Grow African Hair Long GAHL: how to transition to natural hair

About a year and a half ago I stopped relaxing the bottom half of my hair and the edges because I felt that the texture of my hair on these areas was almost the same as my texlaxed hair. I was transitioning to texlaxed hair at the time. (Incase you do not know what it means to texlax, this is simply underprocessing the hair purposely while applying relaxer this technique is also called texturizing.) After six months of learning to deal with my different textures I realised that i could actually do without the relaxer and realised that I just loved the coils and curls coming out of my scalp, I literaly could not keep my fingers off them and was actually shocked by them because I had never noticed them before. This gave me even more reason to start my transition to natural. The picture below shows my starting and current length at my nape.

This part of my hair is completely natural and this is one and a half years of hair growth. It does not look like much growth in it's curly state, but stretched out it is past shoulder length.

The front of my hair and my crown area are currently one year post relaxer. I have to admit that it is very hard to tell the difference between my texlaxed hair and my natural hair in the front section. The fully relaxed areas are much easier to spot because they are super straight compared to my natural hair which is curly. I also discovered that I have three different textures on my natural hair! My crown has curls that are a lot tighter than those at the front. And the back and edges have very loose curls. Which makes me say that I do not have one specific hairtype.

I will be sharing a few things that have really helped me over the past year in the next blog. But for now I will just mention one of the most important ones which is protective styling. I like to leave my hair alone but at the same time I always want to have access to it. This is the reason why I don't braid or weave my hair. For me bunning is the best protective style because it is easy to do and requires very little manipulation.

Bun on a failed bantu knot out!

Wash and go bun!

High bun on straight hair!

Since I am transitioning to natural, length retention is not really a big priority for me right now. I have been cutting off my relaxed ends every other month because they look thinner than my natural hair.

If you are on a longterm transition too or are thinking of starting one what are some of the challenges you are facing?

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