The first time I ever saw micro-braids was on a sister walking downtown Chicago, on Clark Street, right in front of the LaSalle National Bank building where I worked and just exited.

Strolling past me with her blondish / brown micro-braids up in a French roll of sorts, the woman walked confidently with a white man — both of them dressed in business attire.

I couldn’t help but stare.

I’d never seen anything like them — micro-braids so thin and neat with gorgeous coloring.

The sistah smiled back at my open gaze. I’m sure her micro-braids brought her plenty of stares back then.

After all, it was circa 1992 — and not too many of us were sporting micro-braids back then.

But I never forgot her.

And here I am, 15 years later (wow…has it really been that long?) finally setting up a web site all about micro-braids.

Micro-Braids-Hair-Style.com will be literate, a virtual meeting place for all us micro-braid wearers to discuss all aspects of wearing someone else’s hair braided, bonded, or bejeweled within our own.

I’ll share all my journey from being “a virgin of the micro-braids,” as one West African sister from CJ’s Salon down in Shaker Heights, Ohio, called me — to the African Euphoria women who braided too tightly, chuckled when I said “uhn un” to putting my hair straight back in a ponytail after it was done and had plenty of attitude as I plunked down my 380 bucks.

We’ll talk about our micro-braiding mishaps, like where we’ve found braids that have fallen out…

…to how much joy we feel wearing them or, if you’re like me, meditativeness of micro-braiding my own hair.

So stayed tuned, sign up and let’s take our micro-braiding trip together.

“White women micro-braids. White woman microbraids.”

It’s funny, but I was surprised to learn that requests for “white women micro-braids” and “white woman micro-braids” made up 50% of my search terms of how people found this website all about micro-braids soon after I started it recently.

But then I remembered Taryn Manning, the white actress who wore micro-braids that I kept staring at in Hustle & Flow, the excellent movie with Terrence Howard.

(I mean, who can forget the scene with Taryn Manning and Terrence Howard sitting in the church with real tears — as Terrence has said they were — streaming down his face as they listened to the woman sing about Jesus?)

But anyway, back to the white women and micro-braids central topic at hand.

I liked the way those long braids looked on Taryn in the movie — that’s why I couldn’t stop staring at them.

If Bo Derek did it with cornrows, you can do it with micros…
And the fact that Caucasian women are searching for information about the trend and assurance about wearing them has led me to update the mission statement above to reflect that this is a site for ALL women who wear micro-braids — be they black, white or somewhere beautifully in between.

The Lord let me know I’m on the right path.

When searching for a picture to place above in the header, I found the perfect one: Black strands and blonde strands beautifully interwoven together.

(Don’t let me bust out singing: “Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony, side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord why don’t weeeeeeee?”)

Anyway, it makes sense that females of all races would want to pick up on the micro-braiding trend. Just like how Bo Derek stunned the world and gained legions of fans when she came running up out of that surf in “10″ wearing cornrows, with beads, no less!

So if you’re white and feel in your soul that you want to give micro-braids a try — go for it!

Ignore the haters. They didn’t make you, they can’t break you…

I feel another song coming on:

“This joy I have, the world didn’t give it…the world can’t take it away!”