#BellaNaijaWCW Ade Balogun is Promoting Social Acceptance of Dreadlocks with Locitude

#BellaNaijaWCW this week Ade Balogun was working as an architect a decade ago when she made the decision to permanently loc her hair due to her crazy schedules and spending 2 to 4 hours twice a month at a hair salon wasn’t working for her.

She decided to loc her hair. But that came with its own challenges. Her colleagues made fun of her and at some point, she began to dislike how she looked.

It brought back memories from 3 years prior. While in architecture school, she told her mum she wanted to loc her hair and her mum said nothing until they were driving one day and saw a mentally ill man and she goes: “is this what you want to do to your hair?”

Ade kept at it and a year into her hair journey, she had a conversation with a friend who kept her natural hair and made her understand that there’s nothing wrong with wearing her natural hair.

This motivated her to keep wearing her hair the way she loved. To combat the lack of societal acceptance of dreadlocks, limited styling options and unprofessional salon services, Ade re-created styles from watching YouTube videos and applied her architectural leanings towards generating even more unique hairstyles.

She decided to start a blog (locitude.blogspot.com) to help people like her going through the same challenges with their locs. That was how her platform Locitude (Locs with an Attitude) was born.

Locitude is a community for people with locs. The platform has five pillars – its hair studio, product line, events, content creation via its blog and magazine, and education.

Ade also promotes societal acceptance of locs, self-confidence, networking, collaboration, and hair care and maintenance among people with dreadlocks, through her platform.

She hosts the annual Loc Appreciation Day in Lagos and has given talks at a TEDx event as well as Social Media Week, Lagos.

You can check out her feature on BN Fro Friday.

Ade is a visionary who is putting the fun back in for women and men who want to rock their natural hair with attitude and panache, and we’re totally rooting for her!