I'm not quite sure why I made the sudden decision to stop punishing my hair, but I remember very well what lead up to it.

The summer of '98 was good to me. I was visiting the hairdresser every 9 weeks for my 4-hour long Optimum relaxer hair session. With snacks, newspaper and cell phone stuffed neatly into my bag, I was prepared to spend as long as necessary waiting for my favorite beautician to finally get around to ridding me of my nasty, embarrassing, nappy roots. Hey, I might even go out to the club tonight, I thought--as I’d have a fresh, shiny, just-come-out-of-the-beauty-salon- looking, bone-straight head of hair. But because my hair was growing like wild, it was time to ruin it, of course. I had to have color, and it had to be red—but I wasn’t gonna pay at least $60 for my favorite hairdresser to put the color on for me. (Yeah, I liked her, but not that much!) Nope, I was going to do it myself.

I’d messed with my hair before, and hadn’t always been successful--but this time would be different. I mean, how wrong could you go with a semi-permanent? The first application of red was not quite red enough…well, maybe it did look red in the sun--but hey, why settle? I wanted everybody to see that brilliant red even when dark, just like in the magazines. So the following week, I colored it again, left the red on for one hour and threw a plastic cap on it, for good measure--you know, so that the color would really take.

The only thing it really wound up taking was my hair.

Nearly in tears, I ran to my favorite hairdresser. "Cut it," she said. “Can’t you save it?" I pleaded. "Well, we could try," she mumbled unconvincingly. So I spent double the usual amount and got a good deep treatment, just as she recommended. I was desperate. During the next few weeks, I was still losing hair left, right and center. Braids, I thought, that always works. After 4 months of sporting braids, the damage had long been done, and I had to come to terms with the fact that my badly ruined hair had to go.

In January 1999 I made the appointment. I packed my snacks, newspaper and cellphone neatly in my bag and with sunken shoulders and head tucked down in her chair, I felt like Samson, all my strength cut clean away as my favorite hairdresser cut my hair down to a one-inch, plastered-down kind of ‘do (I had to practically beg for two inches to be left in the front). She made an appointment for me to come back in another month for another serious, double-the-price treatment. As the date grew nearer, I grew tired. Tired of the hair-scapades, tired of the trials and tribulations, tired of 21 years of relaxer…wet look… another relaxer…a Jheri curl…then a product that promised you could go from curly to straight to back to curly all within 1 hour…a relaxer…another Jheri curl that “didn’t take” (which I had to embarrassingly deal with for 4 months)…then back to a relaxer. Oh—and bear in mind, in between all this hair torture I was braiding and throwing in a weave in here and there.

There, I’ve said it. I messed with my hair until it finally said, “Enough! Now it’s my turn to mess with you!”

And let me tell you, I did not like it, not for a minute!

Andrea White is the founder of Kinksrus.com , a website that celebrates natural hair. Originally from Bristol, England, she currently resides in Connecticut.

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