Suburban Afro

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

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

By Claire Worthington

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

By Claire Worthington

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

By Claire Worthington

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

By The Suburban Afro Leave a Comment

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.