A New Day

You see that look on my face? That's me after just washing my hair. It looked and felt like I washed every single twist off of my head. In the picture, I look like I'm wearing a little afro with some twists shooting out here and there. Needless to say, I had a lot of work to do that night.








As for the process, here goes. I have been going to my usual websites. Nappturality.com and just recently Motowngirl.com. Grrreeat website!!! It gives you recipes for homemade concoctions that are great for natural hair. The only problem with this website is that you cannot copy and paste the information, nor can you print the page. I painstakingly typed each hair recipe onto Word and printed it from there so that I could have access to the information at home. The ingredients in these hair recipes are a little strange to me, though. For example the use of honey. Who would think to put honey in their hair...on purpose? Anyways, I'll give you an example of what I did when I washed my hair just recently.

I shampood my hair with a conditioner. Before I did this, I used a recipe off of the Motowngirl website for conditioning. It's called the honey/olive oil conditioner. Basically, you mix 3 teaspoons of honey and one fourth cup of olive oil together and massage it all over your hair. You then cover your head with something (I used a plastic bag) and leave it in for a half hour. Next, you wash it out and voila! Now, I'm not going to lie to you. The concoction was sticky. I did not like putting it into my hair, either. The oil did it's thing...you know, smoothed out the honey a little bit. But there's so much it could do. I felt VERY uncomfortable, gooping that stuff onto my head. And spent a good period of time wondering if everything was going to stick to my hair from that point on. (It didn't)

After the "not quite a shampoo-shampoo," I used something called an apple cider vinegar rinse. This is like a clarifier. It's a mixture of one to two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and two cups distilled water. You pour it over your head after you shampoo and it completes the hair cleansing process. Now I wasn't all that much impressed with the final result. That's not to say that the recipes that I tried didn't do their jobs, just that I didn't get the earth shattering results that I anticipated. My hair felt a little funny. Like clean, but not very soft. In fact, it wasn't even oily from the olive oil. Nothing, nada!

I got to work retwisting, using the ORS hair locking gel (with some olive oil in it). Clipped on the hair clippy things and blew dry my hair. Unfortunately, I was too tired to take pictures right after (and I had to go to work at 4 in the morning). But here's one I took a day later. Kind of hard to make out my hair, but here goes...

So that was my hair washing adventure. I will be washing my hair more often now that the grace period is up and I'm hoping to be able to see the benefits of these homemade conditioners and clarifiers.

Okay, now for one of the more interesting concoctions that I made this morning. I used the recipe for MotownGirl's Homemade Spritz with my own little additions. I had to buy some essential oils (which are not easy to come by and not very cheap either.) I purchased them from a Whole Foods Store.

The things that you see in this picture are castor oil, vegetable glycerin, jojoba oil, lavender oil, rosemary oil, tea tree oil and peppermint oil. And boy those essential oils are strong! For the Homemade Spritz, I used water, my pantene conditioner, olive oil and some tea tree oil (which I added for kicks-and the 4 little droplets that I used gave the whole concoction a different scent). I put everything into an 8 oz. spray bottle, shook it up and sprayed my hair.

It was then and there, in my bathroom, that I heard my hair let out a deep sigh! My hair literally said, "aaaah."

It felt softer and my twists were springier. My hair smells terrific. The funny thing is that it's not oily at all, just soft. I absolutely love this stuff. I will be using it everyday. Two thumbs up.

I also mixed water and 4 drops peppermint oil to make MotownGirl's Scalp Energizer. I poured this into an 8 oz. spray bottle. A few sprays of that to the head and it stimulates the scalp (which stimulates hair growth). I didn't really feel the tingly sensation that I expected, but I love the smell of peppermint. My boyfriend was calling me Peppermint Patty today. I think he liked the way it smelled too. So two thumbs up for that recipe.

That's me looking like I'm going to blow my brains out with the homemade hair spray.

Well that's the journey this week. I can't wait to mix up more recipes with the rest of my ingredients. If you want to try this stuff too, here's the place to go...

http://www.motowngirl.com/

...happy experimenting!