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These are a few photos of my hair when I was trying to figure out what on earth to do with it:
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Photo of me and my brother. In the beginning, my hair was straightened by my (African American) grandmother on my mom’s side. It was carefully set each night in dozens of little balls all over my head. It took at least an hour a night.
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The one time my mom took me to a hairdresser, the hairdresser cut off all my hair and gave me a Jheri curl on top of my relaxer. After that, everyone sort of threw their hands up in the air, and I began trying to take care of it myself. I’d just brush it and pat it into a roundish shape.
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During a visit to my (Caucasian) grandmother on my dad’s side, my grandmother offered to style my hair. She bravely worked on it with a curling iron. It looks as though my hair was as flexible as warm plastic.
Soon afterwards, I began wearing scarves over my hair.
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After I discovered chemicals, I got them to take out the curl, but could do nothing else with my hair. So I wore it as strapped as possible.
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A slight variation of my basic do. I sometimes mixed it up with two ponytails.
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In later highschool years, I wore it texturized. It never grew longer than this.
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To the right, I cut my hair off with kitchen scissors and dyed it bright red.
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This was my attempt at dreadlocks. At the time I couldn’t find any information on them, so I just stopped combing my hair. It turned into a big mat, and I had to tear apart each lock and roll them between my fingers to get sort of the right shape. They stuck out everywhere, so I sewed lots and lots of glass beads into them to keep them weighted.
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My dad and me at my highschool graduation dinner. I’d given up on my locks by then because they wouldn’t grow. So I was back to the ‘fro again.
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When I went to straighten my hair after I cut off the locks, I messed up and dissolved all my hair. What little was left was orange and crunchy. That was when I got into weaves, which lead to extensions, much like pot is supposed to lead to heroin.
I didn’t know what I was doing with the extensions, and ended up with all my hair matting together. I spent two days ripping the extensions out, and 8 hours to comb out the mat. I was left with the same short hair I’d been trying to get away from my whole life.
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Here I was trying a bit of everything. I had my hair texturized, and also I had a few extensions left in it for good measure. Sometimes the texturizing gave me really straight areas mixed in with curlier spots (see right photo).
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This is when I first cut off my relaxer.
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Okay, it’s artsy. But this shows my hair after I finally cut off all the chemicals, and it was growing out. This was at about two years.
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This is my hair at about three and a half years of new growth.
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It’s much longer, but I hadn’t figured out how to keep it from puffing up in the wind, rain, humidity, and if someone looked at it the wrong way.
This was after about six years of growth.
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This is how my hair is now (this was taken after about ten years of growth). I finally figured out how to keep it from puffing up like a balloon. It touches my butt when it’s wet, and I shrug at rain, wind and humidity. (For more photos of my hair as it looks now, check out Hair Shots.)
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