Stop Relaxing Your Hair and Accept Your Natural Texture

I am a Black woman who grew up in a family like so many others, where all of the women relaxed their hair. So when I was young and my mom decided to relax mine it felt completely natural as if it was a rite of passage. But I had a strong desire to go natural a few years ago, and after contemplating it I finally got the courage to accept my hair and stop relaxing. If you want to go natural but are too afraid of what others will think read on for advice.

What Makes Us Relax Our Hair?

Fear and Loathing

I think the main obstacle to black women embracing their natural hair texture is the fear. Although more and more women of African ancestry are wearing their hair natural not only in America, but all over the world, the truth is that the overwhelming majority of black women still do relax their hair in America.

For the most part, it's still a rarity to see a woman who chooses to wear her hair natural, so it seems more natural to actually use a relaxer. So the women who consider not straightening their hair might feel apprehensive because of the fear of looking different from the rest of society.

We live in a Western culture that values straight flowing hair and we have been taught that our kinky hair is bad hair, nappy, ugly, and abnormal through the history of slavery. But now many of us still believe that because we have been taught this by our own family, friends and the media.

We have been taught at the earliest ages that our hair in its natural state isn't acceptable, and that in order to be beautiful we must change our hair. So black women and even some men (hello Terrence Howard!) have adapted and relaxed their strands in order to conform to that standard of beauty.

It can be unsettling when you start to grow beyond that conditioning and admire women who rock their kinky, curly, coarse hair just as nature made it. So it can be downright terrifying to feel the urge that you'd like to put away your relaxer and go there as well.

All these fears come up, from how you're going to look to how other people are going to view you. It's scary to consider going outside of a comfort zone where you fit in to then challenging the norm and being different.

Ignorance

Seeing your natural hair as unattractive is the biggest obstacle to women going natural. But once you start to find kinky hair beautiful the other issue that prevents women from doing the big chop and rocking their hair natural is ignorance.

Many a black woman, including myself, received her first relaxer when she was a child, so most of the time you don't even remember what your natural texture looks like. It's like someone who's colored their hair for so long that they don't know what their natural shade is. So it's scary to think about cutting out your relaxer without knowing how your hair really looks without chemicals.

Not only did I not know how my natural texture looked, I didn't know how to style and care for it. So I was very hesitant to stop relaxing my hair just as many other women are, because we have no clue about taking care of our natural hair. We don't know how different our hair is going to be, what products to use, how to maintain it, and even how to comb it. We also sometimes think our styling options will be limited.

Going natural when you've worn your hair relaxed for the majority of your life, is out of most Black women's comfort zone. No one who cares about their appearance wants to change their hair drastically when they have no clue about how they are going to style and maintain it.

How to Get Off the "Creamy Crack"

Get Informed

I was totally a creamy crack addict myself once, whenever my kinky roots started to emerge every 6 weeks I was annoyed by it, and would be the first to run to a drugstore to pick up a box of relaxer to straighten them out. But I started to have a change of heart my senior year in high school. When my roots would grow in I started to like it. I thought it had more character and life than my ends.

I started to find natural hair beautiful and wondered how I would look if I didn't relax. But it wasn't until I was out of college that I really started to consider it, and it took me about a year and a half after that to actually do it.

Off and on during that year I would look online at natural hair sites to find out everything I could about it. There is a huge community online of black women who wear their hair natural and want to support other women in doing the same.

So I found plenty of information available about getting over your fears, transitioning, all of the different hair textures, keeping kinky hair healthy, and how to do different styles.

Knowledge is power and doing the research helped me to get over my fears and gave me an idea of what I could expect. By the time that I decided to stop relaxing I was very prepared.

Get Inspired

Besides just getting the hard facts, during the time when I was learning about my hair, I was also getting inspired. As I stated there's a whole community of black women who rock their hair naturally on the web. Through websites like www.motowngirl.com, www.fotki.com, and www.afrobella.com and even youtube I saw women who had the courage to go against the norm and do the unthinkable - which was accept themselves and be proud of their hair, and it inspired me to do the same.

Through these sites I also became inspired by their hairstyles, especially by the pictures that natural members of www.fotki.com posted. There I saw black women from all over the country and world who used to relax post pictures of their hair journeys. They'd show pictures of them with relaxed hair, then pictures of them cutting it all off, to months later wearing a baby fro, and then years later having long healthy natural hair, with dozens of hairstyles in between.

Through these women I was able to see the amazing range of textures that our hair comes in, all of the different products they used, and the tons of different ways they styled and wore their natural hair.

By seeing all of these different women I began to see the beauty in all forms of Black hair and I realized I could accept my hair too. I also got inspiration for lots of different hairstyles that I could use when I did go natural.

In the End...

Even though in the mainstream media we usually only see one narrow view of what beauty is for a Black women (hello Beyonce!) there's a much broader perspective out there if you choose to see it.

Seek out new information from books, magazines, and natural black hair sites and get inspired by the fabulous range of skin tones and hair textures that our community has to offer. Even if you don't go natural yourself it's good to be able to remind yourself that you are beautiful just the way you are.