![]() In the past, I felt the need to slick or gel down my hair because I was entering into a corporate space that was unwelcoming to Black hair and Black beauty. I made sure to guard my natural self and my natural aesthetic. And especially being an Africana major in college, I just realized how many beauty standards infiltrate our hair, our makeup, our skin care, our fashion, everything. I've been very cognizant of that since I went natural five years ago. Realize how Eurocentric beauty standards are projected on us and that you don't have to succumb to those things. I just think it's important to be unapologetically Black in everything that you do. It's so interesting that they even pick up on those things. I get messages from young Black women with kinky, type 4 hair who notice I don't use edge control or gel as much. I don't have an edge control brush - I just don't! I don't believe in that. That all ties into why certain styles, practices, and hair techniques are popularized now. A lot of us - me included - permed our hair before we even had a say in what we wanted our hair to look like. Many of us have not been taught that our hair is beautiful from its inception. It is, in its very nature, the manifestation of freedom and liberty - so why place so many arbitrary, unnatural restrictions on it? And if no other group of people has such rigid standards impressed upon them (see, again, the widely accepted messy bun) why are we so quick to comply? Our hair naturally wants to puff up and frizz. Just because you want your hair-care routine to be less involved does not speak to how much you value yourself. We take pride in our hair, but sometimes, it feels as if that "pride" is putting undue pressure on Black women for the look of their hair to fall within a set of parameters that one, no one else has to follow, and two, were not created with Black people in mind anyway. A 2018 study done by Nielsen revealed that of the $63.5 million spent on Ethnic Hair and Beauty Aids in 2017, Black people accounted for almost 86 percent of that, shelling out a whopping $54.4 million. ![]() People with Afro-textured hair spend a lot on beauty products. Where's the Black girl version of a messy bun? Where's the Black girl version of a messy bun? Why the obsession with making sure our curl patterns are always crisply defined, even if it means spending hours a week to twist and retwist our hair? Why is it that in order for us to be considered "presentable" our hair, which by nature wants to puff up, needs to be brushed down to look as sleek as possible? If part of loving one's natural kinks is about rejecting Eurocentric beauty standards, why not let your crown be gorgeously cloud-like, from root to tip? On the surface, it may seem like an innocuous standard, something as simple as a style preference, but in many ways, it's much deeper than that. There is a persistent belief that if we wear our hair out, our curl patterns - natural or done with the help of braids or curling tools - need to be perfectly defined in order for the hair to look good. Even if they aren't going so far as to straighten out their texture, many Black women still face pressure to make their natural hair look a certain way - specifically, for it to look "done." And ofttimes, that means finessed, swirled, gelled-down edges, or a slicked-down base that blooms into a puff. ![]() But even as Black women continue to play with their natural texture, there still are certain aesthetic preferences within the community that need to be contended with.
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