Grow African Hair Long GAHL: longterm transition

On the 31st of January was 2 years since my last relaxer. In hair blogger language I am 24 months post relaxer!!! hurrah!!! it seems like only yesterday that I announced to you that I was transitioning to natural hair. If you missed on that you can read about it here My transition announcement

Two years down the line I am fully natural and loving it. I love my relaxed hair and I love my natural hair too. Contrary to many women who feel that going natural brought them a feeling of liberation, mine did not I am the exact same person I was when I was relaxed. To me Afro hair is beautiful no matter how you choose to wear it as long as you keep it healthy. Your hair your choice!

My hair before washing and conditioning

My hair blown out/ blow dried


Hair blown out. I was so tired already but the hair looked good!!!

I decided to straighten my hair just to see what it looked like straight and in the process I learned yet another lesson. While my hair was still relaxed it was much easier to get straight. Natural hair needs a lot more time!! It took me a total of 5 hours to wash, condition, blow out/dry, flat iron and trim my hair I was so exhausted afterwards that I could not even take pictures. Too bad because my hair reverted a little bit during the night. My hair desperately needs a good trim but all in all I am very happy with it´s overall condition. I love the thickness and have enough hair to play around with. I love having hair to play around with and that is why I settled for a long term transition instead of a big chop. I ended up chopping off the rest of my relaxed/ texlaxed ends at 17 Months post relaxer you can read about that here just in case you missed out on that Long term transition update!

Flat ironed hair at 2 years post relaxer

flat ironed hair at 2 years post relaxer

The journey has had it´s ups and downs and I am really grateful to God for giving me the strength and patience to get to know my hair and learn to care for it. I am still learning though because this hair is just full of surprises. I have three different curl patterns on my head and I am still learning how to care for each because they behave very differently.

I have finally found a hair care routine that works well for my hair. If you would like a blog post on my latest hair care routine, please comment below.

My goal for this year is to get to mid back length when my hair is stretched/ straight. This means that I will be on a very strict hair routine until I achieve my goal :)

What is your goal length for this year?

Thanks for reading and God bless you!

Joanne

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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