When you’re on a healthy hair journey one of the things that can come with it is a hair setback. That is when something goes wrong with your hair and it causes you to lose some or a lot of the progress you’ve made with reaching your hair goals.
Whether you realize it or not, several relaxed hair bloggers have experienced a setback of some proportion. I recently had one and am currently working to help my hair fully recover.
As part of my plan to get my relaxed hair healthy again I started taking hair vitamins.
I’ve taken biotin pills in the past and really didn’t notice a huge difference in my hair so I decided to try some other vitamins with a different formula.
I looked at several brands and vitamins on the market and decided to try out two that are from hair brands.
- The Mielle Gummy Healthy Hair Adult Vitamins
- And The Mane Choice Manetabolism Plus Healthy Hair Vitamins
Instagram and I have a bit of a love/hate relationship. Overall I’m not a fan of the app but it’s kinda a necessity for bloggers, especially ones in the beauty space like me.
One of the issues I have with Instagram is that it doesn’t allow you to include links in each of your posts like you can in other social apps. Instead, you can only include one link in your profile. The kicker is one link is never enough.
This happens to me every year. Winter comes and the dry air it brings dries out my skin causing all sorts of issues and discomfort. I start having itchy, ashy-looking skin and have even experienced some skin peeling because of it.
I haven’t done one of these in a while. A hair update as a blog post. Lately, I’ve been sharing my hair updates on
Instagram or on my
YouTube channel.
So what’s so special about this update that I decided to do a blog post? Well, I’ve got some plans for getting my hair back to the healthy state it was in before and I wanted to put it all in writing for you.
For over a year I had been experiencing some hair breakage in areas, my hair wouldn’t hold any moisture, and my hair would look rough and hardly ever smooth. I tried several things but nothing helped.
It has been raining new foundations for the last few months. It’s been a bit overwhelming on what to try and what to pass on. Some brands made it simple for me because the foundation formula seemed better suited for dry skin and I have oily skin.
So it’s no surprise that the new foundation I reached for was the Urban Decay Stay Naked Weightless Liquid Foundation. I use and really like the Urban Decay All Nighter setting spray so I thought I should look more into what this foundation is all about. After reading about the foundation and watching a few YouTube reviews I was intrigued.
SheaMoisture has been a part of my healthy relaxed hair journey since close to the beginning. Admittedly we did have
a rough start but over time it started to get along with my hair. I’ve used and shared several SheaMoisture shampoos and deep conditioners over the years that my hair has really, really liked and a few that my hair hasn’t. Even during those down times, I didn’t think it would come to this. I didn’t think that I would feel the need to break up.
So what is leading to this break up? It’s something that’s been building for a little while so it’s not one thing but really a multitude of things.
I know I’m not alone with breaking up with SheaMoisture. In fact, there have been calls on Twitter for a while now to cancel SheaMoisture for various reasons which I’ll talk about but I’m not really going that far. My reasons for breaking up with SheaMoisture are more personal.
So why have people been canceling SheaMoisture?
You’ve probably heard about it by now. (If you haven’t where have you been hiding?) I’m talking about the Fenty Beauty Pro Filt’r Soft Matte Longwear Foundation.
It was the foundation that rocked the beauty industry and rightfully so. It launched with a record 40 shades with most of them shades for all tones of brown skin.
Additionally, this foundation looked to be perfect for oily skin like mine.
- It’s a soft matte
- It claims to give skin an instantly smooth, pore-diffused, shine-free finish
- It’s supposed to be resistant to sweat and humidity
- It also says to be long-wearing and feel light-as-air
How often should I wash my relaxed hair? This is a question I’ve asked myself and one that I get often in DMs, emails, and see in relaxed hair Facebook groups. While this is a simple and valid question, it’s not so simple to answer.
There are a lot of varying opinions about this and after searching online I wasn’t able to find one clear answer so I’m going to be sharing my opinion based on my research and experience with my hair.
Let me tell you, finding a deep conditioner or hair masque without protein ingredients in it is really, really, really hard. So I couldn’t limit myself to just specific brands, I cast a wide search net.
One of the brands that ended up in that next is Not Your Mother’s. I’d never tried anything from Not Your Mother’s before but had heard about them and watched some video reviews for some of their products. I had also seen that their products were very affordable.
You’ve heard and even read that it’s important to keep a moisture and protein balance in your hair. So you alternate between using a protein conditioner and a moisturizing conditioner each wash day. There, the moisture and protein are balanced. But are they really? Is that really all there is to it?
I’ve found that really understanding what maintaining a moisture and protein balance means goes a bit deeper than that. Not all hair needs constant moisture and not all hair needs constant protein. It depends on hair type, styling methods, whether you have relaxed hair, color your hair or are natural.
