Most women love their hair, and spend a huge amount of time and money trying to keep it in the best condition they possibly can. Hundreds of thousands of dollars every year are spent on straighteners, sprays, and shampoo. After all, one bad hair day can totally rock a person’s confidence, male or female, and so people go to desperate lengths to try to prevent it. But for Asha Mandela, length is the only thing that she cares about.
Asha is fifty years old, and has deadlocks that are nineteen and a half feet long. In fact, some individual dreadlocks have been measured to be around fifty five feet long. They are fabulous, and she wears them with incredible style and dignity. Growing out her dreadlocks is something Asha is completely dedicated to, and we suppose that you would have to be, because it’s a difficult job. Since 2008, Asha has had the longest deadlocks in the world – which makes us wonder how many other people are out there desperate to take her crown away from her.
Because getting to this place has not been easy for Asha. When she was twenty five – which funnily enough was twenty five years ago, Asha uprooted her life, and completely changed the world around her. She moved from Trinidad-Tobago to New York, and decided (whilst she was at it) to have a slightly more natural hairstyle. Once she started growing her hair, there didn’t seem to be any point in cutting them off, and it all started from there. Now she has been given the nickname ‘the Black Rapunzel’ – a title which we would imagine Asha absolutely loves. She has stated that she will never ever cut off her hair, and we believe her. She managed to keep all of her hair in dreadlocks even when she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, a feat that has shocked many of her medical team.
Because getting to this place has not been easy for Asha. When she was twenty five – which funnily enough was twenty five years ago, Asha uprooted her life, and completely changed the world around her. She moved from Trinidad-Tobago to New York, and decided (whilst she was at it) to have a slightly more natural hairstyle. Once she started growing her hair, there didn’t seem to be any point in cutting them off, and it all started from there. Now she has been given the nickname ‘the Black Rapunzel’ – a title which we would imagine Asha absolutely loves. She has stated that she will never ever cut off her hair, and we believe her. She managed to keep all of her hair in dreadlocks even when she was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, a feat that has shocked many of her medical team.
Many people cannot understand how Asha lives with her hair being that long, but there are small changes that she can make to her life that makes things a little easier. She probably doesn’t need to shut doors in her home, because like the Rapunzel of our story books, her hair would just get stuck! But Asha has not been laid back about her amazing hair, and has even seen a way for her to make money from it. She has now brought out her own range of hair products, including shampoos and conditioners that reputedly increase hair growth and prevent hair loss – something that surely Asha knows a lot about. But when it comes to looking after her own hair, everything gets a little bit complicated.
It now takes Asha an entire day to wash her hair, which she does every week using around six bottles of shampoo to make sure that every single inch has been cared for. After all of this effort, there’s not much Asha can do but wait, because it takes two whole days for her hair to dry. When her deadlocks are wet, Asha is carrying around 25 pounds on her head, which has caused some medical concern to be voiced. Without taking a different route in caring for her hair, she may come up with even more medical problems as she gets older. There may be evidence that her heavy hair is slowly twisting her spine already, and she is only going to find more problems as she continues to grow her hair. However, we’re not sure that anyone can convince Asha to part with her dreads
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