[ PERSONAL ] The Nappy Adventures

Hai darlings ! Can you be so tired that you die of it? I think that's what happening to me, feel like the walking dead forreal! But I need to feed my baby blog, so while I prepare my post on what I just saw at the H&M showroom ( trust me its gorgeous !) I'm going to tell you about something that has been on my mind for a while now

I've officially decided to go natural and start my Hair Journey ! 

You probably have no idea what that's supposed to mean so let me start at the beginning okay ?

As I showed you in an earlier post I cut my hair pixie-short in January of this year. At the time I did it because I wanted to do something different with my hair, after years and years of lenght-obssesing. I liked it more than I thaught, even though it was a major adjustment! I was so sick of the weaves, plus I never ever EVER dared to do something crazy with my hair, so I just decided to chop the whole shabang off. Not even realizing what I was getting myself into, but I figured that I would discover that as I progressed.

Cutting my hair that short forced me to take extreme care of it, because you simple can't make a quick bun on a bad hairday. I did some research on how to take proper care of my afro hair and omg, a whole new world opened for me. I learned about the natural hair movement that is totally the ish overseas,which got me thinking a LOT.

The thing with African, Afro-American and Mixed women is that we relax  our hair A LOT. Relaxing is making your naturally curly hair straight, using chemicals that are quite dangerous. Talk about suffering for "beauty" ! This tradition goes wayyyy back, the first relaxer was invented in 1877 !! It basically uncurls your hair for let's say 8 weeks.

^relaxed hair vs natural hair

But relaxing your hair is not without risk ! Exessive use can not only burn your skin, but it can cause your hair to just fall the f*** out of your head !! You must be wondering WHY on earth people do that in the first place. Well, it's a LONG story. Like I need to explain apartheid and everything. It all comes down to the pressure to fit in, and look like caucasian (= white) people.

Anyways you've probably figured out by now that it's NOT good for your hair OR your scalp to relax it. 

Since a few years, black people started to realize that you don't need to "fit in" to be defined as beautiful, so they started to embrace their natural hair. To get off the relaxer or "creamy crack" is absolutely not something you do overnight ! Like actual drugs, you need time to get used to it, to take special care of yourself and your lifestyle to be successful with the rehab !

Enough talking about others, let's go back to MOI.

I'm not gonna lie to you, I'm a white girl to the bone. Bounty. Oreo. Doesn't really matter what you call it.

I just wasn't raised in the black community, but among the Dutch. Many of you know that I lived in The Netherlands for almost 8 years, in one of the most "villagy" cities EVER and I just didn't know any better. I started relaxing my hair at a very early age ( I think I was about 8 ) simply because I wanted straight hair, like all my Dutch friends. Soon the weaves followed, but mostly because I wanted to experiment with my looks rather than really trying to fit in.

Anyways when I started to do my own hair, I noticed that I liked it big, fluffy, curly! I started to wonder why on earth I relaxed my hair only to style it like how it would look without  that stuff in my hair ! Fast forward to this year : I decided I needed to embrace my natural hair, behcuz I loves it.

(credit picture)

It's pretty scary though, I have no idea what I'm getting myself into! But I feel like it's totally worth it.  I want to show of my 'fro in a few months, be proud of me and my NATURAL hair. For the moment I've got braids, but I'm soon taking them off so I can trim my relaxed ends and fully dive into this adventure. So SO exited ! I know it won't be easy at all, but there are more than enough natural sista's out there to help me stay motivated and stick to the end.

Hereby I  pledge to go natural, to embrace my hair the way it was made to be on my head and to always promote natural beauty on my blog. I'll try to post updates as much as possible, if only it were to motivate others to go natural too =D

Tracee Ellis Ross is my natural hair inspiration, my goal this year is to grow a similar or even more gorgeous 'fro !

 To stay commited, I joined the 2014 Natural Hair challenge. You can click on the banner on your left to find out more.

Wish me luck babes! 

Bisous

Dreams | Cirque Du Soleil

I'm running away with the circus OK? Not just any circus, but the mind-blowing Cirque Du Soleil. So guys I love y'all but I'm leaving.

CIAO

Okay no I'm not yet going, but there is something so bedazzeling, so magical about their circus, I just had to write about it. For those who don't know them ( be ashamed, cultural ignoramus!) Let me wiki that for you:

Cirque du Soleil (English pronunciation: /ˈsɪərk duː soʊˈleɪ/, "Circus of the Sun"), is a Canadian entertainment company, self-described as a "dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment." Based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul in 1984 by two former street performers, Guy Laliberté and Daniel Gauthier.^[2]

Le Grand Tour du Cirque du Soleil was a success in 1984, and after securing a second year of funding, Laliberté hired Guy Caron from the National Circus School to re-create it as a "proper circus". Its theatrical, character-driven approach and the absence of performing animals helped define Cirque du Soleil as the contemporary circus ("nouveau cirque") that it (...) blah blah blah yada yada yada etc.

The thing with Le Cirque Du Soleil is that they are nothing like a regular circus. Their magic lays in the fact that they took the ancient aspects of classic circus ( acts such as the tumbling acts, the clowns,...) but managed to maintain if not outshine the current standards of entertainment. Nowadays grown people have the attentionspan of a fly, they always want new, better, even more spectacular... How is a regular circus supposed to compete with that ?

