Journey to Lazy Natural

I am not my hair!

I don’t remember why I wanted a perm in the first place.

I was twelve when I stepped through the salon doors, the chimes announcing my arrival. My mother had scheduled an emergency appointment as my uniform cornrows began disappearing under a bed of new growth. Although I don’t remember if a fight preceded this specific occasion, it seems safe to assume there was some amount of kicking and screaming. All my notable salon memories involve tense confrontations over my reluctance to go. It was never a happy place.

I grabbed one of the free lollipops meant to pacify fidgety children and plopped down on the ragged leather waiting seats. When it was my turn to sit in the big girl chair, the hairdresser looked at me expectantly.

I want it straight.

While my mother looked shocked, the hairdresser was unperturbed, as if pre-teens asking for chemical relaxers was an everyday occurrence. When she looked at my mother, I remember the bewildered shrug she gave that was enough to serve as approval.

To be fair, bewildered was her default setting in every salon. She’s had the same teeny weeny afro since the 1980s, and knows pretty much nothing about doing hair. Her excuse was generational: my grandmother wore a similar teeny weeny afro since seemingly the late 1950s. Determined to break the teeny weeny cycle, I think getting a perm became my way of asserting personhood and staking out my own path

My grandmother’s TWA shines in the center. Oh, and there’s Maya Angelou on the left.

Inspiration could’ve come from any number of places. Every salon visit offered a front-row seat to the endless parade of older women arriving for hair transformations. Jealousy panged in my stomach watching them leave with their cascading curls while I was relegated to cutesy cornrows and twists. Perhaps I began to associate a silky smooth perm with being grown, and my pre-teen logic decided that middle school was the perfect time to debut such a look. Perhaps my tween obsession with Raven Symoné fed my desire for long, silky straight tresses, not realizing that hers were the result of thousands of dollars in weave and extensions. Perhaps my mother’s exhausted mutterings while combing through my hair snaked its way into my still-malleable brain.

Either way, perms became a fixture of my adolescence. The ritual became comforting--the mixing of the pasty white substance, the tingly smell, the slight burn on my scalp followed by the rushed sprint to the sink. But the butt-length That’s So Raven inches I so desired never appeared. A perpetual bob persisted through high school, and despite endless protein treatments, trims, and salon visits every 6–10 weeks, it never grew past my shoulders. Not even into a chic lob. The “grown” look I had been chasing became my main source of insecurity--why at 16 did I have the same hairstyle as my school’s secretary?

Does it get more 2000s than a denim bucket hat?

I don’t remember why I wanted to go natural, either.

By 18, the never-ending salon visits drained me. I was actually entering adulthood instead of pretending to, and this time I wanted a new look that didn’t age me 10 years. I was also headed to the number one HBCU in the country, and visions of frolicking around campus with a giant afro, like some 70s era revolutionary, filled my head. When I told my hairdresser, who had watched me grow up in her chair, that I no longer wanted a perm, she stared at me in confusion.

“Really? Right before you go to college? What are you gonna do instead?”

A great question that I couldn’t answer. It never occurred to me that I would have to decide. Decisions hadn’t been necessary; the ritual always commenced automatically. I pulled up a YouTube video of some girl doing a twist out on her loose curls, and naively offered it as inspiration. She was quick to laugh.

“Girl your ends are completely dead. No curl is coming out of these strands anytime soon.”

Dead ends. I decided to make an exit and cut them all off. I started college with a teeny weeny afro of my own.

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Going natural seemed like a way to relieve my hair burden, or so I thought. At the time, the natural hair movement was a little past its peak, but still thriving. YouTube overflowed with videos promising long, healthy hair in “just five easy steps,” tutorials for the perfect twist-out, and demos of supposedly effortless updos. But “natural hair,” or at least as presented by the movement, proved a misnomer. Nobody naturally grows perfectly defined, shiny curls straight from the scalp. Those “effortless” looks actually demanded hours of labor and constant manipulation. And when my own texture of fine hair and tight coils revealed itself after nearly a decade of chemical relaxers, I realized it would take me even more work to bend and mold it into the aspirational styles I saw online. Admitting burnout from ten-step wash days or daily moisturizing routines was met with an unspoken judgment: you just didn’t want it badly enough.

But I wanted it pretty damn bad. Growing my hair past my shoulders became an obsession. I watched every video, cornered every hairstylist I met, piecing together my own hair bible. One stylist swore by a certain shampoo, so I bought it. Another insisted on a brush—until someone a commenter declared that brush was the enemy of healthy hair, so I had to switch to a wide-tooth comb. I got the deep conditioner a vlogger devoted fifteen minutes to praising, and started detangling when my hair was soaking wet—until another “expert” swore dry detangling was the only way to go. And so it went.

