BON
My hair is like when you look into an abandoned parking lot or field in a poor neighborhood, but it's really pretty because no one's touched the grass; they just let it grow, and it's all become super tall and long and you're not sure which is the invasive species and which is the natural foliage of the land. But, it's really nice and you get sad when people want to cut it down because why not just let it be? You know, it looks fine!
Learning how to take care of my hair was a lot of trial and error and through YouTube videos. There's just not a lot of resources for black hair care, particularly the type of hair that I have.
A lot of how I dye my hair reflects my personality, and definitely parts of my culture. It's odd–there's nothing in particular about my hair I can say reflects my culture, but I feel like it does; it's the connection I have to my hair, and the love I have for my hair that's what I feel reflects my culture.
I feel like when I change my hair my personality changes! A lot of stuff that inspires me, especially after I started dying my own hair, is stuff (media) that I've seen. The split color is from, like, Todoroki (BnHA), the blonde and blue green is from this one character in Pokémon Legends Arceus, and those two ideas combined gave me this. I didn't know I was going to exactly do this until my entire head we blonde and sat and looked at it for a while and thought... Ok, that's what I'm going to do!
I have lots of memories of
being frustrated with doing my hair,
but in the end I've always really really liked my hair.
So, a lot of my frustrations were from outward experiences of people doing
things to my hair and less of me disliking my hair.
The whole time I was at my old school [the culture] was very anti-black. One incident was when someone went to enroll their son, who had braids, in the school. The school told them if you want to be enrolled in the school you have to cut his hair. Well, the mom got really mad– I think she broke one of the windows. And a couple of years later, that woman pressed charges against the school, and now that's the reason the Crown Act was passed in Illinois!
I had to wear a wig for the entire last week of my eight grade year (and graduation, and luncheon, and class trip). They wouldn't let me into the school to go to class or take any of my exams because I dyed my hair a brown color. They said the policy was that dye could only be a shade lighter or darker than your actual hair color.
I dyed it again (darker) and I was fine for a while. Then they saw it again under stage lights and said, 'your hair looks kinda red'. I said, "my hair has red undertones, I don't know what you want me to tell you!" They said, "no, your hair is this color", and then I had to dye my hair again because they said it wasn't acceptable.
Eventually I got to dye my hair blue, and that's what I've been at for most of my life. I did a period of 'rainbow undercut' style but then I went back to blue because I started dying my own hair.