Do it yourself natural hair

At the request of my boyfriend, I stopped relaxing my hair over a decade ago. He absolutely hated the smell of the relaxing chemicals and how they would linger on the pillow cases for days after a “touch up.” But after ten years of walking into just about any beauty shop and finding at least one competent beautician, I had a dilemma. No one seemed able to do anything with my natural hair other than pull out the hot comb or the braiding weave. I would go to the stylists anyway and suffer the breakage from over straightening or too tight braids because I didn't know what to do with my newly natural hair.

But in 1996, I found Good Hair: For Colored Girls Who've Considered Weaves When the Chemicals Became Too Ruff

by Lonnice Brittenum Bonner and a light bulb went off.

The problem wasn't that I didn't know how to style my natural hair, the problem was that I didn't know how to do ANYTHING with my hair.

For years before this discovery, since I'd turned 16 and started getting my hair relaxed, I'd even considered my relaxed hair a problem.  Because I NEVER planned to attend any event, photo session, reunion or party without going to the hair stylist first. Because, as far as I could recall, every woman in my family addressed hair as something that had to get "fixed" before one was presentable. And the person doing the fixing was always someone else.

One look at Good Hair, and I gave up the search for the perfect natural beautician who would only fill in on what I was really missing. Knowledge.

Natural African American hair is not that difficult to care for. But in my childhood, it was foreign for the women in my family to care for their own hair at all.

So I started doing my own hair and sharing the styles here. All of the styles you see here are do-it-yourself, except for the one page of comb-coils done by Suzan (pg. 14). I'm no beautician, and if I can do it, so can you.