So, I decided to start a hair journal here because everyone I know thinks I'm kidding about growing this butch cut down to my butt and I am NOT KIDDING. And I know that here, of all places, I will be taken seriously.  ^_-  Which is why I love this place already.   

Even though I totally look like a boy right now I am absolutely delighted about the fact that my hair is in the absolute best condition that it has ever been. I've recently gone on a diet (I'm pretty overweight right now, 5'9" and 200 pounds, ewww) and although I couldn't tell a thing under all that disaster my perm turned into, I think that eating healthier is being very kind to my hair, too. I had terribly greasy hair all through high school, and then the perm turned it drier than I imagined possible...but I assumed that under the perm, the new growth of hair would still be very greasy. But since I've been eating healthier it feels wonderfully soft, but not oily, meaning that I can condition it without nasty results. I'm glad, because I wanted to start conditioning as soon as my hair would let me to keep my hair as smooth and healthy as possible while it grows.

I'm trying not to seem silly around my family because they think I should keep my hair like this, but when I hop in the shower I'm combing my hair as smooth as possible, shampooing it with extreme care, conditioning it devotedly, rinsing with cool water and then standing in front of the mirror combing it and smoothing it out again, all with as much care and delicacy as if it were five feet long! I keep imaging it hanging down to my butt, all shiny and soft and straight, and it makes me want to take extra good care of it even now at three inches.

I know that the more weight I lose, the better I will look with long hair, especially since my hair is so fine and thin...long, fine, thin hair doesn't exactly have a thinning effect on my round face! But my senior year of high school I was quite skinny and my hair hung a little bit past my shoulders at the time and looked really nice despite how thin it was. My face was very thin, which is what did it then, I think.

Anyway...I know that I will never have the patience to withstand seven years, eight years of excessive care to meet my goal (once I get there, it won't seem so tedious, I think) unless I keep imagining how awesome it is going to be to finally have long hair in beautiful condition that ISN'T frayed with split ends halfway up my back, like it was in early high school. So my imagination is constantly going back to seeing myself with long hair...not to mention at my normal weight.   

**dreams of long hair and ignores butch cut staring out from the mirror**

Well, my hair has grown just a TEENY bit...of course, it's only been a few weeks since the cut...but it's grown JUST enough to start fluffing out a little instead of just being plastered flat against my head, and I'm no longer getting the "butch" or "you look like a boy" comments. I still haven't needed to use anything on it like clips or gel...I'm just sort of letting it do what it wants to, which isn't too nutty yet. I have to admit that the stylist definitely did an expert job with my hair...I thought I would be totally traumatized by cutting my hair this short, but he made it look really nice and frame my face really well (hard to do since I'm fairly overweight at the moment).

I'm so happy with how shiny and soft it is! I tried out the "Nature's Gate" shampoo and conditioner for fine and limp hair, and...WOW. It has never felt this soft. It's not as shiny as it used to be but I know that's partially because of the way he layered it.

My dad made a stupid comment the other day...I was chatting with him online and a bunch of my friends were in the room and I told him I had to leave because we were going out to dinner, and he said, "Okay. Have a good evening. And the rest of you...keep her hair short!!!"

I know he was just kidding, but I was kind of annoyed. He makes jabs like that a lot and I'm just like, "Okay...it's my hair. I'm tired of it short. I want it long. And you're practically bald anyway."  LOL...

Anyway. I'm having reasonably good hair days so far. Probably within a few months the weirdness of growing out layers is going to kick in, but so far it still looks pretty, albeit a little shaggy.

I've never been as gentle with my hair as I'm being now, and it definitely shows. My hair has NEVER been in such perfect condition.  **happy**

Ella

Yes, you are so lucky that you are starting out with
a completly healthy head of hair from the start.  I think
healthy hair does frame the face better, looks thicker
has more elasticity and just looks great all around.
Your hair will look good as it grows.   I think sometimes
people object not so much to long hair but long
unhealthy looking hair.  I lot of people don't know how to take care of their hair(I know I didn't until about
3 months ago.)  When I got my big chop from BSL to
Earlobe length last year, People kept saying "It looks
so healthy!"  My hair has never looked healthy long
which is why maybe people don't think I should have
it.  I am now taking super good care of it
NO HEAT! and its looking a lot better.  Unlike you, however, I didn't know how to take care of my hair
until it was to my shoulders, so while it is looking a
lot better, I'm always going to have colour treated
damage ends (about 7 inches) which I can't bear to
cut off.

