Any black person who has ever donned kanekalon, bundles of virgin remy or painstakingly worked crochet needles through canerows (or cornrows, depending on how you say it), knows just how far the hair industry has come within the past 20 or so years.  

In addition to becoming increasingly accessible in terms of price, the craftwork behind a number of protective styles - i.e. wearing certain hairstyles in order to protect or put away one’s hair - at least to my memory, have advanced in leaps within the past ten years or so.

Gone are the days of donning questionable leave-outs, sacrificing our scalps to weave bonding glue, and making do with less than convincing lacefronts in order to change-up our styles. As ever, the rarely celebrated and often appropriated thriftiness of black people has given way to the golden age of black hair: DIY wigs, hair tutorials and homemade products galore.