Chocolate Hair / Vanilla Care : Natural hair care for kids, adoption, and family life.

October 31, 2010

Happy Halloween 2010


Gingerbread Kid, 2008	Angel, 2009	Little Miss Muffet, 2010

I received the two best pieces of advice from Mama Marissa (hi, Marissa!): 1) Start styling hair early because the sooner Boo learns to have her hair done the easier it will be; and 2) Teach her to sleep in a sleep cap as early as possible. Unlike me, Marissa is a licensed cosmetologist so I had no excuse not to follow her advice. Since we've brought Boo home I have received tons of advice (both solicited and unsolicited) from nearly every source imaginable. But these two pieces from Marissa have been truly a saving grace for us in this household.

Thursday's Thoughts: Best-Laid Plans

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm a planner and part of that planning includes hair. I had everything figured out for this week and next, around Halloween and school photos. But as everyone knows, sometimes things just don't work out as you planned them. Or, more often than not, you end up changing plans to better suit the reality of each day as it arrives.

Detangling: What We Do and Why We Do It

By it's very nature, curly hair is tangled hair. If you don't have curly hair yourself, this may be news to you. You see, those little coils and ringlets are actually clumps of hair that are intertwined to give them the curly shape that we all know as curls. If you brush through curled hair you loosen the intertwined hairs from one another and the curls will no longer hold their coiled shape. This gives curly hair a frizzy appearance, and the reason why we never really brush curly hair when dry.

Hectic Holiday Hair Planning

Benin girl with traditional hairstyle, photo by Frédéric Renaud

It's just the beginning of the holiday season and I'm already starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. This year things are little different as far as planning hair. At this point, I'm very glad I only have one child's hair to worry about on a regular basis as I'm learning as I'm going and think that trying to "do it all" with several sets of hair might just "do me in!"

Two Strand Rope Twist Veil with Two Puffs

So as I mentioned in yesterday's post, we have a couple things going on this week that coloured how we needed to do hair. Halloween costume on Thursday, Boo having a cold, Daddy's birthday today, and a child's birthday party tomorrow all helped contributed to our choice to do the Veil style this week. Well, that an Mama Holli wanted to know how, so who am I to say no? And seriously, although the name of this style is long and complicated, the style is anything but!

Saying Goodbye to Free Hair: Detangling and Plaiting

Well, the time has come to say goodbye to Boo's free hair. She's bummed. Now that she is officially sick, all she wants to do is sit around in her sleep cap with her blanket and pajamas, so it's more comfortable to have her hair down rather than in some style with lots of rubber bands. I still haven't decided what I'm going to do tomorrow, but tonight's detangling went remarkably easier than we thought it was going to, especially considering all of the obstacles that Boo's hair faced during the week.

The Murphy's Law of Hair: Part II

No, I was not planning on doing a "Part II" to the Murphy's Law post. But then, Murphy's Law isn't really a predictable thing now, is it!?! Just when I thought we had beaten the rain, we encountered several other trials to the "free hair week" to which we had so looked forward. You know what they say, "When it rains, it pours!"

The Murphy's Law of Hair: Update on Free Hair Style This Week

Well, it's Tuesday of "free hair week" and I thought I should give all of you a chance to see how Boo's hair is holding up. When I decided on this style, I had no idea what we were going to be up against this week. Talk about being thrown a curve-ball!

Free Hair Week: 4a/4b Hair with Style!

We have decided to do free hair this week. Free hair means that Boo will be wearing her natural curls, free of braids, twists, cornrows, or puffs. I don't want to say that she has "no style" because, well, free hair is a style in and of itself! And a beautiful one at that!

Plaiting Hair: Preserving the Efforts of Detangling

"Plait" is just a fancy word for "braid." And just like braids, there are many different ways to plait one's hair. But why bother plaiting hair at all? The simple answer is, to preserve all that hard work we did detangling hair in the first place!

