If you grow up with curly hair, you’ll feel that beauty standards weigh heavily on your self-esteem. Throughout our childhood, no one in our family knew what to do with our curls. This is a universal experience for people with these hair types. What do you do with it?
Esme: It’s not unusual for anyone to base their self-worth on their appearance, especially as a teenager, but for me, society’s beauty standards and the weight of girlhood felt like lead in my stomach. It was done. It’s a weight that has accumulated throughout my life, someone telling me to comb my hair, asking why I don’t straighten it, the typical “bird’s nest” that I heard in my childhood. Every time I made a comment like , it took on even more weight. Many of them also come from people close to me.
Mitali: I know what you mean. “Messy” and “unkempt” were adjectives often used to describe my hair. As a child, I grew up hearing this, and without even realizing it, I subconsciously developed a dislike for my own hair. I always wanted straight hair like my mom and sister and hated curly hair like my dad. He never understood the problems I had with my hair. Because as he has grown up as a man, he has received very different treatment than I have. We have the same hair, but in his case it was almost celebrated, while in mine it was quite the opposite.
Cutting hair was also something I never looked forward to. I remember my sister getting excited and running ahead of me to the hair salon because she would give me a lollipop every time I got my hair cut. Every time I go, people say, “You look better with straight hair,” or “Don’t you have any hair? It’s so complicated and difficult to manage.”
I remember the first time my mom allowed me to blow dry my hair straight. I was so excited. When I went to school the next day, I received many compliments on my hair. Even though that was all I wanted to hear, it upset me to receive such recognition for something that wasn’t actually mine. It pretty much confirmed that everyone hates my actual curly hair and is just waiting for me to follow the straight hair standard.
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Esme: I had a similar experience. Despite my mother’s constant warnings that my hair would be damaged, I would frantically brush my curls and slam the straightener away every day until they were as supple and straight as possible. She even hid the curling iron in her room to prevent me from using it too often. I’m grateful to her now, but as a teenager I also despaired of having to attend school with natural hair.
Mitali: Actually, I think my mother was the only person who always celebrated my hair. I’m so grateful because for her, learning how to care for my hair was a journey we started together. We realized that I couldn’t treat my hair like hers.
Esme: It’s treated differently in the broader depiction as well. Naturally, curly hair is perceived as messy, wild, and unprofessional. Some kind of unkempt curly hair is often seen in depictions of witches and other evil women in art and media. With this, there is an urgent need to mold curly hair into something manageable in line with societal standards. This usually requires a long routine of applying creams, gels, and mousses.
Mitali: I agree – I think the problem was that our hair types were not represented as being considered beautiful. Every commercial, every movie, every TV show, and every media I consumed showed women with fresh blowouts and straight or wavy hair. For the first 16 years of my life, I didn’t even know how to style my hair. I chose the same boring hairstyle from middle school until near the end of high school.
Esme: I faced the same feelings in high school, but as soon as I got used to my hair and appearance and leaned into acceptance and naturalistic beauty, I was faced with a new problem: corporatism.
Simply put, curly hair is not considered professional. A sophisticated, chic and timeless look, reminiscent of femininity in a business environment, is not easily matched with natural curls. Phenomena such as the “pretty girl aesthetic” are adding fuel to this fire.
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Mitali: When it comes to the clean look of a girl, in my culture it is traditional to apply oil and comb your hair. This was a weekly routine in my household and I was dreading it. My sister completed it in about 20 minutes and always had a smile on her face at the end. When it was my turn, my mother and I would look at each other with disgusted expressions every time we sat down. The spaces between the hairs were so thin that the comb couldn’t go through them in one go. My mom sat there for at least an hour and polished me in small sections to make it as painless as possible for me. However, despite her best efforts, this ceremony ended in tears for me.
Esme: And it’s these cultural practices that underpin the incompatibility of curly hair with professional environments. Unraveling the insinuations behind it reveals the bias. The reputation of curly hair as unprofessional is partly rooted in colonialism. Prejudice against non-white women by imperial means constituted defeminization, or ridicule by separating them from Western standards of beauty. Hair plays a central role in these subordination relationships, and black women’s hair in particular has long been the subject of racialized politics. Weaponizing Western ideals of beauty and femininity against women to degrade them has been used in many colonial contexts, and the vestiges of these imperial conquests can be felt throughout society and the workplace. It’s woven into it.
As a white woman with curly hair, I understand my privilege as these issues pass before my eyes. It’s easy to understand. But perceptions of corporate etiquette are even more difficult to shake off, and I imagine that something will surface later in life that will cause me to be taunted as “unprofessional.”
Mitali: I still haven’t come to terms with accepting my natural hair. I always blow dry it straight, so most of my friends have only seen it in its natural form a few times. Nevertheless, I’m on this because at the end of the day, it’s social conditioning that made me feel this way, not an actual reflection on curly hair.
Credit: Adrian Fernandez @ Unsplash
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