I spent the past week deciding whether to go natural, texlaxed, or stay relaxed. I've been on an unintentional stretch for 5 months now (unintentional because I kept putting my hair in protective styles and didn't bother to relax). So after taking out my twists earlier this week, I noticed I had an incredible length of new growth. My new growth had grown to almost 3 inches, and the next few days was tough as I've had to wash-day through my textures. In addition to that, I also noticed I had texlaxed hair in between my natural hair and my bone-straight. So I had a decision to make - Relax all, cut off bone-straight and texlax all, or cut off bone-straight and texlaxed hair and go natural.
I rang up one of my hairdressers who advised me to texlax and possibly colour the ends of my hair and go roller-setting. I visited another hairdresser or mine who said colouring is a bad idea. My mother was against cutting my hair because in her words, "Don't you know your hair is your beauty!?". I went on YouTube and all the hair blogs possible to find type 4C bloggers who I can get as much info as possible from to make my decision. I was leaning more towards texlaxed and natural as my bone-straight hair appeared incredibly thin against my natural growth.
Long story short - I chose to stay relaxed. Why?
1. I am blessed with a head full of hair coming out of every hole on my scalp. For this reason, my new growth was incredibly thick difficult to comb unless I moisturized and conditioned continually. I thought to myself: If I was to go natural and it grew a couple of inches more, do I really have the time to struggle with it? The answer was no.
2. Flat-ironing. I know there are so many styles one can do with natural hair. However, I would love straight hair from time to time. So if I were to flat iron my natural hair from time to time, wouldn't the heat damage it? The answer was yes.
3. Tangling. Many naturals have noted that natural hair tends to tangle more. Knowing my fragile hair, I'm totally not ready to deal with tangles. Even so, my texlaxed has been tangling with my new growth and I don't like it.
4. Texlaxed - prone to different textures. They say to do a strand test if you want to go texlaxed so you can get texture consistency. I'm really afraid of this and it would be time-consuming if I were to do a "corrective relaxing" for when I don't get my textures right. Besides, again I have loads of hair so texlaxed which basically feels natural wouldn't be easy to deal with.
On these basis, I headed out to get my favourite relaxer - ORS No-Lye Relaxer in Normal strength...and so my relaxed hair journey continued.
Next post: Relaxer day regimen.
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