To begin I would like to thank the sponsors of this challenge for providing us with awesome tshirts and earrings that promote natural hair and beauty. Naptural Roots Magazine positively reinforces the concept of loving oneself and natural hair. This magazine also strives to educate real people on real issues, which is something that I appreciate.

This weeks challenge was the hardest one of me thus far because I had very limited amounts of time. I had midterms and research proposals due this week and I was doing other photoshoots for one my friends who studies photography. By the time the week was over I had done a total of 4 photoshoots with 3 different photographers, a midterm, a research proposal and, work. To make matters worse, I was confused about the actual challenge this week and didn’t fully understand until Friday morning. On top of all of this, my usual photographer was out of town and my backup photographer was also busy. I must have emailed, facebooked, and model mayhemed 10 different photographers before I found two that were willing to help me. I also didn’t end up receiving my items for the challenge until Saturday morning. Despite all of these potential setbacks, I still found a way to make it work. 

All of the credit this week goes to my photographers Sonjhai Megette founder of Esoteric Images and Abbas Khalid of Kovu Photography. They came through for me when I thought I had no one and I am so thankful for all of their help. I was so lucky to find both of them. Sonjhai is a visionary photographer based out of Oakland, Ca and uses her artistry to promote positive images of people of color. She particularly focuses on the natural beauty of bald women and shares their hair stories in calendars that she creates annually. Abbas is an up and coming photographer attending San Francisco State University. He is a photography minor and hopes to have his own business one day. It was a pleasure to work with both of them and I am so grateful that they agreed to help me on such sort notice. 

Back to the challenge, since I had already scheduled a photoshoot for Friday night and I got my package on Saturday morning, I decided to do my own interpretation of the challenge. Since I know that Naptural Roots Magazine prides themselves on representing real people I decided to pick basic items that most women have and show how they can be dressed up into something chic and fabulous. I also wanted to showcase my own fashion sense.  The items I picked were a plain white v-neck and a pair of hoop earrings. I dressed this outfit up with a bright pink scarf, a heart necklace, a metallic leather jacket, and some light mint green jeans. I love all things colorful and sparkly and bright colors make white shirts look fashionable and fun. Colored jeans compliment white shirts as well. I love hoop earrings, they’re cute and can be easily paired with almost any outfit. 

For my hair in this challenge, I really wanted to do hair styles that are simple to do but look very fashion forward. This hairstyle was really simple. The first thing I did was divide the top 1/3 of my hair into 3 sections. For the sections on the left and right of my head I simply corn-rowed my hair straight back, resulting in 4 braids on each side. Before I braided each piece of hair I applied Going Natural’s Curl Keeper light to the sections of hair so my braids would stay longer. For the middle section, I parted about an inch of hair on the right side of the section and created 4 single braids. I then set this hair to the side. I took the loose hair and twirled it around my finger and pinned it in the back so it looked like a twisted poof. I took the 4 single braids, wrapped them around the poof, and then tucked it into the back. For the other 2/3 of my hair I used water and Going-Natural’s Curl Keeper Light to define my curls. The whole process took me about 20 minutes and resulted in a cute, chic, and couture hairstyle that is easy to do. 

I got my package on Saturday about an hour before my second photoshoot was scheduled. That means I only had 60 minutes to come up with a hairstyle and a new outfit. Again, I wanted to choose a simple, fun, and easy style to do. For this hairstyle, I kept the left side of my hair braided and I took the middle section and right sections of my hair and combined them. I then did 4 flat twists going across my head. I clipped half of my hair up in the back and left it curly. I decided to wear copper metallic pants. I thought they brought out the brown colors in the tshirt. They definitely make a tshirt into a cute outfit. For some of  these photos I also decided to wear a really pretty patterned scarf in my hair. It goes well with the earrings and with the shirt and pants. It is a fun multi-useful scarf that can be worn around the neck, in the hair, or even has a belt. I thought the pattern in the scarf resembled patterns that I had seen in Naptural Roots Magazine.  In this shoot I decided not to wear makeup besides blush and mascara. I wanted to showcase myself naturally without a lot of cosmetics. 

This week I learned that sometimes situations in life don’t always happen how they we want them to but, you have to work with what you got and make the best of it.