Detangling Hair That Might Be Starting to Loc

Let me preface this post by saying that we have had to deal with this only once (I don't think many people need more than once to learn their lesson), and probably not to the extent the some people have. I can only speak about the personal experience that I have had and tell you how I dealt with it. Like a lot of what I post, our methods might not work for you, depending on the details of your situation and what type of hair your child has. If you are coming to this post with a child that has hair that hasn't been cared for properly for a lengthy period of time, who has matted hair that has started to loc, I cannot guarantee that you will be able to detangle the hair. But hey, there's no reason not to at least try to detangle before resorting to the scissors, right?

Using Apple Cider Vinegar (ACV) to Cleanse Hair

photo by Artnow314

Mama Holli asked me a question the other day about the gunk that builds up in her daughter A's hair around rubber bands. I'm sure many of us have seen this before; it's a combination of product, shed hair, and dirt. It sort of looks like little dust bunnies clumping around the rubber band. When you remove the rubber band you notice that the hair is still clumped together and the stuff holding it that way is a little like glue and may have whitish fuzz.

How To Do a Two-Strand Rope Twist

Seriously, if you don't even know how to braid, two-strand rope twists are some of the easiest things to do. My husband cannot braid to save his life, but he can do a two-strand rope twist.....yes, they're that easy!

Rope Twists in Diamonds

This is not exactly the style I wanted to do for Boo this week, but she put in a special request for beads (her "star" beads, in particular) so I had to choose something that would work specifically with those. The issue is that the star beads have a larger whole than the smaller beads, and don't work on really thin box braids. Further, although Boo's hair is very long, it is not very thick, thus requiring that I make pretty large boxes in order to have twists fat enough to accommodate the beads.

Daddy's Involvement with Hair

Daddy detangling Boo's hair

Once people become parents there is always the inevitable discussion of what would happen should one of us pass. We are no exception. But with that discussion comes the hair issue: If I were to pass, could my husband manage to care properly for Boo's hair? Yes, yes he could.

Share the Hair: Faux French Braids

I know there are plenty of blended families out there and it just didn't seem right to hog all the cool hairstyles for just the chocolate girls; so I've decided to add a new feature to the blog called "Share the Hair." Every so often I will post how to take one of the cool hairstyles that Boo has worn and translate that to Type 1/2 hair. I mean, vanilla girls might want to have their hair done-up pretty too, right?

How to Straighten Twists/Braids and Deal with Broken Rubber Bands

The Faux French Braid style of this last week gave me the perfect opportunity to cover a couple of style maintenance issues, the first of which is how to straighten the braids after they've been slept on. If your child is anything like Boo, she doesn't sleep in the "pretty position," at which point when she awakens the next morning braids and twists are very often kinked every-which-way (including pointing straight up!). This is a very easy thing to address. During Boo's breakfast, the first thing I do is spray on her daily spray conditioner to wet the braid or twist. I'll add water if necessary to get it wet enough to hold the "re-set." Then, while she's eating breakfast, I will put clips in the braid or twist; not so much to straighten them, but to weigh them down so that they will hang properly.

How Much Stuff Is Too Much: Doing Hair on a Budget

photo by paul falardeau

Yesterday I drove all the way to Los Angeles (a two hour drive) to buy a hair product that is not sold down here in San Diego. Okay, not really. But sort of. We were out of conditioner to co-wash Boo's hair and the stuff I wanted is not available down here (I wanted to try something new). When I went to order it online I discovered that the product was $12 (which I thought was reasonable) and cost another $8 for shipping (um, not so much). Yes, it cost me the same amount of money (if not more) in gas to drive to get it rather than have it shipped. But the truth is, we were planning to go to Los Angeles to visit Boo's Grammy anyway, so we figured we'd just go this weekend instead of waiting until later in the month. Two birds, one stone, right?

Faux French Braids; or Piggyback Braids

This week's style is inspired by Mama Holli (hi Holli!), and her daughter A's hair that she wore last week. Mama Holli didn't do the style herself, but she certainly could have. In fact, if you walk away with anything from this post hopefully it will be with the confidence that you can master this very simple, yet very cute "do."

Removing the Ballerina Up-do

Wow, this was a lousy style choice for this past week. We started on Monday with incredibly hot, dry Santa Ana conditions and within 24 hours were experiencing tropical thunderstorms with high humidity. Poor Boo's hair didn't know what to do! Truthfully, I think her hair was just having the same issues dealing with the crazy weather that the rest of us were having.