I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I genuinely believe that blaming it on “what black men find attractive” is yet another excuse. Listening to reasoning like this can make your own perceptions of beauty tainted and change.

One thing the internet had taught me is that you can find someone to believe in absolutely anything, after all wasn’t it a few years ago that the websites where people offer their sexual organs up for eating by other cannibals was discovered.

EVERYTHING is beautiful – this is a fact which has been proven over and over and over again.

What the woman was portraying as a fact about black men, was actually her opinion of a fact. Her opinion states that that is sufficient reason to choose to betray your natural looks – it is not!!

I used to thing that going natural wasn’t something everyone could do, and I’ve been natural for a year – ask me 3 months ago I would have told you I was considering putting on a weave – I was getting agitated, I got compliments from men about my new found confidence and natural beauty but my friends just weren’t buying it. They would only listen if I presented length or a full hairline, they still believe beauty is within extensions.

Now there IS nothing wrong in wearing extensions, but the whole nature of doing so is usually founded in feeling you need more to make yourself look good – yes this argument can be used for makeup – but makeup doesn’t damage our faces, we can remove it and sleep knowing our face will still be the same, but the whole weaving, gluing etc, that really makes us neglect the careful nature in which our natural hair screams to be handled is a real problem.

All my friends have at most 4 – 6 inches of dry hair on their scalps, one is extremely allergic to extensions (like me), another suffers from ecezma (sp?) another has lost 2 inches of her hairline, when the weaves come off, you see the shock and horror on their faces, but then it’s like a drug, they don’t want to see the truth, so they quickly weave on another to hide it.

I am being judgemental, I know I am, but I am extremely passionate about this topic.

Personally for me, my hair has had more to do with my state of being than just being on my head, it was sometimes the deciding factor on whether I felt included or excluded, it was the deciding factor of which outfit I should wear, what makeup to use, and going natural conflicted with the whole rock chick image I had styled for myself.

When I first considered it, the image of Jill Scott and India Aire were the only I could imagine, and I didn’t think there was any space for me, these women were beautiful women with glowing skin (I had acne and considered myself at the time to be just slightly better than average looking – now I know I’m stunning :P hehe!!). These women wore natural clothes – you know what I mean!! The heavy earrings, the beads, you didn’t see a natural headed woman with false eyelashes and lipgloss at the club or being picked up at the bar – instead you saw the ones who bought the longest weaves, who had the straightest hair pictured having a life – other than that which involves rolling around in grass and being ‘full figured’.

Gosh, I think I’ve gone on for too long..