@ctrlszanthis era brings me so much comfort. #fyp #blacktiktok #2010 #tumblr #moodboard #naturalhair #targetaudience

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At 22, I reached a breaking point.

It was my first salon visit post-pandemic. Lockdown had offered a chance to embrace my natural hair, but I took the break from society as an opportunity to get a break from my hair. Bonnets and scarves rarely left my head as most days I couldn’t be bothered to get out of bed. Hair was washed occasionally and detangled when energy allowed (which wasn’t often). My fantasies became focused on how long my hair would be after months of leaving it alone, which some swore was the secret to retaining length.

My salon plan was simple: get a silk press and a trim. From my approximate calculations (mindlessly playing with strands of my hair), my hair had made its way down my back, and I could hardly wait to have my suspicions confirmed. Everything was going well at first. The salon had complimentary champagne, the shampoo felt amazing, and the TV was playing the Real Housewives of Atlanta (my favorite franchise).

Glances at the mirror during flat ironing fueled my anticipation. I imagined stepping out of the salon, the wind catching my new inches, my hair billowing gently behind me. I imagined finally feeling beautiful in a way that didn’t require an asterisk.

Then, she pulled out the scissors.

“You have a looooot of split ends. Split all the way up the shaft.”

She took a picture of the back of my head, and then drew a line. “I need to cut at least to here to get rid of the dead ends.”

She was proposing around 4 inches. Bra-strap length hair reduced to my dreaded shoulders. Tears welled behind my eyes.

“Do you get braids a lot? If you get a lot of braids and no trims, I see this happen.”

Another dead end. Back to the bob I went.

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When the ordeal ended, I ran to my car and let the tears take over, sobbing so hard my breath caught in my throat. A call to my boyfriend offered no solace. “You’re scaring me,” he said. The intensity of emotion scared me too.

I would start to calm down, but then the absurdity of the situation would kick in and give new life to my tears. The length of my hair had come to mean so much to me--it became a vessel for all the visions and dreams I had for myself, for the kind of person I wanted to become. The breakdown wasn’t just over a haircut, it was the grief of losing that fantasy version of myself I was working so hard to make real. Not just someone with natural hair, but someone who was naturally beautiful.

Embarrassment emerged as well. I realized that those dreams rested on something as simple as vanity—a trait I had deluded myself into thinking I was above. Somewhere along the line, pretty hair got confused with healthy hair, and I let that notion guide my choices. I wore braids back-to-back without trims or breaks, because they looked good. I ignored the damage, because damage meant I wasn’t succeeding.

The natural hair community isn’t uniquely focused on these things more than any other beauty fad in today’s culture. Diet culture wraps expensive cleanses and restrictive eating in self-care language, asserting that they’re essential to taking care of your body. Being fat is seen not just as an aesthetic failure, but also a moral one. Similarly, four hour wash days and hundreds of dollars of products were frequently billed as necessary steps to embracing your hair. With relaxers, wigs, and extensions, everyone knows you’re making a bargain, trading “healthy” hair for the sake of the look. But natural hair shifts the stakes. You don’t just want it to look good; you want it to be good. If it isn’t, failure feels extremely personal. That’s how I felt in that salon chair, like a failure.

After the car breakdown, it was clear the level of attachment to my hair was unsustainable. Something had to give. Ten-step wash days shrank to just two or three. Rigid hair styling schedules became much more fluid; if I went an extra day or six without washing my hair, it wasn’t the end of the world. Wearing it out got easier the more times I did it, even when the curls refused to clump just right. Impulses to scream and cry were diminished with deep breaths and a reminder: it’s only hair. As the pressure for my hair to perform eased, so did the pressure to perform myself.

A video titled MY LAZY NATURAL WASH N GO ROUTINE popped up on my front page one day. Lazy natural. The phrase stuck—not in the sense of carelessness, but as a way of detachment. Hair could be cared for without turning into a project or a bottomless pit for self-worth. Acceptance could co-exist with growth.

By 24, my routine settled. Now, washing and styling takes on average fifty minutes, often timed by the length of a chatty podcast. Twist-outs, blow-drying, and the occasional braid-out form the core, but sometimes styling gets skipped altogether. On those days, I let my hair shrink up to the ears, far above my shoulders, and let my coils fall where they may.

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Lazy Natural is my framework for moving through a world that's obsessed with beauty. Through a mix of personal reflections and pop-culture observations, I explore what it means to step away from the endless hustle of desirability and find comfort in what’s already there.