RAÍZA Facebook ad: “read this if your edges are getting quiet”

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I have braided the same woman's hair every 6 weeks for 17 years, and last March she sat down, looked at me in the mirror for a second, and asked me, real quiet, if I could turn the chair around so she didn't have to watch. I have done this woman's head more than 140 times. I know her mama's church. I did her hair for her wedding and for her mama's funeral. I knotted her braids the week before she had her son and I loosened them the week after. She has sat in the same chair, the one by the window, since 2008, and she has never once asked me to turn it. She used to finish every appointment the same way. She would stand up, get close to the mirror, turn her head left, turn her head right, pat the back, and say, alright now. That was her stamp on the work. 17 years of alright now. Last March she asked me to turn the chair so she wouldn't have to look at her own head. And I did it. I turned the chair. I braided her facing the wall, and we talked about her son's basketball season like nothing was happening, and when I finished she paid me and wrapped her scarf on before she even stood all the way up, and she walked out of my shop with her head down like she was walking out of a clinic. I stood at my window and watched her get in her car. Then I went back to my station, picked up my phone, and started a photo album called just her initials. Because I take a picture of every head I finish. Been doing it since 2012. Thousands of pictures. My camera roll is my notebook, and that day I understood it was about to become my evidence. I want to tell you about a woman I'm going to call Denise, and what happens when every label in the store says growth and moisture and protect, and every doctor says the blood work is fine, and the whole time a woman is disappearing an edge at a time in front of the one person who actually looks at her scalp every 6 weeks. I want to tell you what I figured out, because I did figure it out. I'm not a doctor and I'm not a scientist. I braid hair. And I'm telling you, the people who see this problem first are never the ones with the framed papers on the wall. Stay with me. Here's who I am so you know who's talking. My name is Pat. I'm 54. I've been doing natural hair since 1996, the last 19 years in my own 2-chair shop off Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte. I learned on my aunties' heads before I ever had a license. I have done box braids, knotless, cornrows, twists, locs, silk presses, big chops, and every wash day in between. And I will tell you something people don't understand about this work. A braider sees what nobody else on earth sees. Not the husband. Not the doctor. The doctor looks at your chart for 10 minutes a year. I hold your actual scalp in my hands for 5 hours every 6 weeks, under good light, 1 inch at a time. I know whose edges are fighting and whose are leaving. I know who's stressed by the shed on the cape. I know who's pregnant before some husbands do, because the hair tells it. People think we just braid. We keep records nobody asked us to keep. Now let me tell you who Denise was, because you need to know who she was to understand what I watched. Denise came to me in 2008, referred by her cousin. She was 25, working the teller line at the bank downtown, and she had the kind of head braiders talk about after you leave. Thick. Dense from the nape to the front. 4B mostly, tight and springy, the kind of hair that drinks up a whole day. Her appointments ran 6 hours minimum and I used 8 packs of hair on that head every single time. 8. I used to fuss about it and charge her extra, and she'd laugh and say, that's grade A pasture, Pat, you should be paying me. Every visit went the same way for years. She'd sit down, get settled, and the second thing out of her mouth, every time, was, how's your mama doing, Pat. Then, once I started keeping my granddaughter on Saturdays, it was, where's my baby at. She kept up with my whole family like it was her job. She brought a lemon pound cake to the shop every Christmas week, made from her grandmama's recipe, and my other clients would time their December appointments trying to catch a slice. Every spring, like clockwork, she booked the same style. Middle part, boho knotless, curls left out around the face. That was her signature. She called it her sundress hair. She'd get it done the first warm week of April and walk out of my shop like the parking lot was a runway. No scarf. Never a scarf out the door. She'd do her mirror turn, left, right, pat the back, alright now, and out she went with her head up. She married Marcus in 2011 and I did her wedding hair and cried a little doing it. She moved up at the bank, kept moving up, runs a whole branch now. She had her son in 2019, at 36, after a lot of praying for him. She is the woman at her church who organizes things. She is the daughter who took her mama to every appointment when her mama got sick. She is the one everybody leans on. That's who was in my chair. Now let me show you what I watched happen to her, year by year, because I have the pictures. It started in the fall of 2019, a few months after the baby. She sat down for her takedown and when I unraveled the old braids, the shed that came out with them was about double what her head normally gave