I’ve been natural for like 1 year and 9 months, in January it will be 2 years.

In this time I’ve been figuring out my hair, what works and what doesn’t work. I’ve been figuring out styles for TWA hair and trimming and products.

There are a lot of products out there, especially as more women take the natural plunge. The market is expanding and all the products are so tempting and smell so good you just want to buy them all.

I didn’t turn into a product junkie but I almost took a trip down that road.

Everyone else used so many products on their hair when they washed it, when they styled it… at every stage they had so many products and there was me with just my coconut oil and shea moisture leave in conditioner and argon oil and I thought… maybe I should add more to my routine.

So I did, I tried different products, like styling custards.

Now they smelled good and they did their job. They held my hair in the styles I wanted and weren’t too strong like gel. But they didn’t react well with my hair in the sense that they would always leave white stuff behind.

I was camping this summer. Well I was working on a summer camp and so I needed a simple routine. So one week I did bantu knots for the first time on my TWA hair. It actually worked which was great as it meant my hair had grown. I didn’t have time to deal with my hair so I left the knots in all week as I worked until Friday which was dress up dinner day. I took my hair out and lo and behold white stuff everywhere! It was horrible! The curls were popping but it looked like snow had landed on my head. Or dandruff.

You may be thinking it’s cause I left them in so long. Nope.

I used the same product for a twist out and the same thing happened, white stuff. I hated it. I started to miss my cantu shea moisture so bad but I had left it at home.

So yeah I’ve tried the whole trying new products thing and I have learnt if it ain’t broke don’t fix it!

I’ve also learnt that some protective styles just don’t work on my natural hair as they did my relaxed hair. The protective style I’m talking about is braids.

I love braids. They take my hair off my hands for like 3 months. It’s beautiful. So I decided to braid my hair up before I went to camp as it’d get my hair out my way and I could do my job and it would help my hair grow faster.

It didn’t work.

Okay so it kinda did. It wasn’t terrible but it wasn’t great. They barely stayed in a month, they were just sliding right off my head. It was like my hair was rejecting a foreign object the way the body does when you get a transplant. It was weird. And when I took the braids out I had to cut most of the growth because of split ends. So I was back to where I had started before I put in the braids.

So yeah protective styles are great for others but not so much for me. So I may lay off the braids for a while and give my hair a chance to grow all free on a simple routine as that’s what works best for me.

That is all,

ciao!