So! Being a Creole Islander with mixed ancestry I look like your everyday Seychellois,which in itself doesn't say much since we are as diverse as a nation as we can be. To paint a clearer picture, consider my mother and my 2 sisters ; despite having similar facial structures ( depending on you ask of course) we differ in skin tone and hair textures quite vastly.
Growing up, in a community that valued the fairer skin and straighter/wavier hair to the darker skins and coarser hair, I was always proud of my "mixed" hair! It grew faster and had much more volume and definition than my cousin's and sister's who had the more "Nappy Hair" texture just as they were prouder of their lighter skin tone than my own dark skin.
Needless to say it has taken me a quarter of a century, travelling, meeting so many people and immense personal growth to make me review my principles when it comes to skin and hair. To cut a long story short , I started meeting people who did not chemically straighten their hair and were rocking their natural hair texture, being proud of their skin and hair and not being ashamed. To defy stereotypes and refuse to fit into the world's perception that dark skin need "whitening creams" or that their kinky hair needed "relaxing" inspiring me in my journey of Self love!
And so began my journey when my husband and I moved to Australia... Despite having toyed with the idea of growing back my natural hair texture, it wasn't until i reached our countryside town and I realised how difficult it would be to maintain my hair in a town with less than a dozen black people that I began to seriously contemplate taking the plunge and doing some research on how to proceed.
3 months in, my hair was getting bushier and the the long relaxed part just kept getting tangled up, so hence came the first chop! And this is where it got tricky , because despite my descriptive instructions on what i wanted, the poor hairdresser only had style catalogues of straight and wavy short hair styles.... so I chose a nice bob style that would allow me to have bangs in the front but rid me of the mass of tangled up hair in the middle and back.
3 months after that, the bangs were now just levitating to the sides of my face over the space occupying and fast growing "nappy hair", so the another more drastic chop was due! This time I showed up with my tablet and Google searches of what I wanted my hair to look like...( mostly photos of Solange Knowles in her earlier stages of growing her fro) And a lighter headed me walked home that day, excited to wash my hair and crunch it into sexy hairstyles I had been admiring.
The experience has indeed been a first ever... washing such short hair and having it air dry in minutes is in stark contrast to what I had grown up to. I quiet clearly remember my mother washing my hair every fortnight as a child and well into puberty when I started doing it myself. Her excuse was that it took way too much time and effort to detangle the tangled up "lion mane" I sported for a few days after.and the pain that usually accompanied such experiences left me with a dislike and reluctance to wash my hair more than twice a week even as an adult. Now to pass my finger through few inches of hair .... Pure Bliss!!
Growing up, in a community that valued the fairer skin and straighter/wavier hair to the darker skins and coarser hair, I was always proud of my "mixed" hair! It grew faster and had much more volume and definition than my cousin's and sister's who had the more "Nappy Hair" texture just as they were prouder of their lighter skin tone than my own dark skin.
Needless to say it has taken me a quarter of a century, travelling, meeting so many people and immense personal growth to make me review my principles when it comes to skin and hair. To cut a long story short , I started meeting people who did not chemically straighten their hair and were rocking their natural hair texture, being proud of their skin and hair and not being ashamed. To defy stereotypes and refuse to fit into the world's perception that dark skin need "whitening creams" or that their kinky hair needed "relaxing" inspiring me in my journey of Self love!
And so began my journey when my husband and I moved to Australia... Despite having toyed with the idea of growing back my natural hair texture, it wasn't until i reached our countryside town and I realised how difficult it would be to maintain my hair in a town with less than a dozen black people that I began to seriously contemplate taking the plunge and doing some research on how to proceed.
3 months in, my hair was getting bushier and the the long relaxed part just kept getting tangled up, so hence came the first chop! And this is where it got tricky , because despite my descriptive instructions on what i wanted, the poor hairdresser only had style catalogues of straight and wavy short hair styles.... so I chose a nice bob style that would allow me to have bangs in the front but rid me of the mass of tangled up hair in the middle and back.
3 months after that, the bangs were now just levitating to the sides of my face over the space occupying and fast growing "nappy hair", so the another more drastic chop was due! This time I showed up with my tablet and Google searches of what I wanted my hair to look like...( mostly photos of Solange Knowles in her earlier stages of growing her fro) And a lighter headed me walked home that day, excited to wash my hair and crunch it into sexy hairstyles I had been admiring.
The experience has indeed been a first ever... washing such short hair and having it air dry in minutes is in stark contrast to what I had grown up to. I quiet clearly remember my mother washing my hair every fortnight as a child and well into puberty when I started doing it myself. Her excuse was that it took way too much time and effort to detangle the tangled up "lion mane" I sported for a few days after.and the pain that usually accompanied such experiences left me with a dislike and reluctance to wash my hair more than twice a week even as an adult. Now to pass my finger through few inches of hair .... Pure Bliss!!
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