up. Now listen, some shedding after a baby is normal, everybody knows that, hair holds on during pregnancy and lets go after. I told her that. Her doctor told her that too. She said, doctor says it's the hormones, it'll come back. And I said, it usually does, and I meant it. But I marked it, the way you mark a thing without knowing yet why you're marking it. Because it wasn't just the shed. Her front, right along the temples, felt different under my fingers. Finer. Like the difference between new rope and old rope. In 2020 her mama got sick and the bank went crazy with the shutdowns and Denise was carrying all of it. That year I noticed the packs. I set out 8 packs for her appointment like always and used 7. I didn't say anything. You don't say anything about 1 pack. In 2021 it was 6 packs and I braided a little fuller to cover it, the way we do, and she came in one visit and told me her doctor had run the full blood work because she asked him to. Thyroid fine. Iron fine. Everything fine. She said he told her, you're healthy as a horse, it's just stress, try to relax more. She laughed when she told me. Try to relax more, Pat. I'll get right on that after I close the branch, feed the baby, and call the nursing home. That was the first time I heard a doctor look at that woman's numbers and miss that woman entirely. In 2022 the middle part went away. She sat down in April, the sundress month, and I had her boho knotless ready in my book, and she said, let's do a side part this time, and swirl the front. I knew what swirl the front meant. It meant cover it. I did the side part. I didn't say anything. That summer she went to a dermatologist, a good one, waited 3 months for the appointment. She came to me right after and gave me the report. The derm looked at her scalp for a few minutes, said the word traction, said the word stress, said some of this is common in women who braid, and offered her the drops. You know the drops. And Denise asked her, the drops that you have to use forever or it all falls back out? And the derm said, yes, that's how they work, you'd need to stay on them. Denise is not a woman who wants to rent her own hairline back 1 month at a time. She asked if there was anything else. The derm said, honestly, you could stop braiding for a year or 2 and see. Stop braiding. I want you to hear that the way she heard it. This is a Black woman with 4B hair working 50 hours a week with a toddler and a sick mama. Braids are not a costume for her. They're how her hair survives her life, and if I'm honest, they're part of how she knows her own face. Telling her to just stop was not a plan. It was a door closing politely. She told me all this in my chair with her eyes shut and then she said something I wrote down that night. She said, everybody keeps telling me what the numbers say and nobody can tell me why my hair is leaving. In 2023 the pound cake stopped. First Christmas in 12 years without it. Small thing. I know it's a small thing. But you asked how you watch a person disappear and the answer is, in small things. That was also the year she started booking my last slot of the day, 4 pm, when the shop empties out. She never said why. I never asked. We both knew. She kept her scarf on now until she was fully in the chair, and put it back on before she stood up, and the mirror turn, the alright now, that was long gone. And the second thing out of her mouth was not, how's your mama, anymore. Some visits she hardly said anything at all. I'd ask about her son and get, he's good, and then quiet. 5 hours of quiet where 17 years of talk used to live. And here is the part that makes my chest tight even now. That whole time, she was doing everything right. Everything the internet and the aisle and the influencers said. I watched the products come through my shop in her bag like a parade. The rosemary mint oil everybody swears by, the little bottle with the dropper. Rice water she made herself in a mason jar until Marcus begged her to stop because of the smell. Castor oil, the thick Jamaican kind, every night until her pillowcase went brown. Biotin gummies, 2 a day. A silk pillowcase, a bonnet, a satin lined everything. A growth serum off an ad. And then, because she does her homework, she found batana oil. The one from Honduras everybody was going crazy over online. She ordered a jar off a video. $12 something. She brought it in and showed me. It was tan, smooth like frosting, smelled like nothing at all, maybe faint perfume. She used the whole jar in 6 weeks and another after that. She ordered a different one from a brand with a pretty website, waited almost 2 months for it, emailed them twice, no answer, and when it finally came it looked like the first one wearing a different label. She told me, Pat, I have bought 3 of these now and I'm starting to think I'm the fool. And her edges kept right on leaving while she rubbed all of it in, faithful as church. Her mama's health leveled out in early 2024, thank God, and her sister called me around then too. That's how you know it's bad, when the family starts calling the braider. Her sister said, Miss Pat, you see her head up close, is it as bad as I think. And I told her the truth, because they never get the truth from anywhere else. I said, baby, it's not good, and nothing she's using is touching it, and I don't know why yet. Her sister was quiet and then she