The online community is really vast but hard to pinpoint down for this particular hairstyle. It envolves people from anywhere in the world that has internet access. The targeted audience for the Boho Babe’s passion twist tutorial is primarily black women but can be accessed by anyone. Narrowing down who’s within that community is a bit tricky. There are some black women that are natural and looking to use it as a protective style, like me. While there are some black women who aren’t natural who are also looking to keep their hair tucked away for an extended period of time. There are also hairstylists probably looking to add something kind of new to their portfolio. I’m hoping that I can sift through the comments to find black women like myself, who have a similar hair type, so I can know what to expect when my hair is done. When you have shiny, wavy, and porous hair, hairstyles can look completely different on you versus someone like myself, with tightly coiled and dryer hair. The natural hair movement was coined by black women for black women, but the movement has touched everyone with some type of curl or wave pattern in their hair. Throughout the past decade or so, women who have routinely straightened their hair because they believed it was the best look for them or didn’t know how else to manage their hair stopped. They did big chops, where they let their hair grow out without applying heat or relaxers to it and then cut the weak, overly processed hair off. So the community that I find myself within this community is that subsection of women who don’t want to go back to breaking our hair off to fit a certain look. There are always alternatives to heat and I want to find the women who have the same mindset as me.
The Boho Babe posted her tutorial in September of 2018, but it’s a little difficult to say whether or not she is the actual creator of the hair style. I expect to see a little debate about this when I go through all of the comments. There are always hairstyles that a supposedly from a specific region or associated with a certain nation of people but more of these hairstyles are borrowed from a previous generation with a new twist. The natural hair YouTube community isn’t shy about letting people know how they feel, whether you’re the poster or a commentator. Inside the community there’s a broad range of women who began their journey by watching hair tutorials and may have specifically chosen to do just natural hair styles. As well other people who are just watching the hair tutorial to just understand the magic behind certain hairstyles.
Since I switched my topic half way through the project, I’m not getting my hopes up about posting a comment and having someone reply in time for me to write my paper. I understand that this is a past tense sense of community, but I like that it allows me to browse through things that happened all the way back to September. So to have someone else ask a similar question like mine and get an answer would be at high chance. Or it may be a question that the Boho Babe didn’t respond to out of the hundreds of comments she gets, which is completely understandable. Luckily, she’s not the only one that gets to respond to comments.
Using crtl+f, I was able to navigate the conversations about 4c hair. As always with YouTube comments sections things get messy, like I said earlier I expected some fighting. What I found was not surprising, but helpful nonetheless. The 4c conversation dealt with the question I had myself: why is the Boho Babe only doing this on straightened hair when the natural community tends to shy away from that? It opens up the discussion on why straightening 4c hair is a fruitless task: it won’t stay straight for long and it leaves our hair dry. There’s no point in me straightening my hair when I will be washing it while I have the twists in. So, reading the bickering and helpful comments gives me an idea of what my community is like within the passion twist community. Since the passion twist community falls within the natural hair community, I have to look at the 4c hair community and not just focus on budgeting and saving money. I have to do what’s best for my hair and finding a balance.
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