Highly Textured

Rep your city!!! I'll start...


PITTSBURGH!!! P-A ALL DAY, son!!!

(...though now I live in Washington, DC.)


Where you from?! C'mon, throw your hood up! :o)




(P.S. And don't forget to enter the first Blessed and Highly Textured Giveaway! One day left!)

You've followed the blog for a while. You've seen my encounters with coconut oil, my love for castor oil, my spur-of-the-moment experiment with eggs. You hollered at me for buying a tiny 15-dollar-jar of body butter (hi Katie!) and watched me sing the praises of -- then ease away from -- fat twists.

And yet, after all the creams and oils and butters I've slathered on my hair, I've realized... sometimes it's best to just keep it simple.

I returned to an old routine this week -- wash, slather in conditioner, go on with life -- and my hair has just been, well, content. (It could have something to do with a new conditioner, Hello Hydration... I blame Curly Nikki.) But yeah, this week, I skipped my usual, laborious routine -- no layering of products, no twisting, no sitting under the dryer -- and my hair's just... chilling.

She's good, yo.

And it's making me think of the early days, when I really didn't have this hair obsession that I do now, when I did just enough -- wash, slather in conditioner, go on with life -- to keep it looking decent. And now that I think about it, that's when it thrived. Grew like a weed, to lengths more than I knew what to do with.

I admit, it's a blast trying new products and techniques. You become something of a discoverer, and you wind up super-knowledgeable about ingredients and porosity and whatnot. But at the end of the day, could it be that your hair happiness lies in that four-dollar bottle sitting in your shower?

Could be. What do you think?

Most of you already know I ADORE Latina magazine. (Am I Latina? No, not a drop. Lol.) I loved it even more when this month's issue arrived in my mailbox, complete with an essay on one Dominicana's story of her lifelong frustration with -- and then acceptance of -- her hair.

Of course I immediately wanted to share it with you guys, but Latina didn't publish it online. But with a little bit of sleuthing (gotta love being a journo) I found that the writer, Aliza Hausman (shown here in a picture from her wedding), shared it on her blog a few months back, before the magazine picked it up. (And now I'm combing through my own archives for mag-friendly material, hmmm....)

Anywhoo, check out Aliza's hair story here. She describes how her mother (and others) taught her how to hate her hair, and how she fought with it -- until her would-be husband showed her how to love it.

A little change, as this comes not from a blogger, but from a luminary...

"Oppressed hair puts a ceiling on the brain."
-- Alice Walker
Has your mind opened up since you've been natural?

Watch the video! Enter below! Win some jewelry! WHHHHEEEEEEE!!!!