My cousins and I all have very different hair textures, I am what the curl chart would call a 4A, but in my opinion that isn’t set in stone. The front of my hair is loose and wavy, the middle is super kinky* and coily, and the back is a mix of the two. My hair is crazy fine and can tangle at the drop of a dime.
Two of my cousins have very loose wavy curls, the kind of curls that you might wish you had because their hair care seems so easy and effortless.
They have probably heard throughout the years that they have ‘good hair’ because where we are from (The Caribbean) that is a term that is commonly used to describe their texture of hair.
I would like to think we have moved on from the ‘good hair’ thing, we hardly ever hear it these days, except from time to time on social media when someone feels particularly ignorant. These days healthy hair is good hair and we are all striving for it.
Like many of your families my cousins are also my best friends and we share style ideas and talk about hair all the time. Over the years I have come to learn that they have some of the same hair issues I have; chronic dryness, breakage, dry scalp sometimes, and most recently a hot topic amongst us has been the loss in curl pattern and how to get it back.
One of the cool things about the times we are living in is that there is now an avid appreciation of what our hair should look like naturally. Many of us have taken the plunge to discover our roots literally, learned our curl pattern, and have developed a new found love affair with our curls.
I have learned a lot over the years about curly hair and I have also learned a lot about myself from talking to them. I have realized that I made some assumptions about their texture that I should not have made that is actually rooted in the whole ‘good hair’ phenomenon. Here are some assumptions we tend to make about women with 3C hair that need to be rethought.
They do not need to big chop
Big chops are not just exclusive to women with relaxed hair, if you have loose curls but you have flat ironed your hair for years, or colored it and your curls look limp, it is ok to do a big chop to bring your curls back to life.
One of my cousins recently big chopped and she is seriously thinking about chopping a bit more to give her curls the best chance at coming back to life the way she knows it should.
