As a young African American girl growing up in a small, predominately white town in suburban Connecticut, black beauty role models were almost nonexistent for me. I had Beyonce, and that was about it. Commercials for makeup always seemed to show off beautiful white women with long hair and thin physiques winking at me through pounds of mascara, eyeshadow, and foundation that I was too dark to use. Whenever a black women was featured in an ad, she was light skinned and could've been mistaken for white in the right lighting (like Beyonce in this L'Oreal ad). Fashion magazines showed off women with body types that I couldn't approximate no matter how much I dieted, and lord forbid my mother took me to a beauty store where that I could see the rows of wigs promising hair straight as a pin. It didn't help that by high school I had decided that I wanted to be an “alt-girl” which meant I'd have even less black beauty role models. I couldn't find anything online to teach me the cosmetics that would look best on my skin, nor could I find any tutorials on how to use the makeup after I did. I wasted hours on Youtube and Google, desperate to discover how I could tease my hair, only to find that I couldn't unless I wanted to cut it off afterwards. Even worse, my mother, from a young age, impressed on me the importance of relaxing my hair (chemically straightening it) so that it could be manageable, but, more importantly, beautiful. Such a menagerie of beauty standards kept me feeling terrible about myself until my sophomore year in college. That equates to 19 years of a life spent feeling ugly, or rather, feeling like I could never be beautiful.

Towards the end of high school, I stopped wearing makeup. I made that decision for two reasons: 1. I knew I was using makeup as a crutch to feel good about myself and that it wasn't healthy for my self-image, and 2. It was just too expensive and too difficult to find foundations and and cover-ups, as well as eye shadows with pigments strong enough to show up on my skin. I took the summer between my junior and senior year as a chance to embrace my skin and my features, but, even still, I couldn't shake the problem that my hair posed for me. For all four years of high school, I rocked (I say this sarcastically) just shy of shoulder length hair, forcibly straightened, with side bangs that fell almost to my nose. It was a terrible haircut, and I was aware of it, but I didn't know what else to do. The relaxers had broken off so much my hair, but I was addicted to them, and the straightness they promised. I hated having my hair weaved; the process took hours, and the result was almost always even more straight hair either sewn or glued onto my own, and I resisted braids because they made me look different from the girls in my school. Through my hair, I was always setting myself up for failure since, from the get go, I looked VERY different than the girls in my school, the girls online, and the girls in magazines. I am black, not light-skinned enough to relate to most of the models and celebrities I see, but black. Dark black. So black that, in the summers after soaking up enough sun, my mother would tell me I looked like the tires on her car. Tires aren't beautiful though. Tires are tires.

Fast forward to who I am today. I haven't had a relaxer in almost two years. I rarely wear makeup, and, for the most part, I like the way I look. This isn't because I have denied the idea of beauty, but because I have finally accepted the possibility of Black beauty. The first step, which I took in the spring of my sophomore year in college, was to ignore fashion trends all together. I gave up trying to match myself to people on the internet or TV and instead formulated a look that was all my own, based off of what I thought was fly, not other people's opinions. Over time, my body finally became something I could be happy with, and the sight of my face didn't send me spiraling into self-criticisms. All that was left for me to be happy with my looks was to wrangle with that old devil: my hair.

The first time I wore my hair natural was in the winter of my junior year in college. I had been braiding synthetic, homemade dreadlocks into my hair since the spring semester of my sophomore year, and, although they looked great, they took a LOT of effort. I'd braid them in (which took three to five hours), then remove them after a week (2.5 hours of work), wash my hair (1.5 hours), and put them back in the same day (3-5 hours). The process would eat up a huge part of my day, and to even make a set of dreads took about a solid week of work. I knew that I couldn't continue to do that indefinitely, and so, on a leap of faith, I took the dreads out and let them stay out. I washed my hair, conditioned it, detangled it, then blowdried it, and afterwards had a short afro poof, no more than a few inches off of my scalp. The difference was shocking. I had been so used to long hair (the tips of the dreads reached my lower back) that the shift to short was just what I needed to wake myself up. It looked good. For nearly the first time in my whole life, I thought my hair, my very own natural hair, looked good.

