Claire Worthington

I WISH I HAD HAIR LIKE YOURS. MEMORIES OF TCB AND PLANNING MY NEXT HAIRDO

People often say to me that they wish they had hair like mine. I could finish this blog post with three words and an exclamation mark i.e.

“No you don’t!”

but where’s the fun in that?

It’s a fact of life that people always want things that they can’t have and nothing illustrates this more than hair. Brunettes that want to be blondes, the curly haired girls that reach for the straighteners every morning and I don’t know any woman my age that hasn’t had at least one perm.

As a child I wanted nothing more than long blonde hair. I spent a LOT of my childhood daydreaming about having long blonde hair. I was happy to consider other colours, but the non-negotiable aspects were that it had to be long and straight. On one hand I was probably influenced by the lack of representation at that time, but realistically it almost certainly had a lot more to do with things that were far more about me and my personal priorities such as the fact that afros don’t move (watch any 1970s advert to find out how popular swishing your hair about was at that time) The other highly motivating factor behind my obsession with long straight hair was that having your mum go through your hair with an afro comb was absolutely no fun. In fact it was the opposite of fun. It was often genuinely painful and the longer you got away with not having it combed, the worse it was when you did.

Having daydreamed and combed-dodged my way through primary school and the first few years of secondary school. I eventually decided to start caring how my hair looked. It was clear by this point that I wasn’t going to wake up one morning with long straight hair so I started experimenting.

At some point in the fourth year (old school for year 10) I joined the TCB crew and had a wet look perm. It was the late 1980s and wet look perms were very popular. If you’re not familiar with the concept of the wet look perm it essentially involved having your hair permed and then applying specialised hair products to make it look wet and curly.

The perm looked good, but frankly there was a lot of work involved. Actually getting the perm wasn’t a problem. Fairly standard, the thing I wasn’t entirely prepared for was the sheer volume of product.

TCB was (and possibly still is) a huge brand and once you committed to the perm your house was suddenly filled with beige coloured bottles containing lotions and potions dedicated to maintaining the perm. There was a special shampoo, there was a special conditioner, there was a special moisturiser, there was a special activator but the main thing I remember is that there was sleeping in a shower cap because the wet look perm didn’t just look wet – it was wet.

The hair products would end up on my face and it was all just too much. I went from barely combing my afro to having to do a whole routine every morning and always ending up with TCB hair products on my face. I have no intention of ever reliving any of that. 14 year old me wasn’t particularly skilled when it came to haircare, so it’s entirely possible that my lack of technique contributed to the problem.

Having abandoned the idea of ever rejoining the TCB crew I recently decided to go back to braids. The thing with hair is that it’s a personal thing and people don’t always see the work that goes into the hairstyle we actually show to the world. I see amazing braid styles but frankly don’t have the patience for some of them. For the right hairdo I’m happy to sit in one spot for a long time, but my days of sitting in one spot for a double digit amount of hours is a thing of the past. The longest I have ever spent having my hair done was 18 hours (yes you read that correctly) and it was great, but not great enough that I’d consider doing it again.

Braiding can be hard to time effectively and once you’ve started there’s no going back. If the person braiding your hair talks more than they plait, then it might take a while or if they make the individual braids really small then you’re probably in for a long wait. Luckily this time I managed to get my fro under control in under four hours, at a reasonable cost and without excruciating pain which has made me extremely happy.

I’m already in the process of deciding what to do with mine next and nothing’s grabbing me at the moment. Other than the financial side of things I have almost unlimited options, which might be part of the problem.

Watch this space, I’m off to Pinterest for inspiration.

USING MY AFRO TO ILLUSTRATE SUCCESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

By Claire Worthington

If you know me offline, you’ll be well aware that my hair changes on a regular basis. If you know me online then you’ll probably know that I post a random selection of content on different platforms from time to time and that most of that content gets a minimal response. Most of the things I post get no response whatsoever (unless you count spam), nor should they, most of it isn’t worth responding to. The majority of my posts aren’t for any form of commercial gain so it doesn’t matter, but from time to time my afro highlights the basics of how to be successful on social media.

First things first, the only way to guarantee how many people will see your posts on social media is to pay the social media companies to show them to a specific number of people. If you really want people to see your Facebook posts, tweets or Instagram posts then you have to pay Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Ignore what an assortment of random people will tell you, that folks is a cold hard fact.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering what any of this has to do with my hair and when we’re getting to get onto social media and the lessons my hair can teach you. Posting things on the internet does not mean that anybody will see it. Some people will see it, lots of people might see it, but if you need people to definitely see it, it will probably cost you money. OK now that we have that out of the way, lets get back to my hair!

I have occasional spikes in the popularity of my online posts. I recently changed my hair and posted a picture on Facebook. That post generated 108 likes, which is considerably more than most of the things I post. The last big spike was my graduation and the time before that, was the last time I changed my hair and posted a picture on Facebook.

First rule of social media – choose the right audience. My personal audience on Facebook is made up of my family and friends. There are very few people on this earth who care how my hair looks, but of the tiny percentage of this planet’s inhabitants that do care, almost all of them are in my Facebook friends list.

I have very few hard and fast rules in my life, one of them is that I won’t be Facebook friends with people that I don’t know in real life and wouldn’t be willing to spend a couple of hours in a pub / coffee shop with. It’s a pretty simple rule, but it works for me and means that everybody on my Facebook friends list is a genuine friend / relative that I actually like. There are a few people on there that I wouldn’t want to be trapped in a lift with, but there isn’t anybody that I don’t like and that as far as I know doesn’t like me. This means that when I post things on my Facebook wall I’m sharing things with people who have a genuine relationship with me. The perfect audience. It’s highly unlikely that your business will find an audience as devoted as my friends and family but the key point is to steer well clear of the scatter gun approach.

There is a popular expression in digital marketing “Content is King” which has since been updated to include a secondary phrase “but Engagement is Queen” Creating interesting content is the starting point. It should go without saying that what you post, needs to be of interest to your audience. Boring irrelevant content is always a bad idea. If it doesn’t pass the “so what” test then it probably needs a rethink. “Claire’s new hairdo” passes the test of being at least mildly interesting to my selected audience. My relationship with “my audience” means that they are willing to engage with me online. Which in real life, means that when some of my friends see the picture of my new hairdo, that they “do something”, they click the like button, they comment, they post emojis and gifs, all of which signals to Facebook that this post is of interest. Once Facebook decides that my post is of interest, they show it to more of my Facebook friends and those friends engage with the post by liking and commenting etc.

As a web developer, I primarily work with small businesses, most of whom are using social media as a part of their business and most of whom are not seeing results. A lot of this is due to confusion about how Facebook works, especially for small businesses. If 100 people like your Facebook page, that does not mean those 100 people will see everything you post. The fact that Facebook is “free” leads people to think that it’s cheap way to market their business and it can be, but if you need 100 people to see your posts then the only way to guarantee that is to pay Facebook to show your posts to 100 people and more importantly, to pay Facebook to show your posts to the right 100 people. There is a lot of misinformation about Facebook and how it works, but as most of that has nothing to do with my hair, I’ll leave that for another day.

VILLAGE WEB COMPANY

By Claire Worthington

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

By Claire Worthington

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

By Claire Worthington

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.

Get my mum to stop doing my hair – indefinitely
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.