Suburban Afro

VILLAGE WEB COMPANY

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Village Web Company is the name of my business. I primarily build websites for small local businesses but I also offer help with social media, digital marketing, SEO or anything that involves a computer. My customers vary a lot and I’m lucky enough to have built websites for shops, charities and even a junior football team. Being a small business I understand the pressures they’re under and whenever I can, I try to steer them in the right direction and most of them take my advice – eventually!

When I originally set up my business I traded under the name WorthyOnTheWeb as that’s how I’m generally known online, but after a while I decided to rebrand as the Village Web Company. I wanted something that sounded more professional and that didn’t necessarily limit the business into simply being a solo pursuit. It was hard to imagine my felt tip pen sketches and personal nickname being used for any employees I might have one day.

After a lot extremely poor quality DIY branding, I eventually engaged somebody to redesign my logo. As part of the rebrand, I also purchased some digital artwork. The decision to buy the Village Web Company artwork was probably one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made. I’m not a graphic designer and although I’ve managed to master most of the tools, it still takes me longer than I’d like and I’m not always happy with the end result. For a very reasonable amount I bought the image, including a commercial licence. In less than an hour I was able to download the image, edit the skintone, upload the finished result to my website and order my business cards. It would have taken me at least a day to create that image from scratch, it wouldn’t have been an original idea and the end result wouldn’t have been as professional. Artists add little touches that the rest of us don’t and there are times when it’s worth paying for that expertise.

I create the artwork for the Suburban Afro website myself, primarily as a way to improve my skills and I developed the cartoon me, with some inspiration from a number of Illustrator tutorials I found online. I’m happy to pick and choose when I create my own artwork and when I support other artists by paying for their work, it all depends on the project. It took me a long time to get the hang of the pen tool so I’d hate to lose the skills I worked so hard for.

 

 

WORTHYONTHEWEB

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Although this website is dedicated to complaining about my hair, along with the occasional epiphany about actually having nothing to complain about, online I’m generally better known as WorthyOnTheWeb. I build websites for a living and SuburbanAfro was a project I started because I wanted to experiment with some WordPress themes and wanted a blog to play with. I have several personal websites and blogs dotted around the internet, most of which need to be updated including the WorthyOnTheWeb website.

WorthyOnTheWeb was a “temporary” name I came up with for a Twitter account I set up in 2010. When I first started working in digital I was advised to get on Twitter, which turned out to be great advice. It’s a brilliant source of information, contacts and inspiration for anybody working in web development or digital marketing. I already had an existing Twitter account which I set up in 2008 when somebody I barely knew fell for the “invite all your contacts to join Twitter” ruse regularly employed by the platform but I decided to start a new account with the intention of separating my personal and professional social media. Aside from the extra work of maintaining an additional personal account, it just feels more authentic to maintain a single presence most of the time. I’m already responsible for managing a number of branded social media accounts, so multiple personal accounts is a step too far. As a sole trader it’s hard enough to separate yourself from your business, especially if you are the only employee. When I started my own web development business I decided to use WorthyOnTheWeb for my business name, used some had drawn cartoon artwork and created a blog designed for small business owners without a digital background.

I eventually decided to rebrand my business as Village Web Company and maintain the domain as a personal site. I have a few ideas but my to do list is quite long at the moment so it might take a while before I get around to updating it.

My original Twitter account is still there and occasionally retweets things, the Suburban Afro Twitter account exists mainly to publicise blog posts (and test out social media tools) so if you are genuinely interested in the random thoughts I tweet on the train or the things I care enough about to publicly comment on, then feel free to follow me on Twitter as WorthyOnTheWeb.

 

I DON’T HAVE TO LOVE EVERY LAST INCH

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For those of you in a hurry I’ll condense this post into the following sentence: Disliking my hair doesn’t mean that I don’t love myself.

For those of you with the time and inclination to indulge my ramblings here’s the longer version:

There are certain aspects of my physical being that I like and some that I don’t. I also have certain physical aspects that I feel completely neutral about. As I’ve got older certain things have moved from one list to another, but despite disliking various individual parts of me, I like myself. Why wouldn’t I? In the grand scheme of things I’m pretty alright. I don’t have any festering self loathing issues that need to be dealt with. I’m fine.

