Is that frizz or is that a curl?

How many curly hair products does it take to wreck a bank account…31 years worth to be exact. A personal story of vanity.

You remind me of Grace from Will and Grace, just her curls are nicer than yours. You should straighten your hair- A human from my past

Gather round ye merry gentle humans (it is Christmas after all/Hanukkah/December) as I tell you the story of curly hair..ohhhhhhh I hear you say…. I mean, one can only hope that you get this excited about my blog posts…. This one though, this one has so much that there may be a part 2! Do not say I didn’t give you a Christmas present this year. So please do sit by the fire with me, straight hair, wavy hair, short hair, long hair, no hair, Black hair,you are all welcome. BUT to my curly haired beauties, I ask you most of all to sit with me as I tell you just how beautiful and accepted your hair is.

For those of you that also follow my burlesque account on Instagram I have also done a Care With Curly about curly hair. So apologies if some of this feels familiar, but there will be a lot more here than IG. ANYWAY, ONWARDS.

When I was a kid at school I don’t think I really knew that my hair was curly. My mum had wavy hair but not curly like mine and so neither of us really understood what to do with it. There were many a morning spent with my mum chasing me around the bedroom with a brush with me yelling, it hurts, and her despairing. Hey mum you got another mention! And it was like this because neither of us had any idea that my hair required a different kind of looking after. So often I was just there, with this frizzy little mound on my head. Until one day, on mothers day, because I am super good at giving gifts, I shaved all my hair off.

Now I used to tell people I did it because I was bored, but actually, it was a rebellion against that bloody wooden hairbrush! No hair meant no pulling and no frizz! but also no parents of my school friends whispering to each other about why my hair was like that. One parent once asked me why my mum didn’t do my hair….”probably because she is a full time working, single parent who spends most of her spare time hugging me, may be if your mum hugged you more you wouldn’t be stood here shaming a child”..is what I should have said. Instead I shrugged, with tears burning in my eyes and walked away.

This would not be the last time that adults would have something to say about my hair. There is a long history of, not just me it turns out, but kids and teens everywhere being shamed for their hair not being straight. There was so much shame felt for not having hair like everyone else’s. one day in secondary school I straightened my hair and I had more friends than I had ever had before. I was accepted, and I am not even going to point out the fact that having straight hair and being straight were perfectly acceptable….heaven forbid we should be anything but ordinary.

Now I hear you yelling “Curly what did you do?!” well…I will tell you..relax…or not because relaxing your hair will make you more stressed…so I hear. Well the truth is…I ended up at a Black hairdressers with a friend getting her hair put in. One of the hairdressers asked if I wanted a treatment and I wasn’t about to turn down a little hair care! She used a diffuser and held my curls in a way they had never been touched before. She caressed them, built their shape, their personality, she found the hidden depths on the top of my head. This may sound super dramatic for “just hair” but my curly humans will understand deep in their souls….trust me.

And at the end of this experience she said “make sure you wrap your hair” and to this day I wrap my hair as often as I have time for. Would you like to know when this was….this was 8 years ago….that is how long it took for me to appreciate exactly who my hair is and the that it is an extension of my personality. Now in that time I have also found the Curly Girl method, which has also helped immensely, but honestly, I will always claim they stole most of it from that wonderful hairdresser 8 years ago and a method that Black women have been using for decades. But more on that in part 2.

So the next time you see your hand start reaching out for somebody else’s curls, understand you are about to try and touch part of a persons character. My hair is not your fun play thing, it is an entire battle, an identification and a whole entire movement. You can be an ally to the frizz and that random bit of matted fur we find on a Monday, but you will never truly understand the money spent, the mocking and the acceptance those curls go through.

(Unless you have tried to curl your hair and it falls out….that seems very stressful)

But Guess what…..

I woke up like this…:P

Stick around for part 2! The history of curly hair and products that I use!!

Stay everything you are Pineapples!