Rhiannon Lassiter

After nearly 45 years on the planet I may have finally got my hair figured out. For many years I thought of myself as someone with straight hair with frizzy and curl bits. The years I spent brushing and straightening and trying to smooth it down, I now consider largely wasted. Because inside me was a curly-girl waiting to be set free.

Click on any of the photos to zoom in and check out my hair.

One of my pandemic activities has been growing my hair.

• February 2020, the photo in the orange sweater is me, pre-pandemic in the UK, on a good hair day.
• January 2021, one year later in a pink hoodie here’s my hair agai, it’s super curly.
• September 2021 in the grey sweater is my hair just after dying it, at home with Schwartzkof hair dye. I’m starting to have difficulty fitting it all into a selfie.
• December 2021 in pink velvet is my hair shortly after washing when I wound it into ringlets with my fingers. It was a bit flat on top though with this style.
• January 2022 in a purple sweater I just recently got from ebay for less than £12. It was a good lighting day for my hair.
• The final photo is my hair today on a regular hair day. It needs conditioning.

A couple of people have asked me what I’ve been doing to my hair (genuinely, they have) and I’ve been meaning to document what I’ve done that seems to be actually working. The thing I have learned about my hair is that it absoletely soaks up conditioner. It needs conditioning every day. That’s a lot of product.

Right now I’m using about 6 main products for my hair. All the links below are Amazon associated links. Feel free to use them or not, if you do I get a tiny royalty. If you don’t like Amazon just use the names of the products to source them from somewhere else.

• I wash it in As I Am Coconut Cowash (ust under £10 for 454g)
  instead of shampoo, finger combing it in. Typically while in a bath because this takes some time to work through. I only wash it once a week, or twice at most.
• I condition it with Garnier Banana Hair Food  which says it is vegan (£3.40 for a tub of 390ml)  which is pudding-like, which I also use as a mask or cream. I also sometimes rub a shea butter product into the ends but I’m planning to stop doing that when the bottle runs out, it makes my hair too greasy.
• My main daily product is the Eco Style Black Castor and Flaxseed Oil stylying gel. I get the big tub (£18 for 2.4l) but there’s also a smaller one. (473ml for £4.75.) Most days all I do is use the Eco Style, that’s why there’s such a lot of it, comparatively.
• I can add more curls with the Catwalk Curls Rock (£11.50 for two bottles of 150ml) amplifying mousse, which is just about worth the price for curl volume, although too much risks it getting crunchy.
• I smooth some of it with Aveda confixor gel. This stuff is expensive (£25 for the 250ml bottle) tricky, it’s easy to use too much and I get lazy with it. But used well it can define curls.
• I sleep with my hair in a silk bonnet, ideally research a black-owned company for this, tied up on top of my head in a velvet scrunchie. I also wear silk lined hats. My sister got me one from Black Sunrise.

I never brush or comb it, except very occasionally when its wet and fully conditioned and I am aiming for a particular style. I haven’t straightened it in over two years.

That’s a lot of writing about my hair. However it took very little time to write compare to the time I have spent on my hair in the past two years.