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Teri LaFlesh
spent thirty years trying to figure out her hair. Yes, you read it
correctly. Thirty years of primping, curling, cutting,
straightening, dreading, dyeing and weaving. Three decades full of
heartache, confusion and tons of dead hair.
Raised by her white father in a predominantly
white neighborhood in California, Teri was completely lost when it came
to her hair. “I had this big crunchy-nest thing on my head and I was
trying to straighten it and didn’t know what to do with it,” she
recalls, laughing. “No matter what I did, it wasn’t acting like anyone
else’s hair. I just really felt freakish.”
When she was ten years old, she bugged her family
members to take her to a salon where she pointed to a picture of a
pretty woman with long hair blowing in the wind. “I want to look like
that,” she told them, but instead she walked away donning big, greasy
jheri curls.
After that her mother - who is African-American
and lives in Kentucky,- began to straighten her hair, but when she
moved to California to live with her father, she was left on her own. “I
had to do the chemicals myself so I always ended up burning myself and I
would have scabs over my head all the time.”
One time, while attempting to go for a wavy look,
Teri decided to experiment and ended up with stick-straight hair on one
side while the other side remained curly. “My classmates were really
fascinated with that,” she says with a laugh. “I just [played it off] by
saying it was a political statement.”
Next Teri played around with colors, dying her
hair red and orange, sporting different styles before growing tired of
it and hacking off all her hair. “I think I started putting all my angst
and hostility towards my hair,” she says. “I had mutant hair as far as I
was concerned.”
Afterwards Teri decided to grow dreadlocks but
that didn’t work out - “I put them in wrong” - so she decided to go
back to straight and that’s when all her hair fell off. “It was really
freaky,” she remembers. “It [the chemicals] turned into this paste when
I was trying to rinse it out and the paste came out, and my hair came
out, too.”
To hide her bald, irritated scalp, Teri turned to
weave and extensions while waiting for her hair to grow back. “I got
really addicted to weaves…but my big dream in life is to have really
long hair down my back,” she recalls. “But it never would really grow
much past my shoulder.”
Out of desperation, Teri decided to see how her
natural hair would look like without chemicals and that’s when she
experienced her Aha! moment. Today, Teri boasts of long,
beautiful, healthy curls and a website, blog and
book to teach biracial girls how to love and care for their curls. “I
would’ve saved so much heartache if I had just known how to care for my
hair,” she explains. “It’s funny how much hair can make a difference.
You wouldn’t think so and I’ve always feel a little kind of shallow when
I tell people that I’m writing about hair – but really, it’s more than
just about hair.”
Teri currently lives in Seattle. Estimated
release date of her book 2010, by Wiley Publishing.
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