Immediately I started researching. What would I need to do to grow an even bigger, poofier afro? What products would I need to use? How often would I need to wash it? Could it get wet without matting up? Could I comb it every day? Every two days? Even with a cosmetologist for a mother, I had to turn to the internet which had failed me in my beauty crusade years before. My mother couldn't help me because the beauty school she had gone to only taught her how to work on straight (white) hair. She knew how to relax my hair through years of work on her own, but she couldn't tell me how to make sure my hair didn't break off the next time I brushed it. However, online, I found what I had never had before: a community of black women devoted to black beauty. Perhaps it had always been there, even when I was in high school, or perhaps it only cropped up in the last six to eight years, but I found resources that helped me delve deeply into the world that is African American beauty. There were hairstyles for women with hair like mine that I had never imagined, website upon website with tips on how to grow my hair and what not to do to it (a.k.a everything I had been doing). There were women on Youtube who walked me step by step through how to wash and detangle my hair so that when it came time to style it, it would feel soft and smooth as butter. There was so much that I actually got upset. Why had no one, especially the beauty industry, ever taught me these things before?

When I say the beauty industry, I do mean the beauty industry. The one that teaches women how to have perfect skin and how to do quick and easy hairstyles, but neglect to mention that most of those styles are for women who look a certain way: white. There is some representation of women of color in the beauty industry, Lupita Nyong'o comes to mind, but how often is it that companies actually take the time to teach black women how to have healthy hair? How often is it that they feature women of color with hair that isn't straight? It's not nearly as often as it should be. I mean, think of earlier this year, on the Today Show, when a stylist was challenged to produce 60 second summer hairstyles that anyone could wear. The stylist had three models to work on: one Asian, one African American, and one who was white. The Asia model was given a thick rope braid/high pony tail. The white model was given a wavy side twist. It was clear, however, once the stylist approached the black model, that she was in over her head. She roughly pulled the model's curls into a high pony, and kept pulling once it was secured, even though her hair was dry and far more prone to breakage. She even pulled apart the model's curly bangs in an attempt to spread them across her face, but the bangs flared and frizzed so badly that they looked like they would flap off the model's head and take to they skies. What the stylist should have done was moisturize the woman's hair and gently secure it into a pony, then worked with the bangs so that they fell gracefully, and, as a professional, one would expect her to know that. The fact that she didn't is just proof of a larger issue in the beauty industry. Stylists are trained to work with white hair as if it is the only hair they will ever encounter. There's some representation of women of color, but not enough catering to our needs. Not all hair can be treated the same way, but beauty is so whitewashed that people forget.

It took me so long to feel beautiful with my skin, body, and hair because there were so few instances of black women portrayed as beautiful for just being black. I'm talking about women who didn't straighten their hair, wear wigs, or sew in weaves just to match beauty standards meant for Europeans. I didn't see dark women, and, if they were dark, they were made to look white in other ways. I didn't know I could wear my hair naturally because I had absolutely no idea how until I was twenty years old. I legitimately thought that to have an afro, I'd have to go to some fancy salon and spend over hundred dollars. I got the idea to wear synthetic dreads because I had seen the style so often on white girls in the goth/punk scene. Tragically, the few black women in my life who could've taught me something about how to love the skin and features I was born with were also trapped in white beauty standards, so I grew up lost, and I can only imagine all the black women and girls out there who are lost too, who also have to spend $50+ on foundation because the only ones that match them are also ridiculously expensive, who ruin their hair with relaxers because they were brought up believing it was the only way it could be manageable, who don't know what a braid out is or a bantu knot, who make jokes that they look like tires or pavement because they can't accept their darkness in a world where Beauty is a white woman with blonde hair and no flesh, who sit each night and comb their dry hair until it breaks and settles all around them like the remnants of a bad dream, who don't know that they can be lovely by just being themselves.