Things I Wish I Knew Before Going Natural | Hair Growth, Products, Natural Hair Lies!

Why didn't they tell me? Why didn't they tell me if they had told me these things, i would have been able to save so much time so much money and just overall had a better natural hair experience. Hey guys welcome to my video, it's cami j official. So, let's start the show, my name is kami, welcome or welcome back to my channel, let's go ahead and get right to the video all right y'all. So in this video i'm going to be talking to you about the things i wish i knew before going natural like you're like. Why didn't they tell me? Why didn't they tell me if they had told me these things? I would have been able to save so much time so much money and just overall had a better natural hair experience. So let's go ahead and get into it. So one thing i definitely wish somebody would have told me before i went natural is the fact that you do not need to spend a whole bunch of money to have a successful natural hair journey like you, do not need to go out here and buy the Most expensive products in order to just like, have a really good natural hair journey. Like y'all, i promise i was under the deep misconception that the more i spent on products, the better it would be for my natural hair, and that is not true baby. I promise you there are people winning winning at the natural hair game with her natural hair journey using affordable products. Affordable products definitely can be used in your natural hair routine, and you can be successful with them. Don'T fall into the trap of oh if the dollar sign is here. That means that it is going to be what i need to get for my natural hair journey, like i spent so much money on shampoos and conditioners that just honestly were not working for me, but i thought they were supposed to because of the price tag. Okay and another note on that, just because a product is expensive does not guarantee that it is going to work for your natural hair. You would be surprised at the amount of pricey products that absolutely do nothing for people's natural hair. I wish that i had known before i went natural that too much of a good thing for real is bad for you, like guys, like we know as naturals. That moisture is the key to everything right. Definitely the key to length retention when it comes to natural hair, but i wish somebody would have told me i wish i knew that you can over moisturize your natural hair back in my brain, like when i first went natural, i felt like okay, well, the the More moisture, the better right naturally, because, like if my hair is dry, then i probably need more moisture than anything else, and then i would end up over moisturizing my hair y'all. I was wrong. I was wrong. Okay, you can definitely over moisturize your hair and it is actually called hyrule fatigue and when your hair is just overloaded with too much moisture, you'll notice that the texture of your hair is very mushy. It'S very limp. It feels very lifeless. Your hair can also end up feeling very dry and very brittle also when you over moisturize your hair, because it can damage your hair and one thing i was guilty of back in the day. I would go out there and get deep conditioner y'all, and you know on the back of the deep conditioner. It does have these instructions and it'll probably say something like okay put this in your hair and leave it in for about 30 minutes to an hour. The max time being an hour you wash it out and you go about your business with your wash day. Well, guess what cami was not following the rules and following the directions? Okay, i would leave the conditioner in my hair, like y'all over an entire weekend over an entire weekend, just sitting: okay with a with a bag on my head and a hair full of deep conditioner, for, like no reason like why. Why? Because i honestly believed that the more moisture i can force into my hair, the better i ended up experiencing moisture overload and i would be sitting there wondering like. Why does my hair feel so limp and so mushy? And why are my styles not working so then? I ended up having to go to a hair stylist, who then said, like we're. Gon na need to do some protein treatments to bring back the life into your hair, and luckily that was able to fix it. But that was a valuable lesson that i learned that you can overdo it when it comes to your natural hair and that you just need to learn that balance of you know how much moisture you really need, and also following the directions of course, on the back Of the deep conditioner bottle, another thing i wish i knew before going natural y'all is the fact that all protective styles are not created. Equally, like there are some protective styles that are going to be great for you, based on your hair and your lifestyle, and then there are going to be other protective styles that are going to be terrible for you, okay, so let me explain so back in the Day when i was first trying to go natural, a lot of people were loving, micros. Okay, a lot of people were just loving the micro braids, but for me that protective style was not going to work because number one. I wanted to keep these okay, my edges. I wanted to keep my edges at all cost and unfortunately i had known some people who had gone natural at the same time that i did who really loved doing the micros and they did end up breaking off a significant amount of their edges. So i was like oh no and then i ended up trying some things like some box braids and everything else, and sometimes a person would install them too tight, so that let me understand that you know what all these protective styles they're not created. Equally, because you have to find the protective style that is going to work best for you number one, you have to think about your income, your availability to go, get the style, you know installed and done, and then you also have to really think about. How can you maintain this style like if you're going to be getting, you know braids that cost 200 every time to get them done? Is that going to be a protective style over the long run or over the long haul that you can really afford to do? For me, when it came to understanding that all protective styles were not created equally and figuring out, what worked for me, that is when i discovered that i enjoyed doing twists with my own natural hair, and i actually did an entire video that i will go ahead And link up here that talks about how i use twists to grow my natural hair back after i unfortunately broke off about 12 inches of natural hair. So for me, doing twists in my hair was the perfect protective style. Another thing i wish i knew before going natural is the fact that long hair does not mean healthy hair. It don't it don't. It does not mean healthy hair trust me when i had my mistap and i ended up breaking off so much of my hair. My hair was long. I had grown my hair down to waist length and my hair was looking like some raggedy curtains. Okay, there were so many parts of my hair that were see-through, it was damaged, it was broken, my hair was not healthy and your girl was in denial. Yes, i was, i wasn't denial because i was like i could not get over. The fact that i had done this to my hair, but honestly and truly all healthy hair is healthy. Hair long hair does not automatically equate to having healthy hair. You can have long raggedy, hair i've been there before so when it came to that like i wish i had known that it just is more important for me to overall take care of the health and the strength of my hair, rather than thinking like i have To get to x length in order for my natural hair journey to be validated healthy, hair comes in all different