May was the 4^th Month of the Gahl length retention challenge and I am already very excited to find out how much length I will have retained by August when the challenge ends. I have not trimmed my hair since the challenge started and I am quite proud of myself because I have only used heat once in those four months. And I have been religiously moisturising and sealing every other day and my hair is almost in a bun every single day.

I promised to update you ladies on my long term transition to natural hair so here goes the first update :)

The back and edges of my hair are currently 44 weeks post relaxer/texlax while the crown is exactly 20 weeks post. I do have a lot of new growth! 

I have been getting questions as to how I manage so much new growth without wearing protective styles such as braids or weaves. Well I have come to realise that my hair loves to be left alone and it does not like any kind of stress and manipulation whatsoever, Any time I did braids, twists or weaves in the past I always ended up with a small setback. This is why I decided to try and deal with my hair regardless of how much new growth I had. By sticking to this method I have been able to learn how to manage my own hair even with three different textures ( relaxed, texlaxed & Natural).

Managing different textures on one head can be challenging at first but it can be done, however you will need a great virtue which is patience. You will need to find out what works for your hair.

Here is what works for me.

So far the transition is going on well and I hope that it stays that way. If you have any tips on how to long-term transition to natural with less breakage, please do share. I need all the information I can get . And thanks to all our readers for all the support you have been giving us. We really appreciate you for taking your time to share our hair journies with us :)

My hair had been giving me trouble the last couple of weeks, I was experiencing more breakage than usual. I thought a good deep conditioning would do the trick., so I did one and when I was air drying I realised that my ends looked terrible. And as you and me already know, the only way to cure damaged ends is to cut them off. So I flat ironed my hair and gave myself a small trim. I think I took off an inch and a half.

Here is the procedure I used to trim my hair.

My hair looks thinner than it really is because it was a little weighed down, i applied coconut oil on my hair for shine and to protect my ends. The cut was not as even as it should have been but it will do for now.

Thanks for reading!

Joanne.