I recently watched a YouTube video by talking about how natural hair isn’t for everyone. Like most controversial video on the internet, there were two camps of people. The people who would have just read the title of the video and been like “ oh no she didn’t ” but watched to see what she would say, and the other group would have just gone straight to the comments section with their “I don’t agree with you” comments.
After watching the video, I was inclined to agree with every single point she made about why natural hair is not for everyone. The reasons she gave are not superficial like you don’t have the face for it or it looks unprofessional.
I have summarized her reasons to three words: Courage, Care and Curls
Courage
Deciding to have natural hair takes courage because it requires breaking the social norm of relaxing your hair and it will ultimately lead to you standing out much more than you did before – especially if you do a big chop. What I have personally learnt over the years of having natural hair is that you need to have a really thick skin to put up with the negative comments that people will make about your hair (yes there are nice comment, but there are some pretty ugly comments too). I know from my own person experience people don’t hold back from showing/ telling you how they feel about your hair. Some of it is direct comments, and sometimes it’s passive aggressive comments like oh so when are you getting your hair braided again. If you are someone who cares a lot about what people think, and you would not be able to put up with people having a word in on how you look, then natural hair is not for you. To add to this, if you don’t wanna stand out (people looking at you weird, touching your hair) , then once again, it is probably not for you.
Care
Natural hair requires just as much, if not more care than relaxed hair. You will have to invest a lot of time and money finding the right products and methods for taking care of your hair. As the hair grows longer, the , more work you have to do to maintain it and keep it from looking like a hot mess. (My mum emphasised this point a lot to me, and I finally get that long natural hair is probably not for me until I learn to commit to care ). Unfortunately, there are not a lot of natural hair specialists at the hairdressers which means that you’ll ether do your own hair or you get it done by a hairdresser who doesn’t know how to treat the natural hair (Will make another post about this). So basically, if you don’t think you’ll be able to commit to taking care of you natural hair, then it won’t be for you.
Curls
Some people go natural for the curls. I don’t know who created the hair type system but it’s brought a hierarchy to the natural community. Some ladies go natural in the hope that when their hair grows, they will have loose curls which seem to be more desirable than tighter curls*. If you don’t know what your natural hair is like, then your hair could be anything between loose and tight curls, but you don’t know what you will get. So what happens is that people go natural, but when their hair grows and turns out to be really tight curls, they find themselves really disappointed. If the curly hair is what you’re looking for, there are plenty of good weaves and wigs that would do the job.
After reading this, it could maybe give you some insight as to whether you should be natural or not.
*I love my tightly coiled hair, but what I was saying is based on what I have noted from the natural hair community, reminds me a bit of the light skin/ dark skin debate, but that is a story for another post.
🙂
Here is a link to the video, it was on the Sunshine Abuwi Channel. I really like her videos she’s a bit like me, likes wearing her natural hair short.Natural Hair Is Not For Everyone
Oh My Curls 