said, she cried at Easter because the wind moved her hair in the pictures. Denise. Crying over wind. So now you know everything that led to March 22 of last year. Let me tell you about that Saturday slow, because it's the day everything turned, and I remember it in minutes. She had the 4 pm, the hiding slot, but I was running behind and the shop was still half full when she came in. Takedown day. 8 weeks in knotless that should have come down at 6, because she'd pushed the appointment twice. She sat, we started, I worked the back first like always. The back of that woman's head is still strong, I want that on the record. Dense, healthy, grade A. The problem was never all of her hair. That's part of what kept fooling everybody. I got to the right temple. I loosened the braid at the hairline, the way I have done a hundred thousand times in my life, gentle, from the bottom. And the braid came away and a piece of her came with it. A patch, about the size of my thumb, wound into the root of that braid. Not shed hair. Hair with the little white bulbs on the ends, and behind it, on her temple, a smooth place. Shiny smooth. Skin that has quit. I have been doing this since 1996. My hands did not stop moving. I palmed that braid, all of it, and dropped it in my smock pocket in 1 motion, and with my other hand I laid her fresh towel up over the side of her head like it was part of the process. Because here is what I knew in that half second. There were 4 people in my shop. There was a mirror 2 feet from her face. And Denise runs a bank branch in this town. Half the tellers in her lobby have sat in my chairs. If she saw what I just saw, in this room, in front of these people, that moment was going to live in her body for the rest of her life. She had been fighting for 5 years to keep this private, booking 4 pm slots and wearing scarves to the car, and I was not going to let the wind take it from her on a Saturday in my shop. So I said, loud enough for the room, you know what, this takedown's a mess, let's just do the rest at the bowl, and I wrapped the towel into a turban and walked her to my shampoo room in the back, my hand on her shoulder, chatting about nothing the whole way. I sat her at the bowl and closed the door. And then I told her, quiet, with my hand still on her shoulder. I said, baby, some came out at the temple. More than usual. I've got it, nobody saw it, and we're going to handle it, but I'm not going to hide it from you because everybody else has been hiding it from you behind nice numbers for 5 years. She didn't fall apart loud. That's not her. She leaned back against the bowl, closed her eyes, and the tears just ran back toward her ears, and she said the thing I think about every day since. She said, Pat, my edges said we're done. And then she said, I don't feel like me anymore. I feel like I'm being erased and everybody with a diploma keeps telling me I'm fine. I finished her at the bowl. I braided her simple and full in the front, in the back room, just us, and I didn't charge her and she didn't argue, which told you where we both were. I texted my 6 pm and pushed her to Monday. When Denise left, out the back door to where her car was parked, I sat down in my own chair, and I took an old appointment card and I wrote 1 question on the back of it, and I taped it to my mirror where I'd see it every day. I wrote, if she is doing everything right, why is her hair still leaving. Then I went home, and that Sunday, instead of church, I started. Now I have to tell you about Miss Alba, because Miss Alba is the reason I looked where I looked. Miss Alba runs the alterations shop 2 doors down from me. Been there since before I signed my lease. She's 76 years old. She's Garifuna, from Honduras, came up here by way of New York in the 80s, and she still hems church suits 5 days a week with her own steady hands. And Miss Alba has a head of hair that stops conversation. Silver now, but a rope of it, thick as my wrist, in 1 braid down her back past her waist. Her edges, at 76, are a solid clean line, like the Lord drew them on that morning. I have watched that woman part her hair with her fingers in the reflection of her shop window for 19 years. Monday morning I went and sat in her shop before I opened mine. I said, Miss Alba, I need to ask you something and I need you to take it serious. She put down her needle. I said, you're 76. Your hair is a testimony. Meanwhile I've got women half your age in my chair going bald at the temples, doing every single thing the bottles say, and their doctors telling them everything's normal. What do you do that they don't do. She looked at me a long minute. Then she reached under her counter and set a little dark jar on the glass, worn label, half used. She unscrewed it and held it out. Inside was a deep brown, almost red, like coffee and clay had a baby. The smell came up before I even leaned in. Roasted. Smoky. Like coffee beans done over a fire. She scooped a little with her finger and it melted flat into her palm while I watched, just from the heat of her hand. She said, batana. My sister sends it from home, from La Moskitia. My mother put it in my hair, her mother put it in hers. Where I come from they call our people the ones with the beautiful hair. This is why. Every week, all my life, into the scalp, not just the braid. And I said, Miss Alba, my client bought batana. 