Welcome to It’s Textured, a column the place we untangle the enjoyment, trauma, confusion, and frustration that may include Black hair. This month, author Shani Hillian shares how taking good care of her daughter’s hair has opened up a path of therapeutic for herself.
I sat as nonetheless as attainable, anticipating the Marcel iron’s scorch because it inched nearer and nearer to my head. For about 45 minutes, a stylist pressed my 3C curls into bone-straight silky strands. The salon smelled like burnt hair and the chair was uncomfortable however as a 10-year-old Black lady within the ’90s, I would have sat by means of something to get straight hair like Aaliyah and Monica. After each strand was pressed to perfection, I admired myself within the mirror, squealing with pleasure as I ran my fingers by means of my new hair. It was the primary time I would ever gotten my hair pressed—and I used to be hooked. From that day on, the excessive I’d get from straightening my hair got here with an rising perception that my curls had been troublesome, unmanageable, and never adequate.
My damaging notion of my pure hair began with that first silk press. It solely acquired worse in highschool after I moved from a predominantly Black neighborhood in North Philadelphia to Voorhees, New Jersey, a predominantly white space with only a handful of Black, LatinX, and South Asian college students at my college. It didn’t assist that the starlets of the day all most popular straight types: Alicia Keys with twists within the entrance, straight smooth hair within the again; Beyoncé and Brandy with the infamous micro braids. There was not a curly coiffure in sight—neither on-screen nor IRL. All of the influences round me pointed to the concept that my pure hair was not adequate. So, I both wished my hair straight or in a protecting type, by no means out in its pure, curly state. On the time, I didn’t consider it as trauma—I simply considered it as making my hair fairly.
At house, my mom usually inspired braids or different protective styles as a result of, as a working mother, these had been simpler for her to keep up. I don’t imagine this was as a result of she didn’t suppose my pure curls had been stunning; she simply didn’t have the capability to show me easy methods to look after them. With out that training and validation, I noticed my hair as one thing that wanted to be tamed or hidden reasonably than celebrated and cared for. In my 20s, I, like many Black girls my age, started my pure hair journey, in the course of the early 2010s pure hair motion. I bear in mind it because the Youtube period as a result of everybody was getting their pure hair training from influencers like Hey Fran Hey, and City Bush Babes (two creators who, to me, set the pattern of holistic, pure magnificence throughout that point). There was an enormous shift from straight types to intense pure hair care regimes together with 10-step wash days together with every part from pre-poos and scorching oil remedies to DIY hair masks made with random home items. It took dedication, and I used to be on board, however even then, deep down I by no means actually embraced my curls—I merely tolerated them.
