One Year Healthy Hair Journey

Oh my how time flies! It is already one year since I started this obsession my healthy hair journey, one whole year since I’ve been taking better care of my hair! 365 days! 52 weeks! 12 months!

How did you get here? What made you start a hair journey? Glad you asked  :D

Well, like many of the other ladies on a HHJ (healthy hair journey) my hair was damaged and breaking endlessly! The main culprit, I wanted my hair dyed black!

Ok so we have to go back a little bit further. My natural hair colour is brown (think #4 or 4/30 in weaves); I have what we call “sugar head”, it got darker as I got older but I became fed up with my hair colour anyway, I wanted a change (I think I was having a mid life crisis at the time! O­_o ). At the time, I felt like the safest thing would be to go darker with a non-permanent hair colour; I did not want to risk damages from stripping my hair to go lighter and I also wanted an easy way out just in case I did not like it. I had been going to my hairdresser at the time for some years and had seen her apply colour on many occasions with great results so I felt comfortable with her doing it. I wanted my hair jet black and so it would be! ...............Well, it didn’t quit happen as expected, my first indication to run should have been when she relaxed and dyed my hair and it looked far from black! It came out a very dirty looking colour (I can’t even describe it, it was not brown nor was it black) and even though I told her about it then she claimed it looked great. I left the salon unhappy with my “new colour” anyways. Yes, I threw down TT $1000 for a hair colour that I hated.

I got home and the more I looked at it the more I hated it so I went to the pharmacy to buy some black hair dye to do it over myself. When I got there I became even more upset, I kept thinking to myself, I don’t know jack about applying hair colour plus I had to spend another $200 plus just to buy at least two boxes to cover my entire head of hair; so I decided, you know what, I paid too much for this colour to now spend even more to correct a mistake I just paid $1000 for. I called her the next day and told her we had to rectify this, she gave me a story about my hair not taking the colour well and that I would have to use something a little stronger; assuring me that what she would use next time was a non-permanent hair colour also. She did not have it in stock so I had to wait a few days to get it done since her order was on the way. She called me two days later to let me know that I could come in to get my hair colour redone, so three days after my first hair colour I got my hair coloured again. This time the results were much better but I was not happy with the experience so she lost a loyal customer.

My hair after my recolouring
April 2011



June 2011

Over the next few months, I washed and deep conditioned my hair weekly sometimes bi-weekly but saw that the colour was not fading like it was suppose to, I had breakage and my ends was constantly dry. I did not pay it much attention at first but I knew something was not right.

 



August 2011

 

My ends are thinner in these pics

Within that time I got my relaxer and colour touch up done twice by a hairdresser recommended by a friend. Big mistake! That reminded me why I started paying 500 plus to get my hair done at my previous hairdresser in the first place. Having to wait hours at a salon to get your hair done, something or the other was never working; the place was just a hot mess! Not cool! And to top it off the senseless gossiping! OMG......When are women going to learn, people who bad mouth other people with you will also do it to you! Tell me about me dammit! Better yet, read a book! Sorry to get on a high horse but I just can’t stand that nonsense. I tell people, instead of studying what other people are doing/not doing or how they got what they have/don’t have, do you, you will be surprised at what you will accomplish if you put that same energy into something positive. Ok, I’m done lol back to the topic at hand. So fast forward to some weeks later I concluded that my original hair colour wasn’t non-permanent but a permanent one.

See how black my ends were despite all the washing over the months?
September 2011

The length of my hair was still as black as ever, my hair was dry no matter what I did and I was having A LOT of breakage. Yes, my hair was EVERYWHERE! All over my bathroom floor, all over my bed, on my clothes, on the couch, EVERYWHERE! It became scary to comb my hair because I lost sooooo much hair! My hair was getting thinner and shorter as time went by! Because of all the breakage, I decided to stop colouring my roots and started doing my touch ups myself. I really could not take another so called “hairdresser”, my two experiences with the last hairdresser was more than enough and going back to the one where I first dyed my hair was out of the question, plus looking for someone new was tiring (I had been there before). I kept cutting my hair to get rid of the damage but too much damage was already done, my hair looked terrible.

January 2012

February 2012

I was fed up and frustrated so I was contemplating going natural...................

 
Side Note:

*My one year anniversary was on the 15^th April, sorry about the delay in posting

*Because of the length of this post I decided to split it into two parts click here for part two! :)

*Forgive the quality of the pictures; they were taken with my phones at the time (blackberry 8520 or iphone 3s)