Since I started this blog I’ve become increasingly conscious that there are people out there who have decided how I feel about myself and I’m not impressed.

I’m a fan of the natural hair movement. Your natural hair is nothing to be ashamed of and I wholeheartly feel that the beauty and diversity of afro hair should be celebrated. The part I’m not so impressed with is the weird notion that any black woman wearing a weave or using hair relaxer hates themselves. Other variations on this theme are that we hate or reject our heritage and / or wish we were white. That’s a pretty big leap.

Problems always occur when people start making global assumptions about people they have never met. It’s also undesirable, in my personal opinion, to start lecturing people on what they should and shouldn’t do with their own bodies.

I’m an educated woman and I’m well aware of the various factors that have resulted in some black women feeling that they have to alter their appearance. I also understand the commercial and media influences, which have affected the visibility of black people over the years. I know and understand about the “othering” of people of colour and I am well aware that these things influence what any society would view as “normal” All this aside, my experiences as a black woman born and raised in the UK does not automatically mean that I have issues and I would appreciate it if people would stop assuming that I do.

As a little girl I always wanted to have long blonde hair. I’ve never had any interest in having white skin, but I spent much of my youth daydreaming about waking up one morning with long blonde hair.

The crux of the matter is that when my mum did my hair, it hurt. There’s the problem right there. 5 year olds don’t like having their hair done if it hurts and little girls with active imaginations have the capacity to resolve their fake problems in creative ways. I’ve always been a pragmatic individual. There were two possible solutions to my problem.

  1. Get my mum to stop doing my hair – indefinitely
  2. Change my hair to something that doesn’t require an afro comb

I was a little girl in the 1970s and there was definitely a lack of diversity on the three available television channels. The straight haired blonde models on the adverts certainly didn’t look as though they regularly cried at the prospect of having their hair done. They were very smiley and spent a disproportionate amount of time shaking their heads for no reason. Their exaggerated head movements showed off their lovely long hair. When I copied them nothing happened, and I mean nothing. Short afro hair doesn’t move, no matter how much you try.

I was quite imaginative as a kid and would regularly improvise the long hair I wanted with an assortment of props, the most popular ones being a pair of tights or a long woollen cape, presumably from somebody’s christening outfit. The important thing was that I could wear it on my head and that they’d move when I twirled, unlike my afro which didn’t.

As the years went by I discarded the props and buried my afro under an assortment of shop bought hair, in every imaginable colour and when it wasn’t hidden it was chemically treated it to within an inch of it’s life. My hair has been, Toni Braxton in the 90s, short and other times so long that it tries to strangle me in my sleep. It has been braided, permed, relaxed, cornrowed, beaded, weaved and on occasion left entirely to its own devices. Throughout all of this nonsense, at no point have I wished that my skin was a different colour. I’ve wished I was taller, slimmer, curvier, quieter and occasionally smarter but never whiter.

The days of changing my hair will probably never stop, but the one thing that definitely should, is other people projecting their ideas onto people like me. I’m lucky enough to exist in a place and time where I have the freedom to be whoever I choose. The little brown girl recreating the Harmony hairspray advert didn’t need your approval and the grown woman version doesn’t either.

Don’t look at my shop bought hair and make assumptions about me or how I perceive my identity. My hair, my choice.

FAREWELL, PARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW – SAYING GOODBYE TO YOUR HAIR EXTENSIONS

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No matter how happy you were, the day your stylist put them in, eventually you reach a stage where it’s time to remove your hair extensions. If you are one of those well behaved types this will be at the appropriate time, as suggested by your hairdresser. Many of you will have taken a small detour via the delay zone and then there are some of you, whose hair extensions have been there so long that they’ve been taken hostage by your own hair! I’m not going to judge, you know who you are and I’m sure there was a good reason.

When I started writing this post I was in the process of trying to say goodbye to a weave, by that I mean that I kept looking at my hair in the mirror and shaking my head in mild despair. Whilst Barbara my hairdresser was working her magic, I was happily sitting there watching television and chatting away. I had no interest whatsoever in how I was going to get it out again.