Instead of notes, put up photos of your long-locked idols. Being reminded constantly of your goals might help you.

And you can buy a very coarse-toothed comb and chuck out the others. I lose fewer hairs since I did that. If you buy some new hair toys (including a new, hair-safe brush), maybe it will help you think hair-friendly!

/Kate

I'm at 6 inches now...a half a foot...that's exciting!

I think once I've been growing for 6 months I'm going to take a picture and post before and after pictures in the "Show off Your Locks" thread...the longer hair in the back is about to touch that vertebra all the way at the top of my back and the bangs in front are almost to the tip of my nose!  *huge grin*  And it's still really shiny...but the ends are starting to look just a TAD rough. I think it's because the stylist originally did a lot of cutting with a razor. It looked cute at the time but now it looks sort of messy. I'm still sort of hesitant to put headbands or Alice bands in it very often because, especially with the Alice bands, I'm afraid I'm going to pull hair out. So I just sort of let it fly about however it wants to. Sometimes it looks a little crazy but it's not long enough yet to be a REALLY bad mess.

Tomorrow I'm going out to buy groceries for a friend's visit and while I'm at it, I'm going to buy some multivitamins and start taking them. I've been eating so much healthier lately and it's showing in my hair, but I want to do more.

I'm also considering trying to shampoo less...I've always had oily hair so the idea makes me a little bit uncomfortable. People here are saying that my scalp with adjust and stop producing as much oil if I shampoo less, but I have these flashes of the nasty greasy roots I would get in my teen years if I skipped one day of shampooing.

I think I may do an experiment and shampoo every other day for a few weeks, and see how my hair reacts. Everyone here is always talking about how harsh shampoo can be and the benefits of CO...and I really want to try it out and see for myself.

Ella

Whoa...

So it's been like four months.

Don't even ask how long my hair is, I've been derelict in measuring it. Next month, I swear! But to give everyone an idea, the "bangs" (shortest layer) are hanging down around the corners of my mouth, and the longest layer is an inch or two past my shoulders. Come August I'll have been growing for a year and I'll post a picture. Not now, though. For one thing I desperately need another trim because I'm starting to get the "overgrown weeds on my head" look that layers get when they're left untrimmed. (It's been about three months but my hair grows fast, so don't worry. Heehee!)

Partially due to a hectic work schedule and partially because of sheer laziness, I have been skipping washings far more often than ever before. The most I will skip is one day, but even that is very unusual for me, and doing so a few times a week is unheard of. What a surprise to find that my hair is actually getting used to it and doesn't look too bad if I've skipped a wash. I condition it every time I wash it now...I've shed all my reservations about overconditioning oily hair, my hair has completely adjusted and it gets really soft and shiny when I condition it instead of oily. And no splits! (Usually by this length I'm already splitting. Shows how abusive I was to my hair once upon a time.)

I'm getting so impatient...I want all my hair to reach ponytail length so I have an excuse to start buying hair ornaments!  *pouts*  And also so I can start getting rid of these layers...my hair looks dreadful unlayered when it's short so they're rather necessary but, what a pain to deal with! Once all my hair reaches shoulder length I can start getting rid of the layers and it will look fine. But my hair short + layers = silly-looking.

In the meantime, inspired by someone else (I forget who but it was posted as a suggestion for something to do while waiting for your hair to grow) I actually let my nails grow out. They haven't been long since I took up piano 5 years ago. And to my surprise, they're much less fragile than they were back then. So now I have long nails, at least. 

I'm at work with nothing to do (today is being a slo-o-o-o-o-ow day) but I really should get off this work comptuer before I'm caught. lol.

Ella

I swear to God, my hair is getting thicker.

