The Black Hair Diaries: The Pros & Cons of Going Natural

For most black women, they’re simply aren’t any pros to going natural. I assume this because most black women have their hair relaxed, and they love it. And I love it too. Sometimes I miss having my hair straight.

I went natural because I felt my hair was being over processed with heat and chemicals. It was dry and brittle all the time. I started using more moisturizers, more conditioners, and less shampooing (I heard it “strips” your hair of moisture), but nothing ever helped. Instead of getting a relaxer every month and a half to two months, I started getting a relaxer every 4 months, then every 6 months, then every 8 months, until I was able to go a full year without relaxing my hair. I still used heat styling, but it wasn’t damaging my hair as much since I stopped combining it with the chemical treatments. Eventually, I was fully free from chemicals, and no longer used heat in my hair either.

It took me two years to wean, but I still have the doors open to straightening my hair with the hot comb every now and then. So far in two years, I have only used the hot comb once. It’s not something I’m very interested in anymore. I had no idea how pointless straightening my hair was until I stopped doing it. I now moisturize my natural hair, comb it out, and then I put a headband on it. It looks good and people compliment me on it all the time. Plus it saves a lot of time, which is great if you’re a busy person.

Natural hair is hard to deal with at first though. It was a complete pain combing and styling it because I had no idea what to do with it. I was completely lost. But I guess that’s the problem with us black women. I think lots of black women won’t go natural because we don’t know how to style our natural hair. I feel that we should be ashamed of ourselves for using chemicals so much that we don’t know what we will do without them.

My natural hair looks and feels healthier, but it takes a while to get it that way. You have to pay more attention to what you are doing to your hair more than ever before. But it’s all worth it. My hair feels soft, curly, and resembles “baby hair”. I never knew I had this kind of hair. I was just slapping the relaxer on it all the time and never thought for a second that good hair was hiding beneath that relaxer.

I do understand why black women are so attached to straight hair, and I don’t think it has anything to do with making our hair more manageable. I think black women have a lot of competition in this world. We have black men that often date women that have fairer skin than ours, nonetheless straighter hair than ours. When you are going up against that kind of competition, it’s hard not to feel like you have to make yourself look like them in order to be attractive. I sometimes ask myself, “Did I do myself a disservice by going natural? Will I ever date again?”

Feeling and looking beautiful is important for every woman, and if black women thought that we will be considered beautiful even if we all went natural, I think we would all go natural! But just the thought that you may not be desirable anymore is enough to keep you from doing it. Believe me, I totally get it.

But what if I told you that you will probably be even more attractive if you went natural? Going natural makes you come off as confident in yourself because so many other women do not and will not go natural because of their insecurity issues. Everyone knows that black women straighten their hair so that they can blend in with everyone else. That is no secret. So when a black woman decides that she is no longer going to try to blend in with her fair skin counterparts-that speaks volumes. It says, “I am confident in myself and I don’t feel the need to look like you. You are not better than me just because you have straighter hair.”

Just give natural hair a try, and if you don’t like it, you can always relax it again. Every woman should look the way she wants to look, but I hate to see women that look a certain way out of peer pressure. If you want straight hair, do it because you like it, not because you feel pressured by society.