Then came the the day I stepped away from the delay zone and decided to remove my weave. When I started that afternoon’s mission it all seemed quite straight forward. My hair was cornrowed and the shop bought hair was stitched to it. All I had to do was remove the stitches. Technically all of that remained true but the straight lines of my imagination were nowhere to be seen, well felt. I faced a maze of hair with occasional stitches. The same stitches and ends of thread that were 100% visible the day before, when I wanted to hide them, were now secret ninjas hiding deftly in the undergrowth. I spotted one and by the time I’d picked up the scissors (or seam ripper from my sewing kit) it’d disappeared again.

There was a time when I didn’t care as much as I do now. I would simply tug my hair and hack away at whatever looked like a piece of thread until I extracted the fake hair, but these days I care about what’s underneath. I finally appreciate my own hair, not enough to stop writing a blog about how it’s ruining my life, but enough to respect my home grown hair and stop butchering it whilst removing shop bought hair.

I’m trapped in a perpetual hair cycle of my own making.

  • Stage One: Sulk about my natural hair
  • Stage Two: Plan new hairdo
  • Stage Three: Book hair appointment and buy copious amounts of shiny new hair
  • Stage Four: Visit my stylist and leave with a fabulous new hairdo
  • Stage Five: Strut about for a couple of weeks like somebody in a L’Oreal advert
  • Stage Six: Notice that my shop bought hair is starting to free style
  • Stage Seven: Enter The Delay Zone 
  • Stage Eight: Fall under the curse of the Double Hair Do
  • Stage Nine: Recognise that I need to leave the delay zone but feel overwhelmed at the size of the task
  • Stage Ten: Finally remove the shop bought hair and have an extended deep conditioning treatment
  • Stage Eleven: Remember what shrinkage is
  • Stage Twelve: Return to Stage One

Sometimes I have a thirteenth stage, where I get over myself and make it past the concept of my shoulder length hair disappearing into a three inch fro and make do with my head grown hair for a while.

Despite my endless obsessing, it’s really not that bad. The only person who thinks I’m any different is me and I know that I’m being an idiot. I’m getting better at reducing my obsessive hair thoughts and being self employed my current lack of regular income means that sometimes I have no choice. Hair extensions and stylists cost money that I don’t always have.

I occasionally get a confused look from people who don’t know me that well and experience two totally different hair styles in the same week, but it’s hardly life changing and most of them recognise that I’m always me, but the hair comes and goes.

IT’S ANOTHER ME – MY SCARY BROWN DOLL

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One of my most treasured possessions is a baby doll. By modern standards she’s not the prettiest of dolls, but she means a lot to me because I’ve had her since I was very small.

My doll is made of hard, dark brown plastic, her straight hair is molded into her mainly bald head and for some reason her eyes are orange and they close noisily when you lie her on her back. My children think she’s scary and one in particular regards her as the sort of thing more at home in a horror film than a children’s playroom.

Although my doll is now wearing a pink fluffy romper, that wasn’t her original outfit, she inherited that after three decades or more of being naked. At some point in the gap between playing with dollies  and becoming sentimental and middle aged, her clothes along with lots of my other toys will have been given away. When she arrived on Christmas morning she was wearing a hand knitted orange and white dress with a matching hat. That retro number has long since disappeared and the fact that she had no other clothes, suggests that she probably didn’t come with an outfit.

As a little girl, although she was always there I don’t remember playing with her very much, but I was always very fond of her. I definitely didn’t like her as much as my Tiny Tears. Tiny Tears was the must have toy of 1970 whatever, because she weed herself if you fed her water and squeezed hard enough, which was quite impressive in those days.

So why do I have this weird attachment for her? There are two main reasons.

The first reason is that she’s a connection with my childhood. I’m increasingly fascinated with things that remind me of being a little girl. I have an entire Pinterest board dedicated to things from my childhood including television programmes I watched, Ladybird books, toys I owned, and sweets they no longer make. My doll reminds me of being a little girl and keeping her is a way to remember those days.

The second reason I’m so attached to my doll is because as the only brown doll I owned at the time, she was one of the few toys that actually reflected how I looked. I allegedly exclaimed that she was another me when I received her. All my other dolls were white and usually had blonde hair and although Tiny Tears, Sindy and Barbie were always my favourites, they didn’t look like me. To be honest “Little Claire” with her straight molded hair and orange eyes didn’t either but I knew that she was like me. It was a poor imitation but at least she was supposed to look like me and for whatever reason her hard plastic skin and noisy orange eyeballs never bothered me.

