This month on "The Today Show," the morning talk show featured stylist and makeup artist Deepica Mutyala. Mutyala believes that beauty doesn't have to take forever and that any woman can style their hair in less than one minute.
If you are a black woman, you just cringed so hard that you're at risk for pulling a muscle. Sure, a one-minute hairstyle might work on Asian and white women. That is, if your hair is straight and your styling regularly consists of a single combing, throwing your hair in a ponytail or "just letting it do whatever," (in the words of a white friend who I'm eternally envious of) then this might be the segment for you. However, as soon as I saw that a black woman was included in the lineup for a one-minute styling, I nearly spat out my coffee laughing. Saying that our hair takes a long time to style is the understatement of the century. I shaved my head Nefertiti-style after so much chemical straightening, twisting, and braiding had caused it to become a brittle mess. I felt like Brittany in 2006. I get that women of other races don't really understand this; it's simply not something you have to constantly deal with. This is an actual interaction I have had with an Asian friend of mine-
Friend- "Do you want to go get brunch on Sunday?"
Me- "I can't, I'm getting my hair washed and styled that day."
Friend- "Oh, okay! What about lunch or dinner?"
Me- "...I can't. I'm getting my hair washed and styled that day."
This wasn't just me blowing her off. Black hair takes work to style- and you're going to do it in one minute? This I gotta see.
Mutyala attempted to prove that she can style any texture of hair in under one minute by giving three different races of women a summer up-do one after the other. Mutyala then proceeded to destroy this poor model's hair on national television. Behold, what may possibly go down as the worst styling in the history of hair-
The video isn't great, so here's one of higher quality straight from the Today Show's website.
The most insane part of this whole ordeal is that the beautiful model had an adorable, natural style before "improving" it with a 60 second makeover. Check out the before...
...and the after.
Ouch. While I commend The Today Show for it's attempt at diversity and inclusion of different hair textures, I think the lesson we can all learn from this disaster is that our hair is all different. When you see a black girl on the street and maybe her edges are a little bit of a mess (or don't exist at all), remember this segment and that we all can't do our hair in sixty seconds. That doesn't make us dirty or disheveled- just different.
In the words of an Essence commentator, "she didn't get the memo. Black people hair does what the hell it wants to do."
