Mane Attraction: Healthy Hair Challenge meets Kinky Twists

Much encour­aged by MopTopMaven’s Healthy Hair in 2011 Chal­lenge, I’ve made the per­sonal and now open promise to take her up on it!

I don’t con­sider my hair to be unhealthy, by any means, but I do con­sider myself a lazy care­taker of it, and in that I also rec­og­nize some utterly lazy ten­den­cies. One exam­ple which comes to mind is my lack of patience with detan­gling, which coin­ci­den­tally gets promi­nent men­tion in her piece. Alas, I know what I need to do, but I am nei­ther con­sis­tent or invested in doing it. That will cer­tainly change in 2011

I imag­ine those who know me may say to themselves–or me: ‘but you always switch it up’ and ‘I never know what you’re going to do with your hair from day to day.’ And yes, while that’s true, my pref­er­ence for “pro­tec­tive styles”, rang­ing mostly from wigs to head­wraps has not really been that pro­tec­tive, as very often I am not opti­mally mind­ful of the hair hid­ing under­neath.  I have to admit that I’ve been far more invested in mak­ing myself pre­sentable for the world at large and my var­i­ous activities.

I’ve decided: No more!

So what does a Healthy Hair Chal­lenge in 2011 look like for me?

As a jump-start, my com­mit­ment to my nat­ural hair and myself starts now! In fact, it started on Christ­mas day 2010—and it looks and will con­tinue to look much like the fea­tured image at top. It’s pro­tec­tive styling all the way for this woman. And my pro­tec­tive styling of choice for the fore­see­able future is kinky twists.

I hap­pen to love kinky twists. I love the color selec­tion that can go from Rihanna’s Calypso-red to Beyoncé’s sun-kissed honey blond to more au naturel notes and tones. I love the over­all flex­i­bil­ity and styling options of the do.

This par­tic­u­lar do, took this sis­tah 10 hours to complete!

It was not the eas­i­est under­tak­ing, no thanks to my per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, but it left the most sat­is­fy­ing after­glow as I con­sid­ered the $145 — $190 I had just invested into myself, instead of a styl­ist. (Have you seen my wanted list! )

As part of the healthy hair in 2011 chal­lenge, I plan to redo my kinky twists every 2 months, which means that I will leave them in for 7 weeks, after which I will take down, deep-condition and let my hair breathe and rest for a week, after which I will retwist.

What will my main­te­nance reg­i­men look like while the twists are in?

O-Town’s weather has been extremely unpre­dictable of late. How­ever from past suc­cess, I know that I will still need to keep my hair mois­tur­ized and my scalp clean.

Prod­ucts that have worked in the past and there­fore being employed again:

• Dr. Miracle’s Braid Relief Spray For­mula or my awe­some mix of Rose Water and Glycerin—for over­all mois­tur­iza­tion and con­di­tion­ing for hair at root and along the kinky twist through tip.
• Jojoba and rose­mary essen­tial oil mix—as needed for direct appli­ca­tion to the scalp.
• Sea Breeze or mix­ture of Apple Cider vine­gar and water—applied with a cleans­ing cloth, cot­ton swab or even a Q-Tip for weekly scalp clean­ing and maintenance.

There might cer­tainly be more that I have not yet thought of or encoun­tered, but I will update as I go.

Just know that your nat­ural hair is beau­ti­ful beyond mea­sure, every strand is a nov­elty, every style a func­tion and story. How­ever, nat­ural hair takes patience, it takes love and it takes an invest­ment in the knowl­edge base of the struc­ture of hair that most of us have not seen since we were too lit­tle to know the difference.

Another day, another oppor­tu­nity I always say.

Becom­ing Nat­ural: Here’s to the health­i­est of hair jour­neys begin­ning now, stretch­ing into 2011 and beyond!

ABOUT THE WRITER

Hi there, I’m Tynisha Leon, writer, mango-lover, founder and Editor-in-Chief of DASHEEN mag­a­zine — the online des­ti­na­tion where Cul­ture. Feeds. Imag­i­na­tion! If you seek to inno­vate, pro­mote and/or con­tribute to posi­tioning a Caribbean peo­ple and gen­er­a­tion most pos­i­tively then link me! Bless!

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