Finding dolls with brown skin is much easier to do now and they are no less attractive than their paler counterparts, although strangely enough they are sometimes referred to as “ethnic”, presumably to avoid the whole “should we call it brown?” question. If you’re buying a doll in 2018 you have a wider set of choices. Large companies are offering a range of different skin tones. Skinny and blonde may still be the default, but at least other options exist. There are also lots of small companies who are creating beautiful dolls in every skin shade.

Showing children that they are unique, but not unusual, is important. The images they see on television and in magazines matters. The characters they read about in books and the physical attributes of the toys they play with matters. My orange eyed scary doll was a part of my childhood and although we didn’t look alike she was and will forever be, another me.

 

BLACK HISTORY MONTH

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October is Black History Month here in the United Kingdom and so far I have spent it all with my natural hair. It isn’t a deliberate statement but the timing does seem to work.

I still scowl at my reflection in the mirror first thing in the morning, but I’m OK with it. My hair looks the same as it did when I was eleven, but the main difference is that I now bother combing it properly and putting a bobble in it.

As per usual there are people wanting to know when we’ll be celebrating white history month and wondering why black history needs it’s own place in the calendar. The short version is that if I, as a black woman, have made it into my mid 40s without knowing anything about the history of black people in the United Kingdom then there is a problem in which stories are being shared. I shouldn’t have to go and seek out this knowledge, it should already be there alongside the rest of things I was taught at school. There is no way for my children to understand their ancestry if I don’t.

As American television programming takes over more of the UK schedules, there is a danger that Black history will only ever be seen through the lens of how things were / are in the United States and the stories of black Britons will be lost. I know about Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but how many black British men and women do I know the stories of? Not enough. If nothing else Black History Month is an annual reminder of how much I don’t know and a prompt to find out more.

By the end of the month my afro will almost certainly be buried under a new set of hair extensions, but hopefully I’ll have some new knowledge to go alongside the new hairdo.

 

SEEING DOUBLE. THE CURSE OF THE DOUBLE HAIRDO

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There are lots of ways to have hair extensions. Quite often my go to solution is to bury my natural hair under my shop bought hair. There are various methods, but the end result is that you only see my new (and allegedly improved) hair.

This period of equilibrium exists for a brief time until eventually we witness the return of the original hair, peeking out from under the shop bought hair, giving rise to the dreaded Double Hair Do

The good news is that for a while I’m the only person who knows that there is a problem. The circle of awareness then widens to include people that are in close proximity and know about hair extensions. If the matter is not resolved, it will eventually become obvious to almost everybody, or at least that’s how it feels.

I’m currently at the relatively early stages of the Double Hair Do, but my shop bought hair is fighting to reveal my secret. At first it was quite subtle and could be resolved fairly easily on a daily basis. We were at stage one of the big reveal. As long as I parted my hair the right way there wasn’t a problem. Stage two is a slight increase, a little more work is required but it’s doable. By stage three I’m wearing a headband on a daily basis – whether I like it or not.

It’s no secret that I’m a regular user of hair extensions. I have no intention of trying to convince people that my long luscious locks grew from my scalp, but despite my honesty and openness, I draw the line at people being able to see the stitching!

Once you reach stage three things speed up and if you don’t sort things out you eventually end up sporting a short afro, whilst wearing your expensive weave like a hat on top.

If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ll know that I’m generally guilty of drifting and sometimes hurtling into the Delay Zone. The curse of the Double Hair Do is one of the consequences of spending time in that zone and it reduces the time I get to enjoy my hair and makes me feel self conscious. I have a reasonable level of self esteem for somebody that looks as ordinary as I do and whilst I don’t mind not looking like Tyra Banks, Gabrielle Union or whichever gorgeous black woman springs to mind, I’d like to spend most of my time looking like a half decent version of me. Feeling self conscious about the Double Hairdo is time I don’t really want to waste.