Do you know what a leave-in conditioner is? Do you use one on your hair whether it’s relaxed or natural? If you don’t you should because your hair will thank you. Especially if you use a good leave-in conditioner.
Back in middle and high school, I used leave-in conditioners on my hair but I didn’t like the way they made my hair feel. My hair sometimes felt stiff, weighed down, sticky, or greasy. That’s because of the ingredients that were used in most products for relaxed hair back then and I wasn’t using leave-in conditioners that were good for my relaxed hair. So I stopped using leave-in conditioners for years.
Is It wrong that I’m a beauty blogger who doesn’t go or shop at Sephora more than once or twice a year? If it’s even that much.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Sephora. So much so that both times I was in Canada one summer I made a special trip to browse around the store. While I’ll visit Sephora I don’t shop there much. I think one of the reasons is the store seems dark and moody to me so it kinda puts me out of a shopping mood when I go in there. Plus the majority of the makeup and other products cost so much more than my budget can handle.
But I digress. I’m not here to bash Sephora but to talk about the 2020 Spring Sale that is starting April 23rd for Beauty Insiders. Since I’m only at Beauty Insider status I’m just going to briefly mention some info about the other two levels and focus on us Beauty Insiders.
Many times when you read about people's experiences on their healthy hair journey they may mention that they had a hair setback. Something that messed up their hair and caused them to have to restart their hair journey.
I’ve been on a
healthy relaxed hair journey for over 5 years and had been able to avoid having a setback until now.
This setback caused me to go into a panic. I thought I had ruined my hair to the brink of no return and seriously was considering cutting it all off and starting over again.
I’m a part of several relaxed hair communities on Facebook where women share their tips about caring for their relaxed hair and can also ask questions about issues or concerns they have. One of the most common issues that seem to pop up is problems with hair shedding. What I’ve found though as I read through the comments and see the exchanges between the original poster and the responders is that the issue isn’t always shedding like the original poster said it’s breakage.
Hair shedding and
hair breakage both cause us to lose hair but they aren’t the same though they tend to be confused quite often. They have different causes, different results, and different ways to manage and reverse them. So it’s important to understand which one you’re experiencing so that you can properly address it.
I have a question for you. Does your hair regimen include nighttime hair care? No? Then you need to keep reading.
When it comes to our hair regimens whether we have relaxed hair or natural hair we tend to focus on the actions that we do during the day. Things like moisturizing and sealing, finger detangling, deep conditioning, protective styling. We put so much emphasis on those things that we either forget or ignore our hair at night when we go to bed.
Do you ever get stuck in a makeup rut? That’s what I found myself in when it came to eyeshadows. I had been using the same two shadow palettes for a while and I needed, as well as wanted, to change things up.
Before I headed to the store I did some research online to find an eyeshadow palette that had colors that would work on darker skin. I think eyeshadow palettes are great, but sadly I discovered many of the ones from drugstore brands were a waste of my money.
One of the biggest issues I have with many drugstore eyeshadow palettes is many times I can’t use half of the colors because they’re so light they look like white chalk on my eyelids.
When was the last time you cleaned your comb? How about your flat iron?
Can’t remember? Well, that could be an issue.
I admit, cleaning the tools and accessories we use on our hair tends the last thing we think about. It often seems like the one part of having hair that most people tend to forget.
I like to buy hair products and makeup. Some of my favorite stores to visit are Sephora, Ulta, and Sally Beauty. So it’s no surprise that I have several extra products sitting in drawers and cabinets in my bedroom and bathroom.
I’m typically a very organized person but you wouldn’t know it if you saw how those hair products and makeup are stored. Now while the products are all neatly stored they are in various different places in my bathroom and bedroom. This makes getting ready harder and more time-consuming mostly because I spend a bit of time gathering the products I want to use. Also, I don’t always know what I have extra, so I either buy something I don’t need or think I have something I don’t.
It’s started driving me crazy and I’ve decided it’s time for me to organize that part of my life. So I’ve been doing a lot of research online to find how I can organize my makeup and hair products. I’ve found some great organizers and tips and wanted to share them with you.
So you’ve set some hair goals for yourself this year. Most likely all of those hair goals require your hair to be healthy. And healthy hair doesn’t just happen. It takes a little bit of work, some planning, and a good hair regimen.
A hair regimen is basically a structured routine using hair products and techniques to care for hair. While creating a hair regimen seems easy on the surface there is a bit of prep work you’ll need to do before diving into picking out products. Mainly because it will be used as a guide for the products and techniques you should be using and to create a schedule for your regimen.