When I was just a little girl, I wished for nothing more than straight, long hair.
All the pretty girls and all the models had beautiful straight hair that they could do almost anything with. While my hair was put into two puffy braids almost every day. I remember begging my mom to let me get a perm. I would receive so many compliments when my hair was straight. It was quite literally the only time I truly felt beautiful.
With a half-Asian mom with long wavy hair, and a black father who never really had to do his hair, I had no one to truly teach me how to take care of my curls and love my hair as it was. Currently, my hair is the healthiest it’s ever been, and I would never even think of straightening my hair more than twice a year.
However, it was so hard to get to this point of acceptance, and even now, at 18 years old, I never wear my hair fully out in public and am obsessed with stretching my curls. So, in this article, I’m analyzing the question of why it is so hard for Black women and girls to love their natural hair today.
I believe it all starts out with representation. As a kid, all my Black friends had perms or braids in their hair. To this day, I’ve never even seen some of their hair in its natural state. Looking back at the shows I used to watch, almost all the black actresses had perms or wigs, and the ones who didn’t were almost always playing the nerdy, undesirable character.
Famous Black models such as Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell almost always wore straight hair. From a young age I was taught to hide my natural curls or risk being undesirable. The only way for me to be seen as beautiful was to straighten my curls no matter how much damage it would cause or hide them under a wig.
If I ever decide to have children, I will dedicate myself to showing them just how beautiful and versatile their hair can be. I love my mother so much and she has done nothing but support me in every way. However, as a mixed woman, my mother never had the type of hair I did. Thus, she never knew how to style it or truly show off my curls.
For years, my hair would be in two braids because my mother didn’t know how else to style my thick, kinky hair. I was so jealous of all the other girls whose hair looked straight, silky, shiny, and smooth no matter what. I remember how ugly I would feel compared to them and I remember how much I cried when I was told I could not perm my hair. No matter how beautiful my parents told me my hair was, I felt like it was the only thing making me ugly.
In middle school, I vouched to do my own hair, which my mom accepted. However, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I would wonder why my hair constantly got frizzy at the end of the day or why my curls were never defined like they were when they were wet. Water was all I knew when it came to my hair. The concepts of hair butters, gels, and leave-ins were completely foreign to me. I couldn’t even do simple cornrows.
I remember seeing a girl in my school with long beautiful curly hair that was always defined, never frizzy and went all the way down her back. I wondered why my hair couldn’t look like that. No one had ever taught me how to make my hair look like that. All I knew was in order to achieve a perfect hair day, I would have to straighten my hair.
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a terrible couple of years affecting all parts of the world. Ironically enough, I think it might’ve saved my hair. Due to lockdowns and extreme boredom, I spent all my time learning about my hair, how to take care of it, and so on. I had probably spent hundreds of dollars on hair products just trying everything out. I learned what my hair could do and what it couldn’t.
Most importantly though, I began to see its beauty. I began to learn curly hair might not take away from my beauty but add to it and that’s when I began to love my hair in its natural state.
Looking back at this now, I realize just how far I had come. I always told myself I would perm and dye my hair when I was old enough and now, I can’t even imagine doing that. In a perfect world, little girls with kinky hair like me will be able to see their beauty in themselves and in others with their hair.
A piece of advice: learn how to take care of your hair and make sure it is healthy because healthy hair equals beautiful hair. Let’s advocate for more curly hair representation so that the generational curse of hating our curls does not repeat!