Embracing Curly and Kinky Hair

Finding your way towards and navigating the “Curly Hair Journey” can be a very tricky, confusing, offsetting, and time consuming part of your life. Whether you grew up in an environment that embraced your curly hair, had role models and positive representation of your hair as an adolescent, or simply had someone around you who knew about curly hair and the knowledge to take care of your curls can all have an impact on how you viewed your hair and self as a child. For those of us who did not have these types of curly hair awareness and attention in our lives, our viewpoints on ourselves and our natural hair can turn out skewed such as internalizing our curly hair to our ethnic backgrounds and feeling ashamed of that identity. These early perceptions of ourselves can still follow us even into our adulthood and continue to damage our perspective on the beauty of curly, kinky, natural hair.

The curly hair spectrum can vary in a mass of delightfully diverse ways, styles, and textures. As some individuals will have soft curls that flow freely, others will have tight coiled curls that deliver a lot of volume. As there are these different ranges of curl patterns, the range of hair care from products to styling also differ in various aspects and steps. Certain hair types require less shampooing and washing of the hair in order to retain their natural oils and stay hydrated while other hair types may need to be styled with less hair products to prevent any “weighing-down” of the dried finished curls. Although many curly hair individuals may think all of this information is obvious, much of the population who don’t have curls themselves, or anyone around them that embraces their curls, are genuinely oblivious to this information or tend to think that all hair showering and styling processes are the same for every curly and kinky haired-person, despite their evident different curl patterns.

Although these types of assumptions and mindsets might be accidental or unintentional, they can still be harmful to the curly and kinky hair community since it can reinforce that curly hair is not “normal”, but is instead second to straight hair. This type of narrative has been pushed and ingrained in society for centuries, yet can still be unnoticed by most people. While you might be able to quickly brush your hair after a late morning before work or casually walk into a salon for a haircut, curly-haired individuals have to decide to stay up late or wake up early to style their hair and spend countless hours researching and calling salons and “professional” hairstylists if they even know how to cut curly and kinky hair. Small, and even bigger, life obstacles such as those two take such tremendous tolls on the curly-kinky hair community since they continue to be placed as a sub-group to society and not the “norm”. Thus such life incidents and interactions can be demeaning to the curly-haired individual by overlooking or even discrediting the personal extra time, money, and energy they incorporate in their lives in order to have their hair deemed “presentable” and “digestible” by society.

While there are still many strides needed to be made in accepting curly and kinky hair by society, the love and appreciation must start from within ourselves and those near us. Despite society sometimes not making us feel this way, our curly and kinky hair is definitely something to embrace, love, and be thankful for as it is a visual representation of our backgrounds, identities, and even our family trees by representing our curly hair gene. We must continue to keep opening our hearts and minds to acceptance and inclusion of others as well as listening to other people’s identities and the following struggles they face in order to truly develop into a welcoming society and world.