Achieving and Maintaining Healthy Black Hair  

Let's face it ladies having your hair styled just the way you want it can do wonders for your physical appearance as well as improving your overall sense of wellbeing. Whether its done at home or in a fancy beauty salon, the results are usually the same. You look great and feel wonderful. Is that all there is to it? The answer should be no!  You need to stop and ask yourself. Is my hair and scalp as healthy as it could be? Is there a healthier black hair care solution available?

Learn what healthy hair care is all about. Know what's good and what's not so good for your hair and scalp. You have the opportunity to achieve and maintain healthy black hair. The health of your hair and scalp is just as important as any other part of your body. Don't sacrifice healthy black hair care for style. Whether you braid it, twist it', knot it, relax it, press it, weave it, extend it or wear it natural. You need to know that you can have both healthy hair care and a glamorous hair style.

Healthy black hair and scalp can lead to better hair growth, less breakage, no itching, no flaking, no hair lost, less dryness, more softness, enhanced color, more shine, better control and less maintenance.  

Seeking the latest hair style or obtaining the latest miracle product is fine but at the end of the day achieving and maintaining healthy looking hair and a healthy scalp should be your ultimate goal.  Let Black HairCare.Com International be your main source for  helping you to find that healthy black hair care solution. We will be your portal to help you find those web sites that are dedicated to helping you achieve your black hair care goals.  

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Author: Derek Derek is the guy behind of Lookhealthy. He enjoys blogging on a wide range of health topics and news when he is free.

Updated: July 28, 2011 2:14AM

My wife told me so. And yet, I had to go and open my big mouth anyway on the very sensitive subject of sisters and the hair weave epidemic currently gripping our nation. Man, oh man. It’s been, uh, unbeweaveable.

For my musings — even though they were meant for good, for the promotion of natural black beauty — one sister wrote to me saying she wanted to come downtown and punch me in the face. Another wrote disparaging me as a “bald black man” and saying that as such, I had some nerve for daring to broach the subject. Who did I think I was?

“My head is my head and I wear on my head what makes me feel happy and pretty,” wrote another sister, who said she had long healthy natural hair but often indulges in wearing weaves, changing from blonde to redhead to brunette. “I believe I can speak for most black women: ‘Don’t mess with [our] hair!’ Beweave that.”

Alas, I do beweave it.

And though I may have made one small step for man in my attempt to make one giant one for weave-kind by my examination of this hairy cultural phenomenon, I must now recede, like my hairline, from any further discussion of this most sensitive matter that can hold dangerous consequences. But I have discovered I am not alone.

“As an African-American man, I found this article to be both entertaining and dangerous. Explanation: I’ve had countless discussions with my wife, sister, cousins, and sistas over the . . . (enter whisper here) . . . weave,” writes a brother whose identity I am protecting for obvious reasons.

“Trying to convince them to just try and go without it . . . Abandon all hope ye who enters this door. Any African-American male who’s had the weave conversation quickly feels the fury. It’s easier to answer the question, ‘Does my butt look big in these jeans?’ with a ‘yes’ than to open the can of worms marked ‘weave.’

“My hat’s off to you for writing this inbox filler,” he continues. “It’s a dangerous road you’ve chosen to travel, my friend. I have seen the face of evil created by this topic and I must leave you to walk this road alone. I’m sure there is a Sista-Girls-With-Weave-Assassination-Squad heading to your office, driving a convertible with the top down to give you a piece of their mind.”

Man, I hope not. My shiny baldhead is a little hard to miss. Maybe I should go to the weave store and get a glue-on piece or a wig of dreadlocks. (Yeah, mon!)

Indeed, I recently visited a beauty supply store and was mesmerized by the wall-to-wall, nearly floor-to-ceiling assortment of hair weave pieces, clip-ons and full wigs, hawking names like “Indian Remy,” “Milky Way,” “Velvet,” “Goddess” and “Silky.” Also there were sisters, studying the hair, smiling, delighting — like kids in a candy store — as they fashioned integrating it into their own — stroking it, flipping it, lavishing in it.

