Afro Hair & Beauty Show and Strength of Nature Brit Beauty

What a whirlwind of a week! I was away for half of it which was packed with work, meetings and more work....

The most exciting thing though was the Afro Hair & Beauty show and the Strength of Nature Brit Beauty mixer which happened on the bank holiday Monday. All I can say is that it was a pleasure to meet so many lovely women, followers and bloggers. I had such a great time!!

The Strength of Nature mixer was such an amazing fun filled night...complete with so many beautiful women with gorgeous, gorgeous hair! It was organised by Pelumi of Care For Your Hair and hosted by  Patrice of Afrobella, also fondly know as the godmother of brown beauty blogging! Her blog is one of the first blogs I ever discovered/loved and she is even friendlier and nicer than you could imagine.

I loved that the Strength of Nature team came down from the US to share their brand and future goals with us in the UK. I felt it highlighted that they value us as part of their Strength of Nature customers and community. They have a number of brands which include Beautiful Textures, Elasta QP, African Pride and The Profectiv range. This forms part of their philosophy to provide a wide choice of affordable products to suit the hair care needs of many women of colour.

I left with a lovely goodie bag and will be including some goodies in a giveaway next Month so stay tuned.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Top 10 Points from WOW - Women of the World Festival

So last weekend I attended the Women of the World Festival (WOW), which was held at the Southbank Centre and which celebrates the formidable strength, and inventiveness of women.

The day was a diverse programme of events, performances, talks, debates etc. from women from around the globe

Two of the fantastic debates I attended were:

Fashion, Beauty and Style

The fashion industry contributes nearly £40bn to the UK economy, directly employing over 800,000 people. So why isn’t it taken more seriously? Why does a dress worn by Kate Middleton (Duchess of Cambridge) sell out in minutes? Can fast fashion ever be ethical?”

The speakers included Hadley Freeman from The Guardian, Natasha Pearlman – deputy editor of Elle Magazine and ethical fashion expert Amisha Ghadiali. It was chaired by June Sarpong, presenter and co-founder of the WIE Network.

And

Weave VS Natural? The Politics of Natural Hair’ “For centuries, women of colour have been told that their hair in its natural state isn’t good enough. Do we judge black women by whether or not they straighten their hair? Is the Afro still a political hairstyle? And do Michelle Obama’s bangs really matter?

Speakers included: Keysha Davis, editor of Blackhair magazine, journalist and writer Funmi Fetto, journalist Eva Simpson and blogger Natalie Clue (Beauty Pulse London). It was chaired by journalist and author Hannah Pool – I have a detailed post of this coming up soon where I am writing it as a guest post, so I will keep you posted on when it comes out.

In the meantime, I just wanted to share a brief summary of some of the key points that I took away and some images of the events and people.