My curly hair has been both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes, it can look really nice, but if I’m not careful, I’ll end up looking like Hagrid — and that’s the reality of it that I’ve come to love and embrace over the years.
Growing up, I always seemed to keep my hair the same: parted in the middle and ridiculously long. It was either very curly or very frizzy. In elementary school, my mom would brush it dry every day. You can probably imagine what brushed out curls end up looking like, and it was the reason my friend would come up to me each morning, gesture towards my hair, and squeal, “IT’S SO BIG!” Another friend would see me flying high on the swings or running across the gymnasium in a serious game of tag, and she’d compare my hair to a lion’s mane.
I liked my big, frizzy hair. I realized it was something that made me unique at school, which felt pretty special as a little girl, especially since I was otherwise a very quiet person. In a way, my hair spoke loudly for me, and it became an easy mode of self-expression.
My desire to express myself so loudly changed when I entered high school. I stopped brushing my hair dry a while ago, but my hair was still very big and very curly. Its wild nature used to be something I was proud of. Now, it was too big, too loud — even unkempt.
“You need to cut your hair,” the girl sitting behind me told me in class.
“I can’t deal with your frizz,” another classmate told me. The girl next to him even tried to blow the loose strands back into submission, to my surprise and embarrassment. I realized my hair really was becoming a problem; I cut it shorter and kept it in a braid every day my sophomore year in an attempt to keep myself invisible. By senior year, it was so flat from a year of neglect that I didn’t worry about it anymore.
The summer before I started college was a turning point for me — it was a time where I was finally beautiful because I embraced what was beautiful about me. I started learning how to take care of my curls, taming the frizz as much as I could while also keeping them healthy. I exclusively washed my hair in the morning, wore a bonnet at night, slept on a satin pillowcase, and applied product to keep my curls fresh and defined.
And it worked. My hair did start looking better, at least to my standards. I would follow curly hair influencers on Instagram to gather more tips, and I’d swipe through countless reels. It wasn’t long before I started caring too much about how my curls looked. I wanted them to look tamed and defined and shiny every day and didn’t like it when my frizz would inevitably appear again.
But as I’ve recently discovered, it’s the truth that curly hair isn’t going to look “perfect” every day. And the idea of what “perfect” actually is is subjective and based on other people’s opinions. What truly matters at the end of the day is how your hair looks to you and that you’re keeping it healthy. It doesn’t matter if other people find it to be too big or too loud (and it’s not a problem that you have to solve for them).
While I no longer brush out my curls like I did when I was a little girl running across the playground at recess, I don’t worry so much anymore when the frizz inevitably comes back after a day or two of flaunting perfectly defined curls. For me, it’s just my natural hair, and it’s all part of the experience of having it.
I own it.