Well they did it totally right. Cirque Du Soleil manages to stupefy your senses by bringing an astonishing mix of poetry, athletics, magic, art, costumery, music and much more into a performance that will stick with you for a lifetime.

We live in an era where we think that we have seen it all, our cynical minds tell us that such an old concept such as a circus can't amaze us anymore. PLEASE TELL YOUR MIND TO SHUT UP.

In this age of mechanical production we don't know what pure craftmanship and art is, what it means to see a live performance, to see emotion in a performer's act... Cirque Du Soleil blows our rational mind by transporting us to a new time, a new era where masks and costumes express who you are. Where the body is not only functional in matter of keeping us alive,  but also an extention of our soul, capable to show us emotions we forgot we could see, let alone express.

CIrque Du Soleil is about chasing your dreams and make them come true, to embrace one's self by seeing the beauty of movement. Cirque Du Soleil is about a family coming together to surpass the possible into what everybody thought lost, forgotten, impossible. Their show is about showing your passion and communicate the change we would love to see in this world. Their idealism and visualisation of Utopia invite us to dig deeper in ourselves, to examine both  our wishes and our values. 

I mean, who knew that at my age I could still be emotionally moved by the struggles of a clown?  If you have seen Alegria (aka my favorite CDS show)  you know that the clown in the storm act is just both flabbergasting and heart breaking. For those who haven't seen it, watch this video starting at 7:25

Take that 3D cinema ! So much emotion in an act where not a single word is spoken. Just ridiculously amazing.

Alegria is with no doubt my all-time favorite show ever in the history of EVERYTHING. I could watch it over and over again. If I ever get the chance to see this show live I'm gonna die of emotion.

I know I can get carried away sometimes when I really love something, but CDS is just pure rainbowmagic and unicornglitter. Don't even get me started on their costumes and make-up.

In my Marketing class we keep talking about targeting and finding the right audience for a product, so it's safe to say that when a show can move both the illiterate as the highly educated, the young and the old, from all over the world, it means that something was done right no ? Watch the soul-shaking trailer of Alegria here :

For my Belgian readers : Cirque Du Soleil will be in Belgium performing Corteo from June 13th  in Antwerp! If I get missing after that, I probably slipped myself in their trucks. Not even joking about that. I reaaaaallllyyyyy want to see them live so bad.

Have you ever seen a real-life circus, or would you like to? Tell me about it! 

Bisous

J

Dedicated to my personal circusclown and the best perfomer I know, Venant :) Don't leave with the circus without me or I'll cry, forreal.

Snapped : Wedding Glam Part 2

I promised you guys more pictures from last Saturday's wedding, so here is another outfit that caught my eye: Vestine was wearing this beautiful african-inspired maxidress made by Nishakiye Karim

My reaction when I saw this dress:

Blessed be the person who made this dress. Amen. 

Vestine kept it simple in terms of accessories, meaning she only put on (ivory) bangles on one arm, colored pearls on the other one to stay in the african theme.

Anyways, I'd love to hear what you think about this outfit ! 

Bisous

Outfit : DIY Clutch and Printed Pants

A few days ago I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked outside and some shining ball in the sky, so bright, so fabulous... My sleepy brain got a shock : "IS THAT THE SUN, FOR REAL?" I literally screamed of excitement. We have seen little to no sun at all, I just forgot how it felt to wake up and see something other  than grey and misery! I hopped in the shower and ran outside as quick as I could, I just had to make some outfitposts before it was too late (bipolar weather problems) So yeah, I went for this outfit mostly because it was so laid-back and so me!

The clutch is actually one I made myself in September ( I do such things when I get bored ). It started out as a tutorial I saw on Style Scrapbook, but when I went fabric shopping I couldn't choose so I wanted to mix these two leathers and re-designing it into this pouch. I really loved the result! It was actually one of the first of my self-made bags I was working on over the summer, I'm really loving the  whole designing-thing :D mhmm.. maybe I should do it more often though...

The pants are one of my all time favorites. The people who see me often know that I mostly wear skirts and dresses, I very rarely wear jeans because I'm not so comfortable in them. So pants like these; very loose, soft fabric, lovely print and easy to wear... Can't get enough of them really. The white butterfly top is one of my summer favorites, wrote about them before.

Sooo, ever since I first did these senegalese twist (that's how these braids are called) I loved the fact that I could do one of those cute ballerina-buns. The more volume the better ! I like to wear scarves in my hair too, this animal-inspired scarf is one of my faves at the moment.

^ flowers in the hair, how hippie-chic of me though.

So guys, this is kind of a compilation of favorites, all in one outfit ! What do you think about it?
I'm really considering designing more these days, mostly clutches because of the enormous range of fabrics I could use... Please tell me if you would like to see more of them in the feature :D

Bisous my loves,

J

Snapped : Wedding Glam Part 1

As you guys know, last Saturday I went to Paris to attend a wedding. Besides a gorgeous bride, there were so many bedazzeling outfits that I didn't even know where to look! I had TOO MANY PICTURES ! After a long and HARD time I took out the best looks for you guys to see, starting with what dance-buddy and co-fashionlover Déborah was wearing that day :

Even though I never ever saw her dressed in anything else besides fabulousness, I say she deserves an award for this outfit. Doesn't she look perfect ?

Bisous xo