The vast majority of the people I come across in my daily life have no idea that I’m fighting these imaginary battles and it’s probably for the best. Spending this much time thinking about my hair isn’t productive (or in any way logical) so the answer seems to be that I need to pay more attention to what my hair is telling me. Who knows maybe one day I’ll grow up to be one of those women that schedules their next visit to the hairdressers before their hair needs redoing and I’ll finally be able to banish the Curse of the Double Hair Do once and for all.

 

I SHOULD BE GORGEOUS BY NOW

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I’m average looking. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing, it’s just a thing. Most people are average looking, it is quite unusual to meet people who are either truly beautiful or hideously ugly. The trick is to make the best of what you have.

I looked my best when I was 25/26. I was young and slim. I was old enough to know what suited me and I was earning enough money to buy the clothes, products and hairdo’s that flattered me most. I had my first management position and was driving around in a Golf GTi listening to loud music. I’m not going to lie, if I’d realised that was the best looking I was ever going to be, I’d have strutted a lot more.

Most people are average looking but with the right amount of know how can present themselves as being good looking or at least better looking than they are by nature and this educational process usually starts in your early teens. I learnt the hard way that blue eyeshadow wasn’t my best look, especially not if you just kept using the tiny sponge applicator until the colour on your eyelids looked the same as it did in the Constance Carroll set you were using. Back in the day, the make up collection of teenage girls started cheap and cheerful, none of this MAC lip colours and Zoella tutorials, if you were in your early teens during the 1980’s in Manchester, then you were probably familiar with Constance Carroll. Blue eyeshadows, pink lipsticks and electric blue mascaras were part of the learning curve. Like most girls my age, I went through the curve on my path to finding out how to apply make up properly and actually have the make up enhance my features rather than make me look ridiculous. It also helped to avoid being laughed at by my older brother. It turned out that pink circles on your cheeks wasn’t a flattering look for me and no amount of blue eyeshadow and badly applied, none moisturising, red lipstick was ever going to change that.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t especially very good at applying make up,  or choosing flattering outfits, I was very persistent and kept on going until I finally got the hang of it. Left to my own devices I would have worn stilleto heels and full make up on a daily basis but there was no way my mum was going to entertain that as an idea so it became a special occasions thing. I went through a very brief phase of not leaving the house without make up but you can probably count on one hand the number of weeks, if not days that lasted for.

When I was little I assumed that I’d be pretty when I got older. I’m not sure where that assumption came from, but little me, complete with my small uneven afro, was convinced that I’d look like a cross between Diana Ross and Donna Summer by the time I was a grown up. We were the same colour and they had the long hair I craved, so it kind of made sense. If I was seven years old now, I’d probably aim to be Beyonce.

Focusing on clothing rather than my usual obsession with my hair, my first few jobs involved a fairly specific dress code so I only needed to choose clothes for going out. As a mechanic I wore overalls and steel toe capped boots and as a postwoman I wore a Royal Mail uniform, which meant that I never woke up in the morning and had to plan an outfit. By the time I was 17 I’d transferred over to administration and once I moved past my initial stage of turning up to my job in the Personnel Department wearing jeans, I always knew what to wear. Offices have their own uniform, which despite the endless choices is actually quite straight forward. As long as you own lots of plain tops and stick to wearing either smart pants or a suit you’re set. Top Tip: When buying a suit, buy the jacket, the skirt and the trousers. The world of knowing what to wear in the morning was disrupted by retraining as a web developer. Jeans and hoodies are very practical and being warm and comfortable is very appealing. There are few professions where that particular dress code is acceptable and it’s a very easy habit to get into when you work from home. Over the last few years I’ve spent so much time dressed like a 12 year old boy that I’m not sure I remember how to dress properly. I can’t just revert back to how I used to dress (or can I?) and there is nothing like aging 10 years and gaining 2 dress sizes to make you feel nervous about experimenting.

So if teenage me didn’t look glamorous because I wasn’t allowed and current me isn’t glamorous because I’m out of practice, and lets face it far too lazy to entertain that amount of effort on a daily basis, it looks as though I’m going to have to save my glamour for special occasions. Kim Kardashian allegedly spends 2 hours every morning with a make up artist to look as polished as she does, personally I’d rather have an extra 2 hours in bed.

