People back in my home do not accept curly hair. They will talk about you, single you out and refer to you as “the one with ugly hair.” Ever since I can remember, I have been incessantly fighting my natural hair. All throughout elementary school, I felt extremely self-conscious about it. I hated my curly hair. I wished it could be as straight, manageable and beautiful as all the other girls' hair. Society constantly told me to “put my hair up” because I always looked messy and not presentable with my hair down. The boys I liked said that they would never like someone with “hair like curly spaghetti.”
By the time I became a teenager, I internalized all the negativity toward my hair. I grew up as a physically self-conscious girl. The only time I felt genuinely beautiful was when I could go to the salon and have my hair straightened. I loved getting the, “you look so much better with straight hair,” comments. I felt constantly attacked for holding something so natural. As soon as I turned 15, I begged my mom to let me have a permanent straightening treatment. I was not the only one. I am sure that 99 percent of the girls with curly hair in my high school also inevitably had chemical treatments. To my disappointment, I later learned that curls are extremely resilient.
It was not until I got to college that I met brave young women who changed my perspective. It was so strange to meet girls who completely owned their natural curly hair look. I could not believe my own eyes. I kept wondering how they did not feel insecure about the way they looked. I spent infinite hours applying chemical treatments and using hair irons to straighten my hair and these girls completely defied that. They were rebels and they looked absolutely beautiful. Even though my hair was too chemically treated to ever go back to its natural form, something grew inside of me. I realized that curly hair can be beautiful too, and that for no means is something to be repressed in small girls.
This issue truly affected me when I saw my 12-year-old sister cry, one day. One day, she went to the salon to have a hair cut and came back in uncontrollable tears. She reminded me so much of myself, how she constantly said negative remarks about her hair and how she never passed on an opportunity to have it straightened. She told me she hated her hair, and that now that it was shorter, it would look even more awful. This made me sick to my stomach. I knew how she felt, and I understood why.
Nowadays, the media's standard of beauty is not only skinny figures, thigh gaps and flat abs. It is also straight or slightly wavy hair. There is barely ever a leading female actress or model that flaunts real, natural curly hair. Not waves, but curls. Whether it is Disney princesses, movie stars, famous singers, or the “fitspo” girls we persistently like to follow on Instagram, they all have soft, manageable, straight-to-the-root hair. This does more harm to the mind of a young girl than you can imagine.
I suggest that we fill the media with pictures like this:
Beautiful women who are not afraid to show their curls -- they are the living proof that curls can be attractive, sexy, sophisticated, and especially normal.
Because if there is one thing that you have to know about curls, they always come back no matter how much heat they take.
