protective styles
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UPS Finally Arrives at 21st Century, Will Allow Workers to Have Facial Hair and Natural Black Hairstyles
In one of those “Wait, you mean they didn’t do that 50 years ago?” news items, UPS has announced its workers can finally have facial hair and wear their hair in a number of hairstyles. For Black folks, this means afros, braids, and other protective styles can finally be worn with the iconic brown uniform.…
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Not Getting My Hair Wet Was Keeping My Sex Life Dry
After years of wearing wigs and quick weaves, I recently decided to give my hair a break and try protective styles—and the transition sexually liberated me in ways I never expected. For years, I’d navigated anxiety and insecurities around body image and my sexual performance, but I can also say I’ve spent countless sexual encounters…
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Big Beauty Tuesday: Can a Turban Help Me Embrace Change?
Honest question: Do you need to be a woman of a certain age to effectively pull off a turban? While my extensive history with headwraps, hats, scarves and the like would suggest otherwise, I’d have to argue that a turban might be a rite of passage of sorts, imbued with either deep spiritual symbolism or…
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Bye-Bye, Heat Damage; Hello, Protective Styles!
The relationship a black woman has with her hair is ever changing. One day our hair looks flawless; the next day we’re tying our hair down with a scarf to hold down our edges and whatever might be going on in the “kitchen.” Summer is always a trying time for us because of the humidity,…
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Can I Live? Malia Obama Tries Out Braids for Summer, and Now Everybody’s a Hairstylist
First kids—they’re just like us! Ah, youth. I remember my college years at a predominantly white college in the Northeast, navigating a course load and campus job while trying to figure out how to stay cute while washing my hair with extra-hard dorm water … good times. It’s no wonder that by the end of…
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Get Twisted and Braided in Harlem
The numbers don’t lie: 71 percent of black Americans wore a natural hairstyle at least once in 2016. To find out more about protective styles and the amazing practitioners behind them, I took a journey up to 125th Street in Harlem, the international mecca for the natural-hair movement that’s taking black Americans of all ages…