

But enough was enough.

*****

Who would have thought that my cracka-ass-cracka boyfriend of all people would have motivated me to don all the false getups and just work with what my mama and God gave me? As weird as it is to admit, I don’t know if I would have done it as soon as I did (which was still a long time coming) without Sean’s influence and pressure. But I did, and it was great.

That was a FUN NIGHT. What the hell was I waiting for?

Now, I’m not gonna sit here and lie and say that it was easy, as sad (and silly, in retrospect) as it may sound. I went shopping for my NYE outfit mere hours before Sean and I were to head out for the night, and I went out with my hair still twisted up and drying to be unleashed on the world. As I walked into Discovery with my twisty-knots (which would stretch my curls out a bit) I was INCREDIBLY self-conscious, thinking everyone would be staring at me strangely.

NO ONE did.

And my first bout in public with my hair, and ONLY my hair, being “exposed” helped to dissipate any anxieties I had about my hair before hitting the town for NYE festivities. I was being me.

And thinking about it, in the past whenever I saw a woman rockin’ her own hair, I always loved and admired it.

Examples:

My girlfriend Miz Shanda, who wears her hair in a plethora of ways, has some of the most beautiful curls I’ve ever seen:

And one of my best friends and basically my sister, Miz Kenya, whose natural locs are AMAZING:

Then of course, there’s the gorgeous Sunshine of the website called Naturally Fabulous…and Loving It! [at http://www.naturalhairnaturalproducts.com] who has inspired me for MONTHS of reading her blog, but I was never able to really believe I could do what she’s done. She went from this when she cut off all her relaxed hair:

….To this, which is what my hair looks like:

…And styles like this:

In just over a year. And she has her own line of hair products for natural beauties which I will most definitely be purchasing now that I’m six days into it. How amazing and healthily our hair can grow, if only we stopped torturing it for the sake of looking “societally acceptable.”

And seriously, black girls with their own hair are SO DAMN CUTE. Click this link for rad photos from Le Coil.

So yeah.

Fuck the bullshit. I don’t want to have to hide my real hair from the love of my life. I don’t want to stress about how to get my “stubborn” hair to blend with the packaged Indian hair I bought from a store owned by Koreans. I don’t want to singe my hair on the daily with a hot comb, trying to make my roots lay flat on top of the Yaki tracks I installed. I don’t want to have to feel like I need to conform to the hairstyles of white girls in order to feel attractive. I don’t want to have to use another weird implement such as a pen or a paper clip to scratch my scalp that I actually cannot get to with my fingernail because of all the layers of weave covering my head. I don’t want to be burdened by spending upwards of $200 per month on hair supplies, the highest of the costs being actual hair extensions themselves.

*****

What IS Beautiful?

About 34 percent of hair styling products in the U.S. are purchased by black women (and I would dare to imagine it’s MORE). The black hair industry sells $9 BILLION worth of products each year. As Chris Rock discussed in his documentary called “Good Hair,” there are women spending 20,000 on their hair each year…on a teacher’s salary, which can’t be much more than that. I personally have put off paying my T-Mobile bill a week or two in order to hit up Beauty World to buy packages of Indian Remy Hair.

And I, on my meager income, have spent much more than THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS a year on false hair and its maintenance? NO thank you. Why? To look like the magazines? To conform to the widely accepted standards of beauty we see in Hollywood and in magazines?

No.

It’s time we started defining our own rules of beauty. It’s time we stopped burdening ourselves to look like the majority, plastering real and synthetic hair on our heads that no one conceivably believes is coming from our heads.

*****

The Reactions

When Sean saw my natural hair in all its curly, shiny glory on New Year’s Eve before we went out to meet Diana and Miles, he was astounded. “You are SO beautiful,” he said. “Absolutely gorgeous. Even more stunning than I could ever have imagined. I love it; I absolutely LOVE how you look.” I knew I looked great, but his reassurance made me feel on top of the world.

When Diana saw it, she raved; Miles asked if it was inappropriate to say that I looked “smokin’ hot” with my hair that way. We all agreed; not inappropriate! On New Year’s Day Sean and I went to his sister Hilary’s house for belated xmas gift openings, and one of the first things her 6-year-old son Jordan said was, “Charrrrlit, I like your hair!” And later 4-year-old Mya asked me, “Chawwlit, I like your hair! How did you do that?” So I told her I put in a million little twists to make it reallll curly and big, and she thought it was pretty neat (I love the honesty of children, especially without any adult prompting).

The next day I went back to work, and my coworkers all complimented me on my curly ‘do. I got the comparisons to Corinne Bailey Rae, Macy Gray, and other fierce black women. My coworkers also inevitably asking the questions I knew were coming, and honestly, I don’t mind answering stuff like “did you cut your hair?” and “Is that all yours?” because how else would they learn a little about natural black hair if I didn’t tell them?

The only strange response I received from a coworker was from a hostess named Lola who laughed, “Charlotte! What happened to your hair?” in her Yoruba accent. I simply told her I got rid of all the extensions and was rockin’ it natural for a bit. I was surprised that everyone I’d encountered was nothing but complimentary, and the AFRICAN WOMAN WHO CAME TO THE STATES SEVEN YEARS AGO laughed. She wasn’t being malicious, but it still rubbed me the wrong way, and you’d think someone from Africa would be a little more empathic.

A couple nights later at work, one customer whom I’ve encountered about three times in my four YEARS there would ask me, “So what’s with the new ‘do?”

“What do you mean?” I responded. “I’m doing something different.”

“Oh, well I prefer the old look better.”

“I don’t recall asking for your opinion, did I?” And I walked away. Cracka ass cracka. I should have said, “Well, I prefer men who talk to me and email me about silly ideas for co-writing books not be old and overweight and UGLY,” but I bit my tongue. It really infuriated me, but as they say, “When your hair’s nappy, white people ain’t happy.” Hmph.

That same night after work, I went out for a new year reunion at Crocodile with my closest and most beloved friends, all of whom complimented my hair as well.

I didn’t even become annoyed when people tried to touch my hair; the 20 or so people were all friends I’ve known 4 years at the least, and up to 9 years at the most, so it was all love.

Love.

That’s all my relationship with my hair will be from now on.

Happy New Year! Have you done anything interesting, new and/or drastic in 2010 so far?