They say a woman’s crowning glory is her hair. It can be your pride, your shield, your conversation starter and a silent first impression. As someone with hair, I have had my fair share of good days, bad days and everything in between that has often times driven me to the very brink of going into the kitchen, grabbing the scissors and cutting it all off a la Britney Spears in 2007.
As I grew older and my hair became an actual interest, rather than a chore I sat through in my mother’s bathroom, I became familiar with and began to despise the term “good hair”. A phrase so commonly used in African American culture, it has inspired numerous references, documentaries, and the now infamous Beyoncé lyric. Wikipedia defines good hair as, ‘a phrase used within the African-American community to generally describe African-American that most closely resembles the hair of non-Black people (straight or curly), especially those images of hair popularly presented in society, and as contrasted with the appearance of natural Afro-textured hair.’ The opposite, bad hair, was without openly saying classified as tightly coiled, kinky or coarse hair. It was commonplace for you, your mother or your hairdresser to spend a couple of hours every two weeks using any means necessary to straighten your mane.
These terms are more laughable and silly now in 2016, when every other commercial features a women with a voluminous fro and the natural hair movement is booming—but such a short time ago these words and the meaning attached to them shaped the way many girls perceived and accepted their own beauty while trying to wade through the contradictory standards that society had set for them. Many kinky headed girls grew up wistfully wishing for something that was not naturally theirs because commercials, advertisements, T.V. shows, dolls, singers, rappers, mannequins, movies, models, and maybe even your mama implied or outright told you that you had “bad hair”. To many it may seem a petty conversation, after all it’s just hair, but to any girl who in her most formative years grew up believing that the way she grows and flourishes naturally is wrong or goes against the grain setting her back on the long journey to embracing herself, I assure you it’s not just hair.
Fast forward today and it seems as if there has been a hair revolution. Natural hair is everywhere and women and men are openly exploring all facets of their hair in its glorious natural state. Now fashion mags are praising heatless curls (Bantu knots) and designers like Marc Jacobs are incorporating dreadlocks into New York Fashion Week. While minds seem to be opening it walks the fine line of appreciation and appropriation. Kim Kardashian is hailed as a trendsetter for wearing boxer braids (corn rows)— but the gag is little black girls all the world over have been “setting” the trend forever. It is nothing new for mainstream society, as Jesse Williams eloquently puts it, to extract culture and gentrify our genius. The true question is, how long will it last? While I don’t believe it possible for anyone to turn off the faucet of self-love that has been irreversibly switched on I ask the question have beauty standards truly evolved or is it just another trendy phase to be shelved when pop culture is over it?
