I came out of the womb with a full head of dark, curly hair. Fetus Ariel had crazy, curly hair.
Just because I’ve always had my curls doesn’t mean I’ve always appreciated them. When I was a kid, and especially growing up with a single father, we had no clue what to do with the mess on my head. I mean, we brushed my hair pretty regularly, which is the number one no-no of curly hair. For so long, I desperately wanted straight hair. All my friends and all the pretty girls at school had straight hair that was always perfect.
As I got older and got more access to fashion magazines and the Internet, I started to realize the right way to take care of my hair and why it looked frizzy all the time, and I started to learn how to fix that. (My hair is almost always frizzy, no matter how much my friends assure me that “it looks fine!” It doesn’t look fine. It looks like I stuck my finger in an electric socket 90% of the time. Let’s just be honest with each other.) But also if you have curly hair, you know it has a mind of its own, and I just pretend to be in charge of it.
Now I’m a sort of grown up, and I love my hair. People always ask if I ever flat iron it, and I do, but I don’t feel like I need to flat iron it all the time. When I do flat iron it, people say, “You look so much better!” which is a cool way of saying “Normally, you look like garbage!” They also say, “I like your hair straight so much better,” which is another nice way of saying “Normally, you look like garbage!”
Some days, yeah, I wish my hair was straight and didn’t frizz at the first sight of a rain cloud. But most of the time, I love having a ton of curls. I love that they make me unique, I love that they represent me, I love that most of the time, they look like I made an effort (people ask me if I get perms which is apparently still a thing people do in 2017).
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