My Struggle with 4b hair

 Did you know that we shed 50-200 strands of hair per day? 

Don't be alarmed, It's alright to shed some strands but when you have a handful of hair in your palms everyday, please don't panic but seek help.

Hair!! A woman's pride. It comes in different lengths, thickness, colours and textures. Some apply chemicals while some rather leave it natural. Anyways, this is a brief story of my horrible hair journey.
I'm a Nigerian with 4b hair. I had horrible hair growing up. I never knew hair products existed back then. Right from a tender age, my mum started applying relaxer to my hair and as a result, i never really knew what my natural hair looked like.

Fast forward to when I started noticing the condition of my hair....

I never noticed the extent of hair damage caused by the relaxer I was using at that time until my Biology teacher sighted me as an example of someone with protein deficiency. He was listing the symptoms of protein deficiency and one of them was 'Red Hair'. Unfortunately for me, that was the one day I decided to ditch the white scarf I'd normally wear to school and let my hair be

The entire class stared at me and erupted into laughter. They didn't know the redness was as a result of chemical damage and to make matters worse, I was skinny. I felt so so bad but I kept using the relaxer anyway. 

I wore my 'red hair' with pride until i noticed that the hair at the back of my head was breaking badly. It was shorter than the rest of my hair. It was so bad that my mum angrily took me to my aunt's house and told her to cut my hair. Without any form of reluctance my aunt cut my hair and left me looking like a shaved bird with uneven hair patches.

As the hair grew, I started using sporting waves texturizer on my hair along with Morgan's hair darkening cream. Trust me, that cream worked wonders. My hair was jet black and spiky. I loved it!!! I was literally on hair cloud 9. After a few months of experimenting with the texturizer i started braiding my hair with extensions. One point to note is that I have very fragile edges. For all readers who don't know what edges are, they are the hair at the front of your head that are kind of like baby hair. The hair dressers like neatness and in order to achieve that, your hair has to be pulled tightly. Laughing was torture each time I got my hair braided. Don't get me wrong, the braids were always on point but they were snatching my edges real bad. Sometimes I didn't sleep at night because the hair was just too painful and there was no comfortable spot.

The hair dressers would normally braid my edges to install the weaves and that wasn't palatable too. It was painful and I started getting bald patches. In other to cover up those bald spots, I continued installing weaves. The condition started getting worse and it was developing into traction alopecia. 

I got fed up at a point and decided to ditch weaves entirely. I cut my hair and decided to grow it natural. During this time, I started using wigs. After a month or two of being a naturalista, my mum suggested I use Jheri Curl. I started using it and the growth was quite amazing. There was minimal breakage and my edges were beginning to come back. The only problem was that it was expensive. The curl activator was telling on my pocket. After sometime, my hair started breaking again and I decided to give up chemicals once and for all.

On the 2nd of January, 2018, I cut my hair again and hopefully, this will be my last big chop. I started growing my hair naturally and this time I'm treating it like an egg. I ditched all the chemical based creams and shampoos and presently I use African Black soap to wash my hair. I use Hair Wonder hair cream, Jamaican Black Castor Oil, Coconut Oil and Olive Oil as hair cream. I use rice water to rinse my hair quite regularly and apple cider vinegar as final hair rinse. So far, I've seen positive changes. My hair is growing healthier and my edges are singing songs of hope. I still wear wigs sometimes so i don't have to style my hair every single day. 

At the end of the year, I'll write another post about my hair progress and hopefully, by that time, it will be a much more positive story. 

See you at the top
Black hair is beautiful!! ❤❤❤

Sorry I won't be able to upload pictures for now. Most of the pictures were deleted due to phone issues. Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment and ask questions.
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