The worst thing about being average looking, is that it’s easy to slip down the appearance stakes and not make the most of your features, which isn’t always great for your self esteem. Even tiny changes like swapping my trainers for a pair of boots or replacing my collection of hoodies with a top and jacket now and again can elevate how I look. Throw in some mascara and a coat of lip gloss and I look like a regular grown up.

The best thing about being average looking is that now and again you get to have the wow factor. If your friends and family see you in jeans and an assortment of hoodies 99% of the time, even without hair extensions, their jaws literally drop on the days when you switch on the glamour and that’s good enough for me.

 

THE DELAY ZONE – NOT GETTING YOUR HAIR DONE ON TIME

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OK so today’s D-Day. You’ve taken your fro to the hairdressers, your hair looks amazing and you’ve had the chat about when you need to do your roots / remove your extensions / redo whatever you just had done and you nod, smile and enthusiastically agree that you’ll be back in four to six weeks or whatever the agreed timescale is. Then  you strut your way out of the salon looking amazing.

Fast forward three months and you still haven’t been back.

The Delay Zone is the gap between when you should have gone back and when you actually drag your carcass, complete with unruly afro, back to the hairdressers. There are a variety of reasons why we, OK I, don’t make it back on time.

Time Flies When You’re Looking Good

When your hair is cooperating and there is no obvious regrowth, it’s easy to lose track of how long it was since your last salon visit. Lets face it there is a certain sense of urgency when you look a mess and can’t face seeing yourself in the mirror. By the time my hair starts to give me clues that my next appointment is due, the agreed timescale is often a dim and distant memory.

Indecision / The Next Big Thing

One of the wonderful things about afro hair is that there are unlimited options. You don’t have to accept what nature gave you. If you want to change the length, colour or texture of your hair, you can. You can change your own hair or you can bury it under the hair you bought from a shop. You can have any look you like. We may not always choose the most flattering option but we’ve definitely got options. In December you were in the mood for for a full blown long luxurious weave but by the time you’re putting the next appointment in the diary you’re considering a relaxed blonde pixie cut. You can’t make the appointment until you’ve made your mind up. By the time you’ve bought some magazines, started a hair maybes board on Pinterest and discussed it with your children, your partner and ten of your friends, another fortnight has passed.

Finding A Stylist / Salon

In my last post I told you all that when it comes to my hair I only deal with two ladies. The legendary Barbara and my braid lady Lynette. If you have recently suffered a hairy horror story with a salon and don’t have a trusted stylist, then getting your hair done means finding somebody to do your hair. At this point you start talking to your friends and family which can be a quick and easy process or can feel like pulling teeth. Random Facebook posts looking for stylists can be problematic. Firstly you’ll get recommendations from people bigging up their friends regardless of their skill level. Secondly if you’ve reached the point where you are randomly asking a couple of hundred people for general advice you have clearly reached a certain level of desperation. There will be a small subset of people within your friends list that could give you useful accurate advice. This subset is probably ten percent of the list at most and there is no guarantee that those ten percent will see your post which takes you back to the rest of your Facebook friends which includes those people you hardly know, those people with totally different hair to you, the try my cousin brigade and the joker with the number one haircut who suggests that you buy some clippers.

Not everybody is as lucky as me. Not everybody has the number of a trusted stylist saved in their phone. In an ideal world by the time you are 25 you should have numbers for all the key professionals.

  • Hair Stylist
  • Decent Mechanic
  • Plumber, preferably one that deals with central heating
  • Builder. A good builder can also usually put you in touch with a good Joiner, Tiler and Electrician when needed
  • Beautician

If you have numbers for these five professionals you’ll be saved from a lot of drama in your life. The beautician may sound unnecessary but you need to be careful who you trust with your eyebrows ladies (and gentlemen) Personally I’m too lazy and cheap to spend money on somebody plucking, threading or waxing away parts of my eyebrows. Which is a fairly easy statement to make when your brows are reasonably well behaved. I’m also so busy obsessing over my hair that I don’t have time in my life, money in my purse or space in my head to obsess over my eyebrows as well.

You’re Going To That Thing

You have finally agreed that you really should take your extensions out but then you remember that you’re going to that thing.  That thing might be a wedding, a christening, a big night out or a job interview . Whatever it is, you want to look good and there is no way you are going anywhere special whilst your hair is freestyling, so you put it off for a little bit longer.

