Hi, everyone!

**LavenderFaerie** · January 17th, 2022, 09:25 AM

I'm so excited to be here!

This is a forum that I've been occasionally lurking since I started my hair growth journey, around late 2019 - early 2020.

As a child, my biggest dream was to have "hair that touches my butt!", as I used to say to anyone who asked how much longer I wanted my already quite long hair to grow. Back then it was around hip length, almost tailbone. In my teens, I kept it at waist length - slowly experimenting with gradually shorter cuts, until I chopped it to shoulder lenght in January 2019. Contrary to what I would have thought as a kid, I didn't regret it. I actually loved it. Despite sharing a distant (but present) resemblance to Lord Farquaad, I felt pretty - most of that feeling of beauty was due to the fact that, at that length, it now took me 1 hour less to style my hair. It felt freeing.

The cut was also great for the health of my ends. Unhappy with my natural, unruly waves, I had spent my entire adolescence frying my hair with a flat iron twice a week - which, on top of time consuming (with very thick hair at waist length, it took me 2 hours to completely straighten it), was incredibly damaging. On my 13th birthday, I got what is now called a Money Piece (my goal was to look like Rogue from X-men) and, a few months later, I remember being able to break off all of my bleach-white ends only by slightly pulling on them. When I cut my hair to shoulder-length at 18 years old, it was pristine. I still flat-ironed it, but now the frequency was reduced to once a week, and I had started to get serious about haircare. With monthly trims to keep the length and the occasional dustings in between, I managed to keep it the healthiest it had ever been.

And then, almost a year and a few changes later (I got bangs for the first time in my life, and I'm in love with them), I decided to grow my hair back. Shoulder length quickly became armpit length, which then became bra-strap length, which then turned into waist length and, then, around october or november 2021, my hair hit hip length. Up until that time, I didn't really have a goal length in mind. The longest my hair had ever been was the hip-to-tailbone length I had during childhood and, at the time I hit hip length again, I thought that "hair that touches my butt" was nothing but a silly childhood dream.

And then I saw this post while browsing the r/longhair subreddit.

"I want my hair to be that long and pretty" was my first thought. Now, I not only want hair that touches my butt - I want hair that completely covers it! But with my hair at hip length, I was starting to notice that keeping it healthy while flat-ironing it every week was getting harder. Styling it was taking longer, too, and I skipped many dates with my boyfriend and meetings with friends due to not having the energy to style my hair. Styling my natural hair with the curly gir method also took too much time and energy, and I always ended up unhappy with the end result. So after talking to a professional and watching dozens of youtube videos on the subject, I decided to get my hair chemically straightened. I learned that it was, in fact, possible to have healthy chemically-straightened hair - I would just have to be more careful and particular about my haircare routine.

And, well, here I am! I'm hoping this amazing community will help me reach my goal of classic length, and I hope I'll be a good, contributing member and help other people reach their goals as well! I'm very excited to meet everyone!

If there's anyone still reading this, thank you for enabling my ramblings, hahaha, and I hope you're having a great day!