Making Waves

 

All my life I was the one with the straight hair. The “Indian looking one”. As one multi racial child of five my siblings and I differ vastly in body shape, skin tone, hair texture etc.  When people would ask me what I am ethnically and culturally I would tell them I’m a mutt. Born in South America, considered Caribbean  ancestors from India, China, Africa (not sure where in Africa) and Ireland.

One contention for me has always been my hair. With both parents balding and me having the thinnest stringiest hair in my family I’ve always simply maintained it by wash, condition and straighten. I sometimes went to the hair salon for highlights and trims but mostly I just wash, conditioner and straighten.

After Hurricane Irma and going through a heavy emotional time I decided to “shed some weight” “cut some ties” the first being my locks and for the first time in life I made the big chop!

Visiting a salon for a deep conditioning treatment shortly after, the stylist mentioned… “your hair is extremely curly and wavy, you should wear it like this”. Really? I feel like it does this 1/2 wavy 1/2 straight inconvenient thing that makes it hard to look good naturally… “No it’s definitely curlier than you think and the reason it’s doing that is because you straighten it so much. If you don’t you will see your hair will make those beautiful waves and curls naturally that everyone tries hard to get.

Taking her advice, I started wearing my hair more natural. Especially since I started working out. It was getting sweaty more often, washed more often and definitely didn’t want to put a hot iron to it more often so natural has become the way I wear it.

So many people have commented on how good, much fuller it looks. A lot of people ask me what I do to get it this way. My regimen is shampoo, conditioner (no preference, whatever is on sale or I can coupon) towel dry, add some Cantu coconut curling cream and go! Literally.

Who knew! My hair… at almost 50 years old, after and entire lifetime of being one of my biggest issues would be…

Making Waves