This story is from The Pulse, a weekly health and science podcast.

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In the blackness community, long natural hair evokes marvel. For decades and from every bit young as simple school, many black women have used relaxers, powerful chemic treatments that straighten curly hair. Since relaxers tin can cause harm to natural hair, such equally breakage or stunted pilus growth, long natural pilus is seen equally a rarity.

Exactly how long our natural pilus tin grow and how long it takes to grow is a mystery to many black women. Still, ane way to get answers to just not relax your hair. This is how I've lived, as a lifelong, kinky-haired natural.

Growing up in the early 2000s, my mom, Michel, had a strict rule: No relaxers would always enter our Brooklyn, New York, domicile. Rather than ship me and my sister to the pilus salon, she spent four hours washing and combing our hair every Sunday nighttime until we turned eighteen.

"Since you guys were toddlers, uppermost in my mind was making sure that you liked yourselves naturally," my mom said.

She was my stylist, rotating between twists, braids and buns. She was too my cheerleader, making sure I knew that even though my hair wasn't wavy like Hilary Duff'south or had absurd highlights like Lindsay Lohan'south, it was still gorgeous.

"When I was doing your hair, I would ever exist making these comments of how blackness your hair was or how healthy it looked and, you lot know, how it felt," my mom said. "I e'er talked virtually it in a positive style and so, similar, giving yous the joy of your own hair."

Reporter Mycah Hazel's mom, Michel, done and styled her girl's hair every Sunday. In this photgraph, Mycah (correct) is with her younger sis sporting braids. (Image courtest of Mycah Hazel)

Non having relaxed hair did get lonely sometimes. From elementary school to high school, I was often i of simply two girls in my class with natural pilus. Still, beingness lonely had its advantages. Since nobody looked like me, I didn't worry almost how long my pilus was or how it compared to other girls'. My mom was supportive of my pilus and in public, people were in awe of information technology.

"People fabricated a lot of comments when you were preteens and teens about your hair," my mom said. "I of the things they would always say is, 'Oh, your pilus looks and so beautiful. Don't you always perm it.' Or things similar that. 'I'g glad you never permed information technology. Information technology looks so skillful natural. Keep it like that!'"

When higher came, I moved to upstate New York, and I brought my female parent'south Sunday launder routine with me. It consists of 7 steps:

• Detangle the hair with a wide-tooth comb and lotion
• Shampoo
• Status
• Apply a hair mask to add together moisture
• Wash out the hair mask
• Add together a leave-in conditioner and a heat protectant
• Accident dry

But washing is the easy part. For kinkier hair similar mine, washing but not styling pilus can lead to it getting disordered and dry out overnight. Information technology has to exist styled in braids or twists. This was something I didn't fix for before higher. So, every bit in most situations, I turned to the internet. I establish a ton of hairstyling videos.

Merely I as well found another type of video: length checks.

Length-check videos were made by women who had cutting off their relaxed pilus and were tracking their natural hair growth. They'd tug a strand of their natural pilus down and mark where it reached — olfactory organ-length, shoulder-length, or the goal, waist-length.

I fell down a rabbit hole of length-check videos. It was addicting, watching how long, thick and luscious these women'due south hair had get. Some women'due south hair grew every bit speedily equally 4 inches in vi months. Other women's hair had grown waist-length in a unmarried year.

Still, the more videos I watched the more nervous I became. These were girls who had simply gone natural. How was their pilus growing faster than mine?

Naturally, I became length-obsessed.

Any natural-pilus YouTube channel I visited, I would scroll through their videos to encounter how quickly their hair had grown. I became super bummed about my own hair.

It didn't assistance that going from relaxed hair to natural pilus was becoming pop offline likewise. It seemed like every woman on campus was starting their natural hair journey, and that their pilus was growing faster than mine. Talking to friends, I would be distracted by their growing top buns and thick Afros.

However, I wasn't alone. In the comments sections on YouTube, I found that black women from across the hair spectrum were as well confused about why their hair grew and so slowly compared to the women in these videos.

Sabine Bellevue, owner of Sabine'southward Hallway, a natural hair salon in Brooklyn, helped to clear upwards some of the defoliation.

"Nosotros have a false thought of what our hair should expect similar because of what nosotros see [with] someone else'south hair," Bellevue said. "You lot have to understand, they alive in a different climate than you. Their diet is unlike than you. Depending on where they live and what they do, and their lifestyles is not like yours, and their parents are not your parents. So your hair may not look like theirs and is non going to come out the same way that their hair is."

Just because we don't see the same results equally the women in these videos doesn't mean our pilus doesn't grow. Kogie Porter, possessor of Jenetics Pilus Salon in Bronx, New York, and a certified trichologist, or hair doctor, said hair grows a half-inch per calendar month.

"There is growth that we are not seeing," Porter said, who has been doing hair for more than than 30 years. "Our hair grows out either in a tight C or a tight Southward blueprint. You won't run into information technology unless you lot straighten it out completely. If we begin to take that natural hair and pull it, you volition meet length."

Climate, genes and diet can tell us why some blackness hair is longer than others. What is more complicated is why length matters and so much to u.s. as black women.

New York-based psychologist Linzy Andre linked information technology to something chosen residual trauma: Our black ancestors had it ingrained in them that European features such as long hair were preferable, and so we subconsciously are concerned when we don't have them.

"There are so many factors that have been used to separate u.s. or to place united states on some type of hierarchy," Andre said. "Everything from peel tone to hair texture and length, to body type and curves. This is something that our parents and grandparents and people way into the past take been dealing with. And it'due south not just going to get away."

Our obsession with hair length as blackness women is rooted in a history mode bigger than YouTube. Only steps to go rid of this obsession are smaller.

"My No. i slice of advice is only learn to appreciate who you are and how you are," Andre said. "Every bit platitude as it sounds, I think that's something that sort of needs to be repeated and understood over and over once more."

Instead of drooling over bloggers on YouTube, perchance I should be listening to what my mom's been trying to get through to me for years.

"You lot're not a kid anymore," she said. "Y'all're contained. And I'yard seeing that you've grown to love yourself. And so my role at present is simply to support, encourage, just to be there."

My mom may not have to exercise my hair anymore, but I tin ever utilize her encouragement.