ranges. It comes in all different lengths. It comes in all different thicknesses, because natural hair is very unique. Right in and of itself is very unique. So, just because somebody has hair down, you know to their butt crack. It doesn't necessarily mean that they have healthy hair and just know that your hair can be healthy at any length and that, at the end of the day, healthy hair should always always be the goal of your natural hair journey. Another thing i wish i knew before going natural is the fact that you know what it's extremely detrimental to your natural hair journey when you are comparing your natural hair constantly to someone else's hair. Like i get it, we want to do certain styles. We want to have certain looks and everything else, but at some point it can just become unhealthy. We have to learn how to cherish and love the hair that grows out of our own scalp and not to develop hair envy or curl envy it happens. It happens. All the time, especially to people who are just considering going natural or thinking okay after the big chop, my hair is supposed to look like this trust me. You are in the process of like learning and understanding your natural hair, and so you shouldn't have somebody else's hair in mind as a baseline, for what your natural hair should do, how it should grow and what it should be. Do not compare your curls trust me. Your curls are beautiful because they belong to you and you are beautiful, and that is what makes the whole thing so wonderful when it comes to your natural hair, and another thing i wish i knew before going natural is the fact that youtube youtube can steer. You very wrong, let me tell you: okay, back in the day when everyone was kind of like first going natural youtube was the thing and then you would have like. Of course, you know the natural hair youtubers and you would run to them and you would go to the videos and you would think that video is gospel, and i'm here to tell you that it is not on youtube. As a youtuber, i can only let you know, i can only share my opinions right like when i do wash day videos and if i happen to not like um a product, i would have people in the comment section like bombarding me saying. Well, you know you're lying because this works so great for me and i'm like sis, it's it's okay, just because it didn't work for me doesn't mean that it's destined to not work for everyone. I'M just sharing my experience, and that is 99.9 of what you will get from natural hair youtubers. They can only share the experience as it happens, to pertain to their natural hair, natural hair. I'M telling you it has so much variety to it and that variety can definitely be the difference in a product working out, amazingly for someone or the difference between a product flopping and not working for someone. If you have a low porosity, high density hair with extremely tight curls, it's going to handle product differently than say somebody who has um. You know high porosity, extremely thin, very loose natural hair. Those two, the hair is completely different, so you can't expect every product to work exactly the same, and this is why i say just be cautious when you are on youtube and take everything with a grain of salt until you can verify it yourself and form your Own opinions every single time, unless it is a youtuber that you really trust you trust you know his or her opinion when it comes to it, but don't let youtube be the reason why your natural hair falls out, like i have seen so many different trends in The natural hair community y'all remember the inversion method where people like hanging upside down to try to make their hair grow longer. Um. There was like the onion juice thing, rubbing onions or onion juice on your scalp. Just don't let natural hair youtube mess your journey up. Take everything with a grain of salt and do what you know is working for your natural hair. Another thing i wish i knew before going natural is just the sheer fact that you are going to have to make time you're going to have to make time for your natural hair. Everyone'S hair is at a different stage. It is at a different growth level. Right. There'S so many different variables, but the one thing that remains true is that the best way that you can handle your natural hair is to make sure that you are making time for your natural hair and doing it within the time that you need, like listen, y'all. I'M telling you i have over the course of the many years that i've been natural. I'Ve come to understand that you know i cannot do a 56 step wash day and god bless the people who can i'm not coming for any of those type of long natural hair routines, but it just won't work for me. I am full-time employed, i'm a wife! I'M a mother, i have things to do, okay, so i cannot spend you know four hours on a wash day. I just cannot do that, so i make sure that i buff out the appropriate time that works for my natural hair routine and make sure that i set aside that time. Another thing i wish i knew is that it is going to take you time to learn your natural hair, and you should definitely take the time to learn you to learn your natural hair, learn what it likes and learn what it does not like and y'all to Be honest: it's going to take time! It'S going to take time for you to do that, because your hair can be fickle. Your hair can love a product one day and hate it. The next you're just going to have to invest the time into your natural hair. To figure it out right to figure it out, because at the end of the day, that's all that really matters is that you understand your hairs, wants and needs. So that way, you can be able to adequately provide that for your natural hair like for me, i learned throughout the process the type of oils that my hair likes, the type of oils, that it hates the type of creams that it likes and so on, and So forth, but all of that is going to take time. I definitely don't want anyone to feel as though you know, during your natural hair process, you're supposed to magically, have it all together. That is incredibly unrealistic, even if somebody lays out, like a whole checklist for you you're, going to find that some of those things work for you and some of those things don't and that's why i'm saying you have to just take the time to invest in understanding Your natural hair - and this definitely goes way beyond you - know natural hair, charts and curl patterns and all of that type of stuff, like you're gon na, have to get down to the nitty-gritty of i'm going to use this shampoo this week, i'm going to see how My hair likes it or i'm going to try this. You know natural hair butter from this line and see if it's something that my natural hair enjoys. I really wish that i had taken the time to learn my hair way back in the beginning of my natural hair journey, because i spent just so much time trying to mirror somebody else's natural hair routine. That i just didn't realize a lot of stuff that i was doing was not working for me. Everyone'S hair has a different tolerance for different things, and once i took the time to understand my natural hair, my natural hair journey became a lot smoother and all right guys. So i really hope that you enjoyed my video about things i wish i knew before i went natural if you did go ahead and give this video a thumbs up. Please also consider subscribing to my channel and then clicking on the notification bell. So that way, you know whenever i post more videos and if you're interested to see even more natural hair content, go ahead and click the video right up here for more. As always, thank you for watching stay safe, stay blessed and i will catch you in the next one. Bye,