tsokuwoman

 

By far, social media is the most powerfull platform of our time, and anything that seems to be highly accepted by our social media communities will then become popular and whoever practices those “trends” will earn their respect in the society.

From my observation in the natural hair world , we have set standards for ourselves , that in most cases, they force us to compromise our healthy hair  practices to reach them or just suffer somehow ,this reminds me of my Botswana ladies ‘sarcasm being “bokgarebe boa itshokelwa” meaning that for you to earn a certain level of  beauty standard you have to suffer somehow .Having said so,we naturals  find ourselves engaged in unhealthy hair practices just to get our  hair to look  nice so that we can post that gorgeous picture on Instagram or facebook. Mind you, I am guilty in many occasions though…anyway here are some “looks or trending natural hair culture ” to meet the natural hair world  of social media standards in our communities.

BOUNCY CURLS

Most natural girls want their hair to be able to form those bouncy curls for that edited video clip that shows the wind blowing those curls or just the girl just shaking her head in a slow motion effect to show that “bounciness” ,yeah, we going Hollywood right? LOL Don’t get me wrong , those bouncy curls are gorgeous, but what if your hair is like mine and cannot achieve that easily?  This means we will have to stretch our hair in product, this involves combing and pulling or even engaging  the fancy & most friction-imposing curlformers, hence putting our fragile hair strands under stress.

LAID EDGES & SOFT BABY HAIRS

Everday we admire the cuteness of  baby hairs laid down at the harline with a form of gel product.The reason I am using the word “soft” is that it seems like some baby hairs are too kinky to lay down, they refuse and they rise from the hairline. LOL! Fortunately I haven’t observed unhealthy hair practices attached to the love of baby hairs . I know it sounds stupid but I feel like its annoying to have your baby hairs acting stubborn and rising from the airline while others are soft enough to lay down. If you have a kink hairtype you might relate girl!

 

TUCKED-IN HAIRENDS

The idea of tucking in hair ends is very common among naturals who wear their hair out. Most of them report that they want to protect the hair from harsh environmental conditions or protect them from drying out too much.This is good of course, but my tiny discomfort is from the metal bobby pins that  sometimes hold my hair too tight at the roots.I know you might be asking:” Why do you pin close to the root then?” I want the pin to hold well and shape my updo as wanted and not fall off-thats why, and trust me I have tried it once and it failed.I normally pin-down my hair to get a neat look for work as well.

 

COLOUR

We all know how exciting is to get a new look , getting something new makes you feel new. Many naturals like having fun with their hair, they want to brighten their daily look by adding colour to their fro,  and most of all accessorise like a boss. Now ,You anticipated right,because  I have a BUT attached to my praise for colour above, here it comes; BUT hair colouring compromise the integrity of the already dead hair ends, This is so because chemicals in the colouring agent act on the hair shaft to let the colour molecules enter the hair

LENGTH & VOLUME

Length checks! length checks! length checks! Oh yes we do them on regular basis. Those need hair to be stretched as well, and one way or the other we end up doing some of the practices named above to stretch our hair.In most cases products that weigh down hair are successful in giving us that volume. Also, this leads to other hair processing  practices such as heat blow drying/flat-ironing, chemically texturizing hair etc, sometimes just done for  ” I want to see how long my hair is?” Now  shall we blame shrinkage for this ? Maybe… but shrinkage is BOSS, its a love or hate characteristic of black natural hair.

GLAMOROUS

Every natural want their natural look to be slaying, Time to spend more money!!! here we introduce what we have as  a way  of accessorizing  such as facial makeup, head  bands, scarves or hats and jewellery. Here we just need to take care that our scarves do not dry our hair too much.

SHAPE

Shape is an existing  NEED for most naturals and some of us are not even aware of it.We all know that women are likely to worry about the shape of their heads and foreheads. Therefore the hairstyle or shape of hair plays an important role.Some of the ways we shape our hair include sidepart, high puff, pineapple style, fro-hawk etc. For me  the high puff  tend to be tight and I experience a little bit of discomfort after about 8-10 hours.

 

WAVY

Wavy effects are normally formed by the stretching methods such as braidouts, African threading method or  banding. We have already talked about what we make our hair go through during stretching our hair as described  above.

 

PROTECTION

Yeah, this is hair resting period, Imagine the feeling you have after getting braids, like “I escaped from doing chores because someone volunteered to do them for me for the next 2 weeks! phew! what a great friend that will be…”. Believe me protective styles protect our hair from our hands than from the harsh environmental conditions. I say this because i know many naturals who do not believe in protective styles because they say that protective styles pull on their hair but still grow their  healthy hair.

 

Please share , comment and let us know How you definitely “tried it” when it comes to  your natural hair care to meet social media trends/standards for natural hair looks. Let’s have a laugh, We say it in Botswana that “loso logolo ke ditshego” simply meaning that we sometimes have to laugh away our problems and challenges in life.

Love from

Lebo @tsokungwoman