As I perused the store — its Korean owners, standing at the perimeter behind the counters, a sea of cheap and also expensive, dead foreign hair and the presence of already beautiful black women seeking to camouflage theirs — it made me feel deeply sad. Sad about the continued manifestation of self-hatred bred by racism, Jim Crowism and slavery and our vain attempt to conform to a Euro-centric standard of beauty.

And this much I will say and stand by, even while standing someday in front of the Sister-Girls-With-Weave-Assassination-Squad: That black women need not be slave to the weave or the perm, nor otherwise partake in the burning or alteration of their hair; need not put weave on layaway; need not so sacrifice for a mere semblance or illusion of beauty that far pales in comparison to their own. You’re beautiful, sister, all by your lovely black self.

And just for the record, there are a few sisters out there who’ve got a brother’s back. Beweave that.

Updated: July 21, 2011 5:07PM

Un-be-weave-able!

Nearly everywhere I look, I see it — hair weave flowing, flapping in the breeze — blonde, brown, black, glossy and streaked. It approaches from the distance, like a mirage, a silhouette of cosmetic homogeneity that has been stitched or glued to the heads of my African-American sisters, some replete with eyelashes that look like sun visors.

Whether on full-grown women or little school-age girls, I see it. Indeed it is hard to miss this conspicuous consumption and indulgence in this post-modern ritual of beautification that leaves me lately scratching my bald head.

The hair, synthetic or someone else’s — worn as full headdress, as a phony pony (tail), or clip-on bang — is, in the words of many a sister, simply a matter of choice. Still, I cannot help but wonder whether this apparent weave explosion does not have a much deeper, more insidious root with consequences and implications beyond what eyes can see.

My wife has assured me that by opening this can of worms, I will get lots of hate mail.

“You don’t mess with sisters about our hair,” she warned.

Yeah, I know. . . . Don’t drop the top on the convertible. Don’t even think about a sister getting in the swimming pool and risking getting her hair wet. And accept that for the rest of her life she’s going to spend hours each month in a beauty shop, getting her hair “fried, dyed and laid to the side” just so she can feel beautiful.

So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t it a woman’s choice to straighten her hair with chemicals or a hot comb, or to curl, crimp or lock? Isn’t weave just an accessory?

“I am not my hair,” I have heard many sisters say, echoing the words of singer India.Arie.

But if that is the case, I certainly can’t tell. In fact, in a sea of sisters wearing other people’s hair, what’s more clear is that that is not their hair — at least not the hair they were born with.

For the record, I am keenly aware that black women are not the only women wearing weaves of assorted varieties. And I am aware that for mankind a woman’s hair has long been considered her crowning glory — aware that weaves and wigs give women who have lost their hair to illness an alternative to baldness, aware that a little hair relaxer or a hot comb can make a sister’s hair a lot more manageable. I get all that.

And to this much I will also concede: We are not our hair. None of us are, whether male or female, black, white or brown. And the core of what and who we all are runs more than skin deep.

I also believe that my 15-year-old daughter’s hair, whether coarse and short, or thick and stubborn in its natural state, is beauty sufficient for a queen. That she need not be blonde or add extensions, clip-on bangs or a long flowing hair weave whose strand of DNA does not match her own. And she need not be slave to the life-long burning — whether chemical or otherwise — used to alter her hair’s natural state just to feel beautiful. She was born beautiful.

And yet, I am aware of the pressures, aware of a mainstream societal standard of beauty that favors long, flowing, straight hair, which does not occur naturally for so many of my sisters. I am aware that the so-called glamorous images staring back from the covers of magazines and television, and the way some brothers seem to salivate over them, can make a sister want to reach for a box of Revlon or for some Indian Remy Hair weave.

But here lately, I see more sisters wearing an assortment of natural hairstyles — dreadlocks and twists, short naturals and even Afro puffs — styles that accentuate their skin tone, their brown eyes and their natural-born beauty — a beauty, that in a word, is simply, un-be-weave-able.