Transitioning Your Hair from a Relaxer: How to Know If You Should

I stopped relaxing my hair a year and a half ago in order to go natural. I transitioned for about three months, but then I ultimately decided to do the big chop and I cut off all of my hair. If you've been relaxing your hair for most of your life going natural can be scary, but after trying both methods I know the pros and cons of each.

Why You Should Transition

The biggest benefit I found to transitioning was that it allowed me to test the waters of having natural hair without diving right in. My hair had been relaxed every since I was a child, so I had no idea what my natural texture was and how it really looked, much less how to take care of it.

When you relax your hair you get used to a certain styling regimen, but when you go natural you use totally different products and have a completely different styling routine. So I found that transitioning my relaxer allowed me to get used to styling my hair in ways that didn't revolve around a blow-dryer or flat-iron. Transitioning also allowed me to get used to different hair products that suited my natural texture as well.

The best part of transitioning though is that you don't have to cut all of your locks off at once. Some women transition for 6 months even up to a year or more, by wearing wigs, weaves, and low maintenance styles, so that when they finally cut off their relaxed hair they can have a full head of hair or at least a small fro.

It can be scary for some women to cut all of their hair off at the very first minute they decide to go natural. What if you change your mind? What if you hate how your head is shaped? What if you feel like a boy? What if you hate your natural hair?

Transitioning just allows you to get mentally adjusted to the whole process and allows you to ease into seeing yourself differently, while still being able to hold onto your relaxed hair. If you don't like what you see, you can just relax your new growth and no one will no the difference.

Why You Shouldn't Transition

Transitioning is cool because it buys you time but it can also be a pain in butt because the longer you put off cutting off your relaxed ends, the harder it will be to maintain your hair since you'll be battling two drastically different textures.

The strands that you relaxed straight will remain straight, but above that the new growth will go wild. The natural roots will begin to twist, curl, coil, and shrink while the ends hang limp.

At first it will be easy to continue to wear your hair straight, but eventually your natural hair will dominate your straight hair. So if you want to continue to wear your hair straight while you transition, you can wind up damaging your new growth. And by the time you're ready to cut your hair you might need to cut off more than you wanted because of split ends, or your hair might just be fried out.

Even if you choose to go with the natural texture that's growing in and you wear your hair in braided styles or curly, your relaxed ends will never be able to look exactly like your natural hair, because it's thinner and more fragile.

The main problem with transitioning is that it prolongs the process of going natural. I became impatient and bored with the whole process because I didn't want to be in the in-between stages, I just wanted to be natural.

After cutting off my hair I realized that no matter how long you transition you're not going to know how you really look with your natural hair until all of the relaxed part is gone.

I thought I knew my texture when I transitioned but I didn't until I was 100% natural. Once those straight ends were gone my hair became unleashed and I got to see my hair's true textures.

And even though transitioning gave me a glimpse of how to style my hair and what products I would need to use I still had to learn a lot about styling and taking care of my hair once I became 100% natural.

In The End...

The bottom line is that transitioning gets you acclimated to being natural, but you're not going to have the real experience until you just do it. After a few months of transitioning you'll be able to know whether you really want to be natural or not.