Blog
Love your hair!
We're trying to think about meaningful things to say about healthy, happy hair, but all we can see in our mind's eye is a hair commercial model fanning her (fantastically digitally modified) hair while expanding on the many scientific (?) merits of using that particular brands. And in fact, I'm not myself 100% sure about what hair confidence is – is this the state of being happy and outgoing BECAUSE of your hair? Or despite of it? And are we talking about natural hair here? (and by that I mean, no products, no straighteners, no tongs, no hair-dryers) Or are we talking about being confident in your hair because you've woken up 30 minutes early to straighten it and every few days you use a serum and you dye it every two to three months?
We don't have all the answers to these questions, we don't even have all the questions that need to be answered, hopefully you have a few more. But our concern here is that asides from the general body issues that plague the nation today, there are serious issues also to be addressed with regards to women and their hair. Speaking to my housemate as she straightens her naturally curly hair, she tells me, “Well, you know – people want what they just can't have – if your hair's naturally curly, you want straight, and people with straight hair are constantly trying to curl it.”
True, and it's part of a familiar psychosis of body control fervour– controlling what you can about your body to make up for the things that you can't control. But who has made us hate our hair? The same people who make women and men hate their bodies – glossy magazines, celebrities, the usual suspects. How much of this, however, can be directly attributed to and blamed on us ourselves? It just seems to us that in an age of vehement independence, anti-conformist, anti-trendsetting, anti-everything, we're selling ourselves short to blame our image ills on something that we can so otherwise easily dismiss – the media.
This is not meant to be a reductionist view of body image issues, or an attempt to demonise the media when the media isn't always to be blamed, or even to demonise society, when society is not necessarily always to be blamed or even the individual. This is an attempt to question these apparently permissible but completely heinous norms that say that it's best to 'tame' frizzy hair, or to 'add volume' to 'flat, lifeless' hair and that if you're entering the corporate world, you need to be doing so with a good quality, cultivated weave.
There are some serious hair issues affecting women and children of all races today – some addressed, most sadly ignored. How many women are truly free of these stigmas? We certainly aren't – we can certainly admit to having lower self esteem when we're sporting our natural hair but why? Who taught us that long, luscious, shoulder brushing hair was the only way we could be attractive? Our hair grows upwards towards the sun and if your hair grows downwards, or outwards, then that's what it does
Some people have it right (in our opinion) – and some people have... their own opinions about the matter – but there are resources out there that cater, at least, for race specific hair. Because let's not forget that race does dictate the specific biological characteristics of your hair and what nourishes one woman's hair completely destroys another...!
For more e-resources concerning hair, hit a search engine, or email us – we have dozens, but most importantly, come along to our Love Your Hair social tonight at 6.30pm in L119, where we'll be watching a few relevant short films and eating pizza and drinking drinks and celebrating our Good Hair, Good Bodies and Good Sense!