3 jars of it. It didn't do a thing. And Miss Alba took the jar back and screwed the lid on and said the sentence that cracked the whole case open. She said, then your client has never touched batana. What they sell in those videos is lotion with a story on it. If it has no smell, it has no truth. I went back to my shop and opened up and braided all day. And that night I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop and my reading glasses and that little card question in my head, and I read until the news came on, and then past it. And I'm going to lay out what I learned the way I learned it, in order, because when it clicked for me it all clicked at once, and I want it to click for you. The first thing I learned had nothing to do with batana. It was about the hair itself. There's a thing called porosity. It's about the outside layer of each strand, the cuticle, which lays like shingles on a roof. Some heads, the shingles sit up loose, and those heads drink product. But a whole lot of our hair, the tight coily hair, is low porosity. The shingles lay down flat and tight and sealed. And I had to put the laptop down when I read what that means. It means water beads up on it. It means oils and creams don't soak in. They sit on top. They make the hair look moisturized, shiny, coated. And underneath the coat, the strand and the scalp can be dry as August. I sat there and thought about 28 years of white cream still sitting visible on somebody's strands at the end of a 5 hour appointment. I knew low porosity hair with my hands my whole career. I just never had the word. And then the second piece. All that shedding and thinning at Denise's edges had 2 engines, not 1. Engine 1 was tension, years of it, plus the baby, plus the stress, all of it weakening the follicles at the temple, the exact spot that gets pulled the most. Engine 2 was that those weakened follicles were starving. A follicle is alive. It has to be fed, blood flow and nutrients, right at the root, at the skin. And every single thing Denise bought, the rosemary dropper, the castor, the serums, either sat on top of sealed hair, or never even claimed to reach the follicle at all, or, and here's the part that made me mad, was fake to begin with. Because then I read about the batana. The real thing is from 1 palm tree, from Honduras, pressed and cooked down by hand, mostly by Miskito and Garifuna women, the way Miss Alba's sister does it. It's rich in the exact fatty acids and vitamin E a starving follicle wants, and the oil itself is the rare kind that doesn't just coat tight low-porosity hair. It melts at body heat and slips under those flat shingles and actually gets in. That's why Miss Alba's finger trick matters. Real batana melts in your palm. Real batana smells like the roasting that made it. That smell is not a flaw. That smell is the birth certificate. And what's being sold in the videos? I read until 1 in the morning about that. The trend blew up so fast that most of what's online now is diluted or outright fake, brown lotion in a jar, a lot of it shipped from factories that never saw Honduras, with no smell, whipped smooth and pretty. Some of those companies don't ship at all, they just take the money and quit answering, and I found whole pages of women saying the same 2 things over and over. This is not real batana. And, nobody answers the emails. Women like Denise, buying hope 3 jars at a time. So look at the whole picture now, the way I saw it at my kitchen table at 1 am with my glasses pushed up on my head. Her doctor was watching her blood numbers, and the numbers were fine, because the numbers were never where the problem lived. Her products were watching their own labels, moisture, growth, protect, and the labels were fine too. And the whole time, the actual scalp, the 2 square inches at each temple, was pulled tight, starved at the root, and sealed off from every remedy she poured on it, half of which were counterfeit anyway. It's like watering a plant that's sitting in a pot with a lid on the soil. You can water it every day, twice a day. You can buy better water. The plant is still starving, and everybody standing around the plant is saying, well, she waters it, so it must be the plant's fault. Denise was never the plant's fault. Nothing was getting in. And what could get in, she'd never once actually held in her hands, because 3 jars of lotion wore its name. The next morning I went to Miss Alba's shop before opening and told her all of it, and asked her the question straight. Can my client get what your sister sends. And Miss Alba said her sister's batch comes twice a year, small, family first, and there wasn't any to spare till fall. But she said, the real thing is out there if you know how to check it. She gave me her 3 checks. It should be dark, reddish brown, never tan. It should smell strong of roasted coffee, smoky, and if it smells like nothing or like perfume, put it down. And it should melt in your palm from your own heat, because that melting is exactly what lets it get past hair like ours. So I went hunting. I'm not going to drag you through the whole 3 weeks. I ordered 4 different jars with my own money. First one came in 4 days, tan, whipped like icing, smelled like a candle called vanilla that smells like nothing. Failed. Second one never came at all for 3 weeks, and their customer service was a dead mailbox, and