I keep wondering if I'm going crazy. Ever since I was 4 or 5, my hair has gotten progressively thinner. At four I had THICK white-blonde hair. By 15 or 16 I had skimpy dull medium blonde hair that looked like it was prematurely thinning. (My mom kept shaking her head at me and saying, "You got my problem hair, all right," to my complete chagrin -- her hair was most definitely thinning.) The fact that in Miami blonde hair was highly unusual was the ONLY thing that continued to draw stares and compliments, but eventually it was such a frazzled mess of split ends that even that ended. My classmates would instead watch me yanking a brush through it and pulling shed strands of hair off everything I owned and shake their heads in disbelief, asking why I would want to keep struggling with it. By 19 I had burned or torn off most of the hair I had left with tightly wound marching band 'dos stuffed under a hat, blowfrying, curling irons, and chemical mistakes, and I was ready to admit defeat and resign myself to an extremely short cut for the rest of my life.

Now I look in the mirror and for the first time since I was extremely young, I'm starting to look like I have a normal volume of hair. And I'm breathing a huge sigh of relief because I was starting to feel like the thinning hair that my mom started to have at 50 and my dad got at 30, I was starting to suffer at 15.

Steph (MahCurlyLocks, the roomie I referred to several posts up as my roomie who didn't want long hair...HAH, I was wrong!) said something about hormonal changes that occur and change our hair every 7 years or so. It makes sense...in early elementary school my hair went from thick and straw-like to wispy and snarly (and OILY)...at the end of middle school it suddenly darkened drastically from platinum blonde to dull medium blonde, got so greasy I was shampooing twice a day, and slight waves that did nothing but make my hair even MORE unmanageable appeared...and now suddenly...

Suddenly it looks and feels straighter and thicker, more like when I was little. And even a slightly DARKER shade of blonde than ever before, but paradoxically, really shiny again. And I can't believe this is my hair. It hasn't looked this nice since I was a toddler, before it became prone to snarls the size of Cleveland that exasperated my mom so much she handed me the hair brush and said to deal with it myself at age eight or nine.

Was all this hair torture I went through that resulted in me cutting off nearly all of my hair in disgust while still secretly wishing for long hair just a result of insane adolescent hormones? Was that disaster in high school not my normal hair, but my hair going through a worse puberty than I was?   

It seems almost too good to be true that my hair should suddenly become docile and manageable again, just like that. A few changes in my hair-care routine and the shift from adolescence to adulthood, and such a radical change? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But in the meantime I'm going to enjoy the other shoe NOT dropping.

*is ecstatic*

Ella

I haven't had this thread up in a year.   

It's about two years since I cut my hair very short and then decided to grow it out. The most important thing I have learned is this:

When I am trying to decide what to do with my hair...whether to have it layered or blunt cut, what products to use, whether to try a particular updo...I CAN NOT look at the way my hair used to behave to try to determine what it will do now.

For instance, I was sure before that a blunt cut just wouldn't look very nice on my hair because that used to be the case. Now...well, I just got a blunt cut yesterday and it looks SO much better than the layers did.

I was sure before that my hair couldn't be conditioned without turning slimy, and now I condition it every day and deep-condition it once a week and my hair is SO much better for it.

I've realized that "how my hair acted the last time it was long" is NOT a good indicator. I was 15 the last time I had long hair. Puberty was not kind to my hair at all, and I was not kind to my hair DURING puberty, and it was a train wreck. It was flat, oily, tangled constantly, full of split ends, and had an annoying wave in it that made it misbehave.

Now, I'm not a greasy-haired teenager, and I treat my hair much better...and I can actually do really nice things with it. I'm not stuck throwing my hands up in despair and saying, "That's it, I just have problem hair and I'll have to resign myself to short hair for the rest of my life." Imagine that.

The one thing I would eventually like to do is break myself of the habit of washing my hair every day. I've heard repeatedly here that it is better for your hair to wash it less frequently...I just can't bring myself to that point yet. I'm a little traumatized from all the years of having hair so greasy that I used to wash it twice a day. (I know - horrible! But I was DESPERATE for cleaner-looking hair at the time.)

Now...every time I try to start washing my hair every other day, I very quickly reach the point where one day I'm on day 2 and I just can't stand that my hair feels oilier and I end up breaking down and washing it. And there goes that plan.

Maybe with the winter coming on, it will be easier to try that one again...