Boity Thulo is more comfortable with her natural hair these days. Image: Instagram
Even though she’s a megastar, Boity Thulo’s natural hair journey is similar to that of most owners of kinky and coily hair.
“I used to be the relaxed girl all the time and I used to colour my hair a lot so the issue was the breakage, my hair used to break a lot. It became very thin,” said Thulo in a chat with The Citizen.
“I know that the attractive part of the relaxing was that your hair was “nice” and thin and soft and you could put your hands through your hair but for me, it became too thin and started breaking easily and in some instances, it started falling out a bit.”
So, Thulo says she decided to do as little as possible to her hair in order to see how it fares when left to grow as nature intended.
Like many new naturalistas (people who join the natural hair movement and advocate its philosophies), Thulo says she cannot list how many products she tried just to find what worked for her.
She even lists trying those gummy vitamins (Sugarbear Haircare) many celebrities promoted on Instagram a few years ago that supposedly promoted rapid hair growth.
“I used to try all these fads without realising that they were created for white people’s hair, you know that type 1 and type 2… I don’t even know what their hair type is called.”
“It was before the rice water days. At least now we have moved into the space where we’re truly catering to natural hair.”
Thulo says she has now become very protective and careful with her hair and she is no longer as experimental as she used to be.
She owes this decision to becoming more educated about the science of her hair and its needs, something she says she learned about in great detail while working with experts to develop her new haircare range, the Boity Hair Care Collection.
“Having done this, having gotten into this step of my hair journey and it being entrepreneurial, I actually had to learn so much more than I actually thought I needed to know.”
She says she started to view her hair as what it is as opposed to something that needs to altered and beat into submission.
“I also knew that I wanted to move away from products that require way too much work because I think that’s another thing that makes people a little bit lazy abut doing anything with their natural hair because they are bombarded with five billion products…”
Thulo tells The Citizen that she didn’t want to alienate people with convoluted processes and extreme promises like extreme growth. Her focus is simply on care.
“You’re going to put love into your hair, it’s not necessarily about seeing it become something else. It’s just a matter of putting love into your hair and caring for it with the right ingredients but also not having to spend five hours – because that’s what it seems like in some of these YouTube videos – spending five hours in the mirror fiddling with your hair.”
Products in the Boity Hair Care Collection | Image: Instagram
She continued to touch on her frustration with the promises other brands and hair care pages on social media make by using people with extremely long and full hair.
According to Thulo, this is unfair because these brands ignore the factors that affect how each person’s hair grows and looks.
She also became exasperated with the hair care YouTube channels out there, all giving the most contradictory advice.
“You get bombarded with so much information that you’re almost scared to even try, especially on YouTube because it’s just too much and now you don’t know where to start.”
“It was a matter of trying to figure out to find something that felt like it was for me and how do I do it now and it’s not going to take me 500 years?”
Thulo felt even more overwhelmed when she realised that most of the natural hair care videos at the beginning of her journey were international videos which meant that the products used by the creators were near impossible to get her hands on.
So, after years of being an unsatisfied consumer, she stepped into the shoes of the producer to create what she felt was missing or inaccessible.
The Boity Hair Care Collection | Image: haloheritage.com
As for what’s next, Thulo simply says: “You never know. The sky’s the limit really.”
“This is just the beginning and for me, with the hair, we’re even going to tap into the space of weaves and wigs. This is not about shunning anything else. It’s not like I’m saying I’m never going to wear a wig again, I’m going to wear a wig. But now I also want products that take care of my wig and I can create that.”
The Boity Hair Care Collection ranges between R140 and R1 600 and can be purchased on haloheritage.com.
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