Journey | Loc Extensions: Instant Style or Politically Incorrect?
by Gail Mitchell
Lately, everywhere I look, I see the beauty of dreadlocks.
On any urban street, you'll see a steady stream--be it newly started buds, crinkly teenage coils or long, mature locs, happily flowing into maturity.
But how many of those long locs are actually the fruit of a person's enduring path to the locked lifestyle? How many of the lengths we see today are the result of a sacred, introspective journey to a true extension of their natural selves? The fact that many of the long locs you see makes you wonder: are we really seeing the result of hard-won patience or an attempt to follow the latest trend as quickly as possible?
Today buying hair is as easy as buying any fashion accessory. We've taken the lead from celebrities who use weaves and wigs to protect their own hair from the heat and damage of everyday styling in their industry. Now weaves and wigs are a part of the everyday fashion lexicon. Now you can buy hair--most of it not African American--at the drugstore, the dollar store and of course the beauty supply store.
I've never felt comfortable wearing a wig, weave or even some braid extensions. I personally felt fake, not authentic. Except for the occasional Halloween party or for the occasion to put on a phony pony, I've felt most comfortable in my own hair, be it relaxed, natural, or now in the earlier stage of locs of about three years. Don't get me wrong-- what works for others work for them.
However, they're not just my thing. As beautiful a head of long hair may be, I still want to wait out the gradual transition into a long mane of fluidity. It will take months, maybe years, but I feel it's worth the wait.
A leading natural salon in New York charges $30 per bundle of hair and $1 per inch for loc extensions, and as high as $400 to attach a finished style. Most of it involves the labor of creating each loc strand-by-strand beforehand, then attaching them to one's natural lengths. Of course, paying this much is one's personal choice, and by no means am I discouraging people from doing it. (If you have the money, you can do what you want!) But I wonder with the rush to lengths is something lost along the way.
Part of the beauty of locs is witnessing one or two inches transform to feet down one's back. Watching your hair slowly creep from the nape of your neck to the middle of your back. It doesn't happen overnight. You change as well. You see others fight with bad hair days or not looking acceptable enough in a white-dominated society, while you slowly await your comb-formed twists or palm-rolled sections grow into long tresses. Since the budding days of starting my locs, I've yet to have a bad hair day.
My locs are a pathway to personal self-acceptance, a symbol of my Jamaican heritage, and a befitting crown to years of feeling uncomfortable with harsh chemicals, and a constant struggle of beating my natural texture into submission for most of my life. Long or short, I accept my hair as a natural extension of myself. It can't be bought in a store, sewn on or braided in.
And I'll patiently await the harvest of lush, long locs. For me it's only natural.