Black hair

Black women always amaze me with their perpetual quest for beauty. We are the most creative when it comes to hairstyles. From the corn rolls, to the dread locks, to big Afro, the choices are endless. We rock each and every hairstyles and we keep finding new ways of making our hair look beautiful.

With the influence of slavery and colonization, we were more drawn to believe that straight hair is prettier but in the last decade there has been a movement promoting love for our hair as it is. Natural hair is now the "ish". I am personally happy I have joined the movement because I feel don’t have to fit a certain standard of beauty, I can just be me with my Afro and my hair is a crown seated on my head reminding me every day of the queen I am. It might be nothing but my hair defies gravity and I love it. Though the movement brought many happy followers like me, it also divided black women in two groups: natural women and non-natural women.
 

In the mist of making black women join in the movement, there was some frowning upon women spending a lot of money on weaves and hair extensions and women who voice negative opinions about natural hair. there was an incident in Senegal where a singer was threatened after she released a song against natural hair. 
There is however a question triggering me: how do we define natural? If being natural is accepting yourself as you are, what do we think of make-up and bleaching or toning? I don’t know if you have seen the recent evolution of make-up, but people make new personalities and faces with make-up. Toning and bleaching cause as much harm as relaxers, if not more. Whereas relaxers can lead to serious injuries, I think they might be less dreadful than bleaching products. Because the use of relaxers is done on one part of the body as opposed to bleaching products which are either applied all over the body including private parts , injected in the blood or swallowed. Toning and bleaching can cause skin cancer, acne, thinning of the skin, cataracts, liver damage, severe birth defects and many more.

I do understand that it should be fine to stay with your natural hair if you wish to, without dreading to be tagged ugly but please I don’t think it is fair to point fingers at women who don't want to keep their natural hair. Give the information and let people make their choices. I think today, with all the information about natural hair and its care, some women won’t still indulge in it because it is time consuming and not because they want to fit in a certain criteria of beauty. So let's all enjoy the diversity of black hair and praise it. 

Whether it is with a weave, natural hair, corn rows, relaxed hair please sister, rock it and enjoy the best of your African heritage as you wish after all Life is too short to not be the best version of you and show it to the world.