I am Vanessa, an owner of a fluffy afro, I know how hard it can be sometimes to handle and style your curls. I can’t imagine a person who could have described it better than an American writer Phoebe Robinson: “We black girls are conditioned from a young age to treat our natural hair as a problem that needs to be remedied, that we need to have that ‘good hair,’ meaning hair that, in its natural state, is not difficult to comb through”. While trying to reach the “good hair” state, a lot of us went through hair processing, such as hot combs, blowouts, weaves, perms and even chemically relaxing their hair. And trust me, this is not just extremely harmful to the hair, but also those processes are very expensive. For me, the-straightening-my-hair-phase came when I was a teenager and of course, the hair straighteners weren't powerful enough, so I ended up using a flat clothing iron (I still have a huge burn mark in my shoulder from that). Few times I even thought about chemically relaxing my hair, but luckily the cost of it was way out of our family pay-check.
My mum, who is a lovely Finnish woman with blond straight hair and blue eyes, was quite handy when it came to handling my hair. She learned how to braid it, do Bantu knots and tie it into a perfect bun for my gymnast competitions so that it wouldn’t look different from my teammates’. The biggest challenge was that she never had the right tools to do it. To simply brush my hair, she couldn’t just march to a normal supermarket and buy a brush. I don’t know if you have noticed, but most of the brushes have these small plastic balls in the tips. Therefore, every time I brushed my hair, I had fewer spikes in my brush and more in my hair. My mum found herself buying a dog brush with no plastic on the tips. So yes! Till today, I have brushed my hair with a dog icon on the brush handle.