Proud to be a Bay Area Natural!

This past Saturday was the first of many (!) Bay Area Naturals Meet Ups!  About 20 natural haired ladies (and one curious potential transitioner) got together at Market Bar in San Francisco to meet, eat, swap and bask in the glory of our beautiful, curly, coily, loc’ed, twisted, braided, cropped, long, bouncy, shiny, and most importantly *healthy* natural hair.  I think I can speak for the entire group that a fantastic time was had by all!  Attendees came from all around the Bay Area: SF, Oakland, Richmond, Fremont, Hayward, Concord, Palo Alto and even from beyond the Bay Area (shout out to Fatemeh who drove the 2 hours from Modesto!).

Special thanks to Komaza Care and JessieCurl, California-based companies, who graciously donated samples for all attendees to  try out and to Thank God I’m Natural who sponsored a giveaway of TGIN books, totes, and t-shirts that several lucky ladies got to take home.

As I said, there will be more of these to come, so stay tuned to details.  If you want to be added to the meet-up list to be notified of future events, shoot me an email at naturalhairselection@gmail.com.

A few favorite highlights:

• The server asking what we were celebrating and replying “umm…HAIR!”.  (Although, Mia suggested I say that it was a family reunion.  I guess its a lil bit of column A/lil bit of column B….)
• Seeing that there were more products for swapping on the table than food (and I scored some great new things that I was planning on leaving the event to go buy, like Aubrey Organics GBP!)
• Learning people’s real names instead of their online avatars (and when their partners found out not only their avatar, but also just how involved and intense the online natural hair community is.  Shout out to Miss Femme Fox on this one— yes, I know your real name, but now we’re back online 🙂
• Casually discussing behentrimonium methosulfate and everyone knowing what it was
• Instead of being asked how I styled my hair that day, being asked how I styled Lola (for the record – a Cherry Lola Treatment and just some Karen’s Body Beautiful Hair Milk)

Please feel free to add your favorite moments and pictures in the comments section.  You can also email me your pix and I can put them up to share!

Now without further ado, the pix from the event after the jump!