Natural Hair Is Extremely Product Driven
I always said that the person who finally invents the ultimate product that you can sell to any black woman on earth and tell her ‘Use this, it will grow your hair, make it soft, shiny, curly/wavy/straight and healthy’ and the product actually works, would become a very wealthy person indeed. Well, nobody has yet invented that product but based on the wares available at the hair show, lots are sure giving it a go!
Natural hair has become as commercial as Christmas and I am of two minds as to if this is a good or a bad thing. The advice pellets overheard from the vendors and non vendors alike sounded like a product junkie’s secret stash. ‘Grapeseed oil* is the best thing you can put in your hair’, ‘OMG that curling custard is the truth!’, ‘Their shampoo is the best for natural hair.’ etc.
More often than not, these brand new products are just the same old stuff re-fragranced and re-packaged. Yet another curling cream that promises to give your curls hold while keeping your hair soft but you find that it works just the same as all the others you’ve ever tried; Averagely.
Women Seem Almost Apologetic For Being Relaxed
Maybe this wasn’t true for the entire event or every single relaxed woman but I was there on Sunday afternoon for just a couple of hours because I was coming down with a cold. Yet in that time 3 separate women, two of them vendors, explained to me, almost apologetically, why they couldn’t go natural, although I didn’t ask. All I wanted to know was how their products worked on 4a/b natural hair and after pawing my straightened hair one of them declared that since I had really good hair anyway, the product would work really well for me (if only she had met my hair before I started taking care of it!).
I also found it very odd that one of the spokespeople for a popular relaxer brand was clearly natural! I suppose that you can’t discriminate based on hair type but I would imagine that there would be a strong conflict of interest no?