when I finally got it, it sat in my palm like Crisco and never melted. Failed. Third one was oil, at least, but pale and thin with a perfume on it. Failed. The 4th one I found by reading instead of watching videos, a small outfit that names where in Honduras their batana comes from and shows the women who make it. The jar came in 3 days. I opened it in my shop and the smell reached Tony's chair. My other braider, Keisha, said, who's making coffee. It was dark red-brown. I scooped it with my finger and held my palm flat and watched it go soft and then liquid, just off my own skin, same as Miss Alba's. I walked it 2 doors down without the lid on. Miss Alba leaned over it, smelled it, rubbed it between 2 fingers, and nodded 1 time, like a judge. She said, this one came from home. Denise's next appointment was 9 days out. I called her and told her to come Sunday instead, when the shop is closed, just us. She came in her house clothes with no makeup on, which told me she trusted me more than anybody left in this thing. I sat her in my chair and I told her everything I just told you. The porosity. The shingles. The lid on the pot. The 2 engines at her temples. Miss Alba's hair and Miss Alba's checks and the 3 jars on my shelf that failed and the 1 that didn't. And then I put that 1 jar in her hand and I said the careful part, and I'm going to say it to you too, exactly like I said it to her. I said, Denise, this is not magic and I am not a doctor. Keep your doctor. Keep your appointments. The smooth shiny patch, the skin that's quit, I don't know if anything on this earth wakes that up, and I won't lie to you like the videos do. But everything around those patches, the thin places, the fine weak places, those follicles are not dead, baby. They're asleep and they're starving, and for 5 years nothing you bought could get in the door, because either your hair kept it out or it was never real to start with. This gets in. Warm a little in your fingers every night, into the scalp at the edges and anywhere it's thin, slow circles, 3 or 4 minutes. Think of it as feeding, not fixing. And we are going to braid you looser up front, no more tension on those temples, that's my part of it. Give it 3 months before you judge 1 thing. Look for less hair in your comb first, not new hair. Less leaving comes before more coming. She held the jar with both hands, and she smelled it, and she laughed for the first time in I don't know how long, and said, it smells like my granddaddy's porch. And I said, that's how you know. And she went home. Now I'm going to give you the next 6 months the way I got them, appointment by appointment, and I'm reading my camera roll and my book as I write this, so these dates are real. May 4, 6 weeks later. Takedown day. The shed that came out of her old braids was maybe half of what her head had been giving up. I weighed it in my hand the way only a braider can, 17 years of the same head, and I knew before she said a word. And at her temples, in the good light, there was fuzz. Not hair yet. Fuzz. Like the shadow of a thing coming. I didn't make a big deal, because hope is heavy to carry and I didn't want to load her too soon. But when she sat down that day, the second thing she said was, how's your mama doing, Pat. First time in over 2 years. I texted her sister that night. Something's turning. June 15, 12 weeks in. She came in at 11 am. Not the 4 pm hiding slot. 11 in the morning, shop full. That was her telling me something without telling me. At the takedown her edges had actual short hairs standing straight up along the temple line, half an inch, sticking up like static, dozens of them, the little soldiers we call baby hair when we're being sweet. She saw me looking and said, I know, I check them every morning like a garden. Her comb, she said, was near empty in the mornings, where she used to clear it every day, and the shower drain, and this is her exact sentence, the drain and me are not enemies anymore. When I finished her that day she stood up, and she did the turn. Left. Right. Pat the back. She caught herself doing it and got embarrassed, and I pretended to be busy with my broom, and she said, real soft, alright now, and we both let it be. August 3, about 4 and a half months. I set out 5 packs of hair by habit. I needed 6. First time the number went up instead of down in 5 years. I didn't tell her. I just showed her the empty wrappers at the end and let her count. She sat in my chair and cried with her whole chest, no hiding, shop not empty either, and Keisha brought her a paper towel and nobody made it weird. That was also the visit she told me about her follow-up at the dermatologist. Same office that offered her the forever drops. The derm parted through her temples with the little stick, went quiet, checked the chart, checked her head again, and said, whatever you've been doing, keep doing it, and wrote it down when Denise told her. Wrote down batana oil in the chart with the good pen. Denise said, Pat, she asked me where I got it. A doctor asked her. Late September, 6 months. Her son's fall pictures were coming up and her niece was getting married in October, and Denise sat down in my chair, in the window seat, at noon on a Saturday, and said the sentence I had been waiting 3 years to hear. She said, let's do the middle part. Sundress hair, in the wrong season, and neither of us