Quote Originally Posted by AmIGonnaFail
Just another quick update..bleach number 3 is on and ooooh my gosh my head is on fire
Sounds awful, hope it works for you.

Made me think of this:


My First Conk
By Malcolm X
from The Autobiography of Malcom X, 1964

Shorty soon decided that my hair was finally long enough to be conked. He had promised to school me in how to beat the barbershops' three- and four-dollar price by making up congolene, and then conking ourselves.

I took the little list of ingredients he had printed out for me, and went to
a grocery store, where I got a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-
sized white potatoes. Then at a drugstore near the poolroom, I asked for a large
jar of vaseline, a large bar of soap, a large-toothed comb, and a fine-toothed
comb, one of those rubber hoses with a metal spray-head, a rubber apron, and a
pair of gloves.
"Going to lay on that first conk?" the drugstore man asked me. I proudly told
him, grinning, "Right!"

Shorty paid six dollars a week for a room in his cousin's shabby apartment. His cousin wasn't at home. "It's like the pad's mine, he spends so much time with his woman," Shorty said. "Now, you watch me â??"

He peeled the potatoes and thin-sliced them into a quart-sized Mason fruit jar, then started stirring them with a wooden spoon as he gradually poured in a little over half the can of lye. "Never use a metal spoon; the lye will turn it black," he told me.

A jelly-like, starchy-looking glop resulted from the lye and potatoes, and
Shorty broke in the two eggs, stirring real fast â?? his own conk and dark face bent
down close. The congolene turned pale-yellowish. "Feel the jar," Shorty said. I
cupped my hand against the outside, and snatched it away. "Damn right, it's hot,
that's the lye," he said. "So you know it's going to burn when I comb it in â?? it
burns bad. But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair."

He made me sit down, and he tied the string of the new rubber apron tightly
around my neck, and combed up my bush of hair. Then, from the big vaseline jar, he
took a handful and massaged it hard all through my hair and into the scalp. He
also thickly vaselined my neck, ears and forehead. "When I get to washing out your
head, be sure to tell me any-where you feel any little stinging," Shorty warned
me, washing his hands, then pulling on the rubber gloves, and tying on his own
rubber apron. "You always got to remember that any congolene left in burns a sore
into your head."
The congolene just felt warm when Shorty started combing it in. But then my
head caught fire.
I gritted my teeth and tried to pull the sides of the kitchen table together.
The comb felt as if it was raking my skin off.

My eyes watered, my nose was running. I couldn't stand it any longer; I
bolted to the washbasin. I was cursing Shorty with every name I could think of
when he got the spray going and started soap lathering my head.

He lathered and spray-rinsed, lathered and spray-rinsed, maybe ten or twelve times, each time gradually closing the hot-water faucet, until the rinse was cold, and that helped some.
"You feel any stinging spots?"

"No," I managed to say. My knees were trembling.
"Sit back down, then. I think we got it all out okay."
The flame came back as Shorty, with a thick towel, started drying my head,
rubbing hard. "Easy, man, easy!" I kept shouting.
"The first time's always worst. You get used to it better before long. You
took it real good, homeboy. You got a good conk."