My first ever product review!!!

Bee Mine Bee U Ti Ful Natural and Organic Deep Conditioner

Ingredients: Distilled water, Cetearyl Alcohol, BTMS (mild emulsifier), 100% Unrefined Shea Butter , 100% Organic Coconut Oil, Cupuacu Butter, Calendula Extract, Chamomile Extract, Organic Raw Honey, Paraben Free Preservative, Fragrance (Phthalate Free)

Silicone - Free / SLS - Free / Paraben - Free / Protein Free 

In a stroke of good luck, I won this product in a BGLH giveaway last week! As I don't have class until the evening on Wednesdays, I decided to give it a go yesterday morning, and as soon as I opened the container, I knew I was in for a treat. 

Creme de la creme

It's a much creamier consistency than the deep conditioner I'd been using previously, and has a light fresh coconut scent that is pleasant without being overbearing. I wet my hair in the shower and then began to apply the deep conditioner, scrunching it into sections of my wet hair, and my hair just ATE IT RIGHT UP. I never realized the degree to which my old deep conditioner sort of sits on top of my hair until this melted right into it! The instructions say to leave it in for ten minutes under a plastic cap, but I like to combine deep conditioning and detangling into one convenient treat-my-hair-right process, so I probably left it in for closer to half an hour as my Denman Brush and I worked our way through my now no longer knotty/tangled and more clearly defined curls! (Denman brushes, women. I highly recommend.) 

With the conditioner in, somewhere in the middle of detangling

Look, Ma, I can comb my hair! My hand looks like an alien life-form in this picture.

Happily quenched curls after I rinsed the deep conditioner out.

Seriously though, I don't think my curls have ever been as thoroughly quenched as they were yesterday, and even when I woke up this morning it wasn't as dried out and in need of immediate moisture as my hair normally is. I contemplated wearing second day curls! But then my outfit called for a fedora, which called for a ponytail, which called for water. Oh well. Point is, this deep conditioner is awesome and I highly recommend it. Like, oh my word.

I won a BGLH giveaway!!!

*rolls out of bed*
*knows she should go get in the shower*
*decides to play around on the internets for a little while first*
*scrolls through Google Reader, seeing what's going on the way-too-many blogs she follows*
*legit does a double-take when she sees Maya Reid won this giveaway*
*thinks, 'That must be some other Maya Reid. It's not an uncommon name.'*
*hesitantly clicks on the link*
*squeals upon realizing she has actually won!* 

I'm getting a new deep conditioner! My morning is awesome! This is particularly awesome because I realized last night that I left my deep conditioner at home when I moved back to campus yesterday, and was just about to go buy some when K and I make a Walmart excursion later...but now I don't have to! Score!

Integration. It's the future, women.

Ran across an interesting article this morning from the Atlanta Post via Black Girl with Long Hair about how Black-owned and Black-specific beauty companies are being phased out. I learned that Black people didn't own almost any of the companies that make the products we use most regularly from Chris Rock's comedy/documentary Good Hair, and I can't say I was really surprised even then. (You can't tell me relaxing your hair isn't conforming to White standards if ONLY WHITE PEOPLE sell relaxers. #I'mjustsayin) And I don't think I was really even aware that such things as Black-specific makeup brands even EXISTED until I lived in Chicago, which evidently has a large enough black population that CVS sells things like Black Radiance. It excited me to see a whole company devoted just to selling beauty products for Black women, but truth be told, I had just as many issues finding products I wanted from that line, because there was less variety than is provided by the larger cosmetics companies. And no matter who I buy from, I've never found a powder that matches my skin tone perfectly--concealer is a joke. So I think this move towards companies targeting brown-skinned people in general, regardless of race/ethnicity (or curly-haired people in general, regardless of race/ethnicity) is good because it will provide more variety. It allows for increases in specificity, because sure I'm a Black woman, but there are probably women in South America, Latin America, and maybe even the Middle East or India who have skin tones very similar to mine. I have a close friend who is Korean--the last time he went to get a haircut, his stylist recommended that he deep condition with olive oil...hair texture transcends racial categories too. [The jew-fro is another example.] As much as I support Black nationalism, I think my ideal fight is minority nationalism...all peoples of color need their needs to be addressed. If it's hard for us, imagine how hard it is for people of even more diverse shades of beautiful.