cared. I parted that head down the middle for the first time since 2022 and the part held. It was a line, a real line, hair standing on both sides of it. Not the line it was in 2015, I won't lie to you, and the 2 smooth patches are still smooth, small, quiet, hers. But everything around them filled and kept filling. When I finished, she didn't reach for her scarf. She looked at herself a long time. Then she took a picture of her own reflection, first picture I'd seen her take of herself in years, and she sent it to her sister and her mama, and she walked out my front door at 2 in the afternoon with her head up and her hair moving, and Miss Alba, who was standing in her own doorway 2 doors down, watched her pass and looked over at me through my window and gave me that 1 nod again. I stood there with my broom and I'm not ashamed to tell you my eyes went hot. Keisha said, you did that, Pat. And I said, no. I just finally got something past the front door. Her head did the rest. It's been 14 months now since the Sunday I put that jar in her hand. She's still my every 6 weeks. We braid looser up front now, always, that part stays forever. She's back to bringing the pound cake, she brought one in July just because, we didn't even ask. Her jar sits on her bathroom counter and she warms a little in her fingers every night while her son gets his 15 last minutes of cartoons, and she calls it feeding the garden, and Marcus learned to do the back for her on Sundays, which she says is the most romantic thing that man has done since 2011. Now let me talk to you straight, because the rest of this is for you, not about Denise. If you're reading this and your edges are getting quiet on you, if your part is wider in pictures than it looks in your head, if your drain and your comb have become something you check with your stomach tight, and everybody official keeps telling you your numbers are fine, it's just stress, it's just the baby, it's just your braids, I'm asking you to do what nobody did for Denise for 5 years. Look at the gap between the labels and the scalp. Trust what your own hands feel at your own temples. You are allowed to notice yourself disappearing even when every chart in the building says fine. And if you have already tried batana, if you bought a jar off a video and it did nothing and you decided it was one more lie, I need you to sit with this possibility, because it was true for Denise 3 jars in a row. You may have never touched batana in your life. Do Miss Alba's 3 checks on whatever's in your cabinet right now. Is it dark reddish brown, or is it tan like frosting. Does it smell strong, roasted, smoky like coffee done over a fire, or does it smell like nothing. And does it melt into liquid from the heat of your own palm, or does it just sit there like something from the baking aisle. If it fails those, you didn't try batana and it didn't fail you. Lotion failed you. There's a difference, and the difference is your edges. The jar I hunted down after 3 strikes, the one that passed all 3 checks and Miss Alba's nose on top of them, is the one Denise has used every night since. A small company, and they name the place in Honduras and show the women who make it, which after everything you just read is the whole ballgame to me. I'm not going to put on a salesman voice about it, that's not what this is. I braid hair. But if you want the name of the one that passed, ask me in the comments and I'll tell you, same as I'd tell you across my chair. P.S. 1. I want you to remember what I am and what I'm not. I'm a 54 year old braider from Charlotte with a camera roll going back to 2012 and a taped-up card on my mirror that says, if she's doing everything right, why is her hair still leaving. I don't work for anybody but the heads in my book. I'm telling you this because I watched a woman I love get erased 1 temple at a time while every expert holding her file said fine, and the thing that turned it was 2 doors down the whole time, in a 76 year old seamstress's little worn jar. If that means something to you, you already know it does. P.S. 2. If you start, don't judge it by new hair. Judge it by what stops leaving. For Denise the order was, week 5 or 6 the shed cut down at takedown, then the comb went quiet in the mornings, then the fuzz at the temples, and the little soldiers standing up came after that, and the part came back last. Less leaving comes before more coming. Watch the comb, not the mirror, for the first 2 months. P.S. 3. Braiders, if any of you read this far, ease up on those temples. I braid Denise looser up front now and I do it on every head in my book, and I'm telling my clients the truth about it even when they ask for tight. The oil was half the answer. Our hands were the other half. We see it first. That means it's partly ours to stop. P.S. 4. Last March a woman I've braided for 17 years asked me to turn my chair so she wouldn't have to see her own head. 3 weeks ago she stood at my mirror, turned left, turned right, patted the back, and said, alright now. If somebody you love has stopped looking at herself, don't let it ride for 5 years like we did. The person is still in there. Sometimes she's just waiting on something real to finally get in. — Pat

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read this if your edges are getting quiet

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