Life with curly, err, fuzzy hair.

@postaday 111; #postaday2011

I have naturally curly hair. But that’s only part of it. I have hair that explodes into fuzz as the humidity climbs. In South Jersey where I grew up, there is plenty of humidity. I was tortured on a daily basis for having curly hair in a world where all beautiful girls had straight hair. I thought I would never have a boyfriend and never get married and that my life would be a failure because of my hair. As you can see, my hair is actually an extension of my vivid imagination. Fortunately, I was wrong about all that. Yay, me.

In Hawaii, where I have lived for just about 30 years, we have plenty of humidity. In this melting pot of a state, there are a lot of women with hair like me, actually better than me, with their long, dark and wavy locks.  My hair behaved in Texas, where I lived for about six months. My hair didn’t cope well in the California desert, circa 1980, and before I had yet to discover hair care products for women of color. They saved me. To this day I invest and rejoice in hair care products for the sisters!

Now we have all kinds of products. So you would think that there would be no excuse for the condition of my hair in the photo that I posted on Facebook yesterday. If you think there was no product in my hair, guess again. The plight of fuzzy locks is that they are temperamental. They love a product, they soak up a product, they say enough already and the hair doesn’t cooperate. That was the case yesterday.

So last night I got out the Pantene deep conditioner for curly hair and saturated my head with it. The hair looks better today, but really, it has looked better than this in the past. Time to shuffle the products around on the bathroom shelves, of which several are dedicated to my hair. I’ll move some of the recently used products to the back, some of those I hadn’t used in a while to the front. I have learned that it’s best to actually keep the arsenal stocked, to not toss products because they aren’t working right now, because just like platform shoes from the 70s, it all cycles back through.

I guess that’s my environmentally responsible commitment for this Earth Day 2011: To not load up on even more products, but to use those I have until I’m stepping on them to squeeze out every last moisturizing, curl-inducing, splat.