Money

Hairdos cost money and sometimes feeding and clothing your children is just more important. I’m not the only one who isn’t happy with their hair. On paper it can be difficult to justify the amount of cold hard cash we hand over to change our appearance. Black women in the United Kingdom spend a disproportionate amount of money on hair care and sometimes there is a gap between needing our hair done and earning the money to pay for it.

 

The real problems occur when you have a combination of these factors. Your hair carries on looking good so you don’t think about it which wastes a few weeks. Then  you decide on a change of style which wastes another couple of weeks. Then you finally commit to doing something but remember that you have ‘that thing’ so you delay it until afterwards but then you don’t have any money, which can delay things by anything from a couple of days to several months.

I’m sat in the Delay Zone right now. I don’t remember when I was supposed to have taken these extensions out but I do know that I am way overdue. I’m so far into the Delay Zone that I’m well on my way to the’ Scared I’m Going To Go Bald’ zone. Maybe one of the problems I have in my relationship with my hair is that in the course of a year, I spend so long in the Delay Zone that the percentage of time when I actually have “good” hair is so small that it feels none existent. It is definitely time I learnt from this.

 

NEW CLIENT SYNDROME – SALON CUSTOMER SERVICE

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I have very strong views on customer service, which almost certainly stems from spending several years as a customer service manager for a very large company, and means that whenever I come across poor customer service I notice.

There are lots of ways that hair salons can display good customer service and over the years I’ve experienced both fantastic customer service and terrible customer service. The frustrating thing is that sometimes you get both ends of the spectrum from the same salon.

New clients seem to bring out all the best and most professional service but a year later when you’re classed as a regular it can be a very different story. Instead of rewarding you for being a loyal customer some salons seem to class you as a friend they’re not that bothered about. The level of skill is exactly the same as it was a year ago but the general level of respect seems to have dipped. There are signs that you have dropped down the scale of importance, little things such as when you arrive on time but are still thumbing through the magazines an hour later.

I’m smart enough to know that hairdressers have to make conversation with clients even if they don’t really feel like it. I also know that many of them work very long hours and as such it’s perfectly reasonable that they have their mobile phones with them. It’s less reasonable that they’re so busy talking to their friends on the phone that they burn one of your ears with a set of straighteners!

I’m now at a stage with my hair where I’m not willing to take risks. My hairy horror stories post explains the background to that. In my experience one of the biggest risks to your hair is a dodgy stylist and the second is a good stylist who isn’t putting you first. I currently only ever deal with two stylists and both of these ladies consistently provide excellent customer service. The know their craft. They do excellent work. They respect my time.

I’m fairly relaxed about braiding. If somebody plaits bits of nylon into my hair, even if they do it wrong the worst that could happen is that they’ll fall out or be so tight that my head hurts. Well technically the worst that could happen is that its so tight that it makes me go bald but lets not tangent. Unlike attaching extensions with the superpower of braiding, lots of other hair treatments involve irreversible processes that rely on some very serious chemicals and when it comes to chemicals I only ever talk to one person and that person is called Barbara.

I live in a smallish village in Greater Manchester and the population isn’t particularly diverse. There are currently seven hairdressers and three barbers in the village but none of them deal with afro hair and although the number of salons has varied over the last twenty years there has always been at least five hairdressers and none of them had ever specialised in afro hair, so as you can imagine I was quite surprised one sunny afternoon when a man approached me with a business card because his wife and her friend were about to open a hair salon.

Dishing out business cards to random black women in the street didn’t feature in any of the marketing books I read during my time at university but it definitely worked in this case. As customer relationships go that random business card has led to a relationship of over fifteen years. During that time my family has grown, the salon has closed and I’ve experimented with lots of different hair styles, but Barbara still does my hair. The location may have changed but the level of customer service is exactly the same.

My ongoing battle with my natural hair and my lifelong reluctance to ever let it have it’s own way, have led me to tolerate nonsense from a long line of hairdressers on the basis that all is forgiven as long as I look amazing on my way out of the salon. The question for me now that I’m older and better able to reflect on the whole situation is – Just how much did I hate the way my hair looked when I arrived at the hairdressers, if I was willing to accept a two hour wait and burnt ears just to look great on the drive home?