I came across a thread on a hair forum on setbacks and what you’ve learned from them. I thought, since my 4 year big chop anniversary just passed, now would be a good time to reflect and blog my experiences with setbacks over the years. Luckily, I haven’t had anything too crazy happen to my hair since I went natural. I had far more bad hair days when relaxed. Pre-hair journey, I had my hair burned clean off at a salon and that’s probably not even the worst thing to happen. Episodes like that really put things into perspective for me. I tend not to fret too much about my hair because of it. I’d say I had 3 major setbacks in my natural hair journey. All were avoidable of course.

Since this article was longer than expected, I’ll split each setback into its own post. The bullets below will be updated with links once the other two articles are written.

• Part I – Hair Color Disaster
• Part II – Heat Damage
• Part III – Trim Turned Into Cut

Setback 1- Hair Color Disaster

I had my hair colored at a pro-salon school. It was highlighted in 3 areas, then darkened all over. I didn’t have a good experience at the salon, so a few months later, I decided to retouch the blond highlights at home. Everything was cool for a while. Then I tired of the blond/black combo and decided to put a deep brown/burgundy all over. I bought a drug store brand hair color that was new on the market and supposedly ‘natural’ or at least more natural than everything else out there at the time.

(Pics of my hair black with blond peekaboo highlights, then colored deep reddish brown all over)

Well this is where it all went south. I noticed I was losing a lot of hair in the shower as I detangled (this was perhaps a week after the color). I didn’t think too much of it, assuming it was normal shedding. While putting mini braids in my hair, I noticed IT. I had a bald spot about the size of a quarter in the back of my head. I had several areas that were reduced to 1-2 centimeters in length. AFTER, I used the dye, I went on MakeupAlley and read a ton of similar experiences with that same hair color *shakes fist.* The parts that were extremely damaged were mostly parts that were not blond. The blond part was not bleached, by the way, but it was lifted using a strong developer then toned. The ends of the highlighted part did eventually break and fray. I think the lifting of my natural hair color weakened the hair in the highlighted parts so damage (with or without the help of the drug store color) was inevitable.

(Pic of some of the damage caused by the box hair color)

Lesson Learned

I learned two lessons from this setback. The first was don’t use strange products without checking reviews or doing a patch test. I know that particular brand of hair color was just a terrible product and many other users suffered the same result. The other lesson learned is that generally speaking, hair color (especially lifting the color) is a bad idea for my fine hair. I colored my hair a lot when I was relaxed. I didn’t think too much of it when I went natural. There’s a mentally that when your hair is natural it’s almost invincible… I learned that relaxed or natural, some heads of hair just aren’t meant for chemical processes. I probably shouldn’t say never. But I don’t plan to color my hair using chemical dyes. My strands are just too fine to withstand it over the long haul. I’ve also dyed my hair periodically since middle school, so much so, that I don’t even know what color my natural hair really is. It always looks reddish in pictures but I honestly don’t know what that’s about.