"You Need Black Friends"

I went natural a few months ago (yaay, Big Chop!) I am really happy about it and I actually get excited before shampooing...Feeling my tight little curls growing from day to day just makes me feel like I am discovering myself again, since my hair has been relaxed since I was around 10.

In Senegal, relaxing your hair was not seen as a bad thing. People weren’t exactly informed about the negative effects of overused relaxer. As a little girl, I just loved that it made my hair shine and easy to style, as it was part of the culture. At every major ceremony, we would go to the salon and end up with beautiful straight hair. Realizing the negative effects of relaxer just helped me re-discovering my natural beauty, and now I love and have fun with my hair.

Anyways, I didn’t really know how I would look like after cutting my hair short, and I eventually managed to find a style to match my hair…but nobody warned me about how hard  it is to find a braiding salon in San Francisco, for an acceptable price. When my boyfriend said to me with a dead-serious expression “You need black friends”, I thought he was making fun of me, and automatically made my offended, why-are-you-stereotyping-us face, before actually thinking about what he said.

Now there ARE braiding salons in the city, they just pop out every now and then, but the price is usually around $200. No less than $160. As a student, I definitely cannot afford this. I say: we should have a giant forum for anyone wanting to get braids in a certain part of the city – or even the country, or the world, even!

In a meantime, my boyfriend was right: as a community we need to have each other's back. It is thanks to the beautiful Brittany that I was able to find the person that would braid my hair for less than half of the “normal” price. I met her on the Muni train, the most random place ever, just by asking her about her braids, I was able to get her cousin’s number and an appointment at her house.

Networking is key in this world, from work opportunities to cheap braids. And I made a gorgeous, sweet friend in the process. Thank you Brittany!