Introduce Yourself
My name is Alexanderia and I grew up in the Memphis, TN, a city famous for its blues and barbecue chicken. A southern girl at heart, I love soul food so much that I have started to grow sweet potatoes and collard greens in my home garden.
I enjoy traveling around the world and have lived abroad in Mexico, Honduras, and Rwanda. I am fluent in Spanish and French, married with three beautiful kids.
Are you relaxed, natural, texturized or texlaxed?
I am natural
What’s your story, how did you get to where you are?
Wow…. Where do I begin? As a southern belle growing up in the deep-south, relaxing my hair was the cultural norm in the 80s and 90s. Like most little girls in Memphis, I had my first relaxer at age five. My dear sweet mom did not know how to braid or twist my hair so wearing a relaxer was the only option for me. Plus, I have really thick, “kinky* hair” and there was no way my mom was going to struggle to press my hair.
Going to beauty salon was the solution to my mom’s problems and quickly became our mother-daughter ritual until high school. We enjoyed flipping through the Dudley hair magazines to see the latest trends before our next six weeks touch up.
However, the day I left for boarding school in a remote, predominately white town in New Hampshire, my hair took a turn for the worse. Now, I had to survive on my own and learn how to relax and care for my hair. Yikes! My classmates and I played kitchen beautician and relaxed our hair. I am sure we did some hair damage along the way.
My hair journey got better during my college years in New Orleans where I started to experiment with natural hair and did my first big chop. I had just returned from my internship in Connecticut and decided to cut off my hair after being inspired by another intern. One day, I was at home in the bathroom slowly cutting out my braids and anxious to reunite with the natural hair that I had abandoned as a child. I was bold and ready to free myself from the bondage of the relaxer.
Being natural was a time of rediscovery and self love. I enjoyed rushing to the mirror to measure my hair monthly. Twists outs, braids, and Bantu knots were my go to hairstyles and I had even tried locking my hair for a brief period.
However, my personal natural hair movement came to an immediate halt when I got married and started working for corporate America. I quickly felt pressured to conform to the relaxed hair regime.
Life took another turn and in 2010 I returned to my natural self. As my husband and I traveled to Honduras with two kids in tow, the first thing that I stressed about was how I was going maintain my relaxed hair in Latin America.
When you have relaxed hair, finding the right salon is imperative, especially in cities with small black populations. I searched throughout Tegucigalpa where we lived, and finally I found “ a black hair salon”, which was a blessing and a curse.
Located deep in the “barrio”/hood of Honduras with lots of reggae-ton and salsa music, “Maria’s Sala de Belleza” as I shall say, was a black girl’s heaven.
It was the one safe place where a black woman could easily get a Dominican blow out without the mean stairs or was refused service for having “cabello malo”, which is a racist term meaning bad hair. “Maria”, my new found black hair stylist, over- relaxed my hair and did not rinse out all of my Mizani relaxer that I had bought from the United States.
Maria’s lack of running water and poor relaxing skills led to my hair eventually falling out. My hair was weak and my scalp was always burning after a retouch. I should have ran for the door as soon as I saw the bucket of water that was used to rinse my hair. I knew better, but was blinded by the fact that “Maria” was a black hair stylist. Wearing braids was the only way to go until my natural hair grew out.
Since then, I continue to wear natural hair and will never go back to a relaxer. In developing countries, the salon industry is so unregulated that you do not know who you can trust with chemicals.