Hair today...

With few exceptions, the women in nearly all hair product advertisements have long, shiny, straight, silky, black hair….hair which doesn’t get tangled in the rain, hair which glides through fingers (never mind whose), hair which allows combs to slide through it, without the slightest tangle or loss of strands……And so, the message is driven home again and again – for a special occasion, get your hair straightened…..silky straight hair is beautiful hair….and if you don’t have it, don’t bother flaunting anything!

Now, I don’t have a problem with straight, silky hair. I think on the right people, it looks beautiful! In fact, when I was younger and foolish, on two near-fatal occasions, I vainly attempted to get such straight silky hair for myself. But then, as I grew older, I also grew a wee bit wiser.

Straight hair is great for some people. Some are born with poker straight hair…good for them! But not all of us have it….and well, I never did. What I DID have, though, was a mane of unruly curls….curls that misbehaved, curls that knotted and frizzed out in the rain, curls which I can never dream of getting my fingers through, curls that take an hour of hard labour to comb out, and which, at the end, look the same as before, broken comb in hand….so, no, I never had hair which any product would put up as their poster-hair. And yet, I found that whether I went to parties or I went to church, while other poker-straight friends were passed by without a second glance, I would be stopped (often by women nonetheless!), to have my hair ooohed and aaahed at, and receive comments like “such lovely hair!”. “where did you get it permed from??”, “how much did it cost to get your hair done?”….and that’s when it hit me, (this was shortly after the second fatal attempt), that my curly locks, though not commercially perfect hair by far, were beautiful in their own way! What was more, in a world of poker straight strands, my curls stood out on their own (literally!), and people were actually willing to pay cash (I’m talking huge amounts!), to get hair like mine!!

That’s when I realized, that I should be proud to have my hair…for the sole reason that it is mine, I could never have had hair which suited me better, and most importantly, because “it’s different”, with a beauty of its own!

I often come across women, who have hidden curls….hidden because they could be out like mine, but are, instead, straightened, or tied back severely, or oiled and plaited away….now that would be perfectly fine, if those women were fine with it….but when they come to me and say “oh we wish we had hair like yours”, there’s only one thing I can say to them, “you do have hair like mine….maybe more curly, maybe less, maybe a different type of curl….but the point is, it is beautiful, and you could not have been given a more perfect gift….so please, free those locks, and be proud of the hair you were born with!”

Sometimes, I think that in the midst of all this commercial bombardment of ‘straight and silky’, people should harken back to their childhood lessons….to quote the words of the nursery rhyme, encapsulating perfect beauty, which my little 5 (almost 6) year old neighbour sings:

“Chubby cheeks, dimpled chin,
Rosy lips, teeth within,
Curly hair……..”

Need I say more?