B003YL4KS0 EBOK (3 page)

My brothers and sisters made fun of my hair.

Where I was born, in Leicester, England, curly hair was made fun of more than it was accepted. I hated my hair from the moment I was able to look in the mirror and see that, unlike my six brothers and sisters, whose hair seemed appropriately lank, I had corkscrew curls that stuck out all over my head, making me look like Little Orphan Annie. For years I was sure that there’d been some mistake at the hospital and I’d been sent home with the wrong set of parents. For my third birthday, I asked my mother for a straight-haired wig and a grass skirt so I could pretend I was a Polynesian hula dancer. It was a strange request from a toddler living in a poor factory town in the British West Midlands. By the time I was four, I was watching rock stars and actresses on TV swinging their long, stick-straight hair back and forth. If only my hair could swing, I’d think. I’d pull my sweater halfway over my head so that it hung down across my back. Look, I have straight hair, too.

I now realize that I wasn’t alone. In this book, you’ll find the personal stories of a world of other curly girls who went through the same denial and hair despair I did. We all worried about humid days, when despite all our efforts, our hair would frizz up. We were teased by kids in school (“Hey, Brillo, where’d you get that hair?” or “Sit in the back of the class. I can’t see the blackboard through your hair!”), and made to feel that curly hair and therefore, we were inferior.

As I got older, I developed a victim mentality about my curls, thinking that they were a perverse joke played on me by a whimsical universe, a genetic mistake that the gods of beauty had planted in my DNA. I’d spend all day thinking up ways to make my hair stay flat and frizz-free. In my mind, the equation was simple: Straight was beautiful, curly was ugly. A sociologist might point out that for many people, this preference for straight hair was a subtle form of racism. Most of us have been influenced by stereotypes of beauty promoted in the last half of the twentieth century—the white Anglo-Saxon look, with straight blond hair and a pale complexion. Children could have curls—if they were golden—but they’d damn
well better straighten out by the time they grew up. I would go to bed at night, my hair tightly wound—imprisoned, actually—around gigantic rollers. (Even at sleepovers!) I’d lie very still lest one should slip off and the curls spring cruelly and sadistically back to life.

So it was inevitable that I decided to become a hairdresser. I’d spent so much time fixing my own hair that I might as well try to make a living fixing others’. I served three years as an apprentice in England, then moved to Hong Kong for four years and became fascinated with my customers’ straight hair. Next, I lived in Japan, where the first word of Japanese I learned, of course, was
masuga
, which means “straight.” I was surprised to find some curly girls in Japan! (Where do you think Japanese hair straightening comes from?) Even when a few popular TV shows and their gorgeous female stars made long, wavy hair fashionable, I kept mine short. One time a hairdresser gave me a cropped cut called a tunnel cut (see
page 100
), but despite its length my hair still appeared voluminous. That night I went to a party, and a boy I fancied took one look at me and said, “Your hair looks like a baboon’s backside.”

That was it! Like an addict who’s bottomed out, I realized I couldn’t fight my curls anymore. I started letting my
My curls in Hong Kong’s 100 percent humidity.
hair grow. I stopped blow-frying it. As my curls grew, they turned into spirals, then ringlets. Meanwhile, I tried to find any scrap of information I could about curly hair, but there was nothing available on the subject of curls. All the hair schools I interviewed said, “Hair is hair. We treat curly the same as straight.” No wonder so many hairdressers continue to straighten everyone out. I found few curly hair role models, something I realized that I’d been searching for ever since I was five years old. (Back then, I dreamed a fairy curlmother would stop me on the street and say, “Listen to me. I know exactly what to do with your curls.” Of course, it never happened.)

My curls in Hong Kong’s 100 percent humidity.

I began conditioning my hair regularly, experimenting with different products, upping the amount of conditioner. I let my hair grow so the soft S’s that are my hair’s natural shape had room to develop. Eventually my scalp sprouted ringlets, then lengthened into thick corkscrews that spiraled down my shoulders. This was my hair destiny—nature finally taking its course. Recently, a fifty-four-year-old client Miriam was told by a friend, “Finally, you have the hair you were always meant to have!” That is exactly how I felt.

I became totally politicized about curly hair. I saw it almost like an arranged marriage—something I might not have chosen for myself at first, but mine “till death do us part.” (In fact, my will forbids anyone to straighten my hair upon my death and contains instructions to the person handling my curls for my funeral.) I vowed that no one was going to straighten my hair or my mind again.

The Beverly Hills salon where my curls were seen as “politically incorrect.”

Unfortunately, while I had changed, the world around me hadn’t. Straight hair was still the gold standard, especially in Beverly Hills, where I’d gotten a job in a fashionable salon. I had been working there for about a week when the salon owner returned from vacation, meeting me for the first time. He pointed at me, the new girl with politically incorrect curls, and went ballistic. “Someone blow-dry that girl’s hair now!” he shouted. Moments later, I left my post at the shampoo bowl and walked. I never looked back.

I moved to New York City, where, for the first time in the life of my curls, I was surrounded by multi-curl-tural people. Jewish, Italian, Latino, and African American people living around me had curly hair that looked like mine! I no longer looked or felt like an outsider.

My friends jokingly accuse me of living in a “curl-centric” world. That may be true, but it’s also true that we still live in a world where the straight-hair stereotype has a tremendous hold on our imaginations. Perhaps that explains why so many of us are still in curl denial, why cosmetology schools still teach stylists to cut curls with a flattened, forced, one-dimensional straightness, and why so many
hairdressers are intimidated by curly hair. Rather than working with hair’s natural curl and texture, hairdressers have been trained to blow it straight, which takes at least 30 minutes to do (and about 20 seconds to undo if it’s humid or raining).

An estimated 65 percent (possibly more) of women have curly or wavy hair. (Take the quiz on
page 6
to see if you are one of them.) But too many of us are still at a loss about how to properly care for our hair or, worse, are pretending we have straight hair and mistreating our natural curls. Curly girls need to surrender their weapons of mass hair destruction, like blow-fryers, flat irons, detergent-filled shampoos, straighteners, and weaves. I’m trying to help you and curly girls everywhere with this book, through hairdressing seminars on how to cut curly hair, and in my work as the co-owner of the Devachan Salons and Deva Spa. There, we encourage our clients to accept their hair, love what they have and make the most of it. In other words, to straighten out their heads instead of their hair. After all those years of struggling and being challenged by what I viewed as unruly hair, I have learned that curls are worth fighting for.

Shey, my future curly girl.

I’m hoping that this book can change the way you approach your curly hair. In it you’ll find a complete guide to curls, their origins, their potential, and their needs. You’ll learn a radical and logi-curl way to care for your specific curl type and nurture its intrinsic shape. How to cleanse, condition, and style your hair, and how to have it cut respectfully instead of having it sliced, carved, and butchered. You’ll wear your curls with pride every day. I promise. It will change your life. So curl up (sorry) and start reading.