Weaves, Wigs, and Relaxers: Common Remedies for “Black Hair Syndrome”
Mainstream femininity entails a series of rites of passages, some more innocuous than others. Getting my ears pierced on my eleventh birthday warranted just minutes of anxiety. Only once had I been brought to tears from getting liquid liner in my eye. Not all of these beauty rites of passage warranted temporary, or what I would consider “worthwhile” discomfort. An unprecedented agony that I have endured for the sake of beauty was due to hair relaxers. “Beauty is pain” is an understatement to someone who has experienced the fiery, throbbing sensation that is a relaxer chemical burn. I first experienced this rite of passage in fifth grade after finally convincing my mother I was old enough. Without realizing, my juvenile impression considered relaxers a beacon of maturity. The women in my family exercised three choices when it came to their hair: weaves, wigs, or relaxers. I was honored to join the long lineage of black women in my family who masked their natural hair. Again, I didn’t comprehend the full implications of this act. At the time, I rationalized that relaxing my hair would make my hair easier to handle, and more versatile in style. In all honesty, just as a typical young person, I was just trying to fit in.
Flashback ten years to elementary school. I was a typical black girl in western Massachusetts, and by “typical” I mean one of two black girls in my grade. One of my best friends at the time, my one and only partner-in-blackness, was Lola Thomas. Growing up with especially strict, academics-only parents meant the highlight of my social life included riding the bus, the only place Lola and I hung out. We made the bus our playground. Common bus activity involved leaping across the aisles, sitting in the back of the bus to feel the full impact of the body-shaking “bump” from driving over potholes, and singing Disney channel songs at top volume. Most memorably, we created stories, embellishing the details of our lives. Lola’s stories often featured scandalous stories of her imaginary older teenage brother, while in turn, I recounted crazy dreams from the previous night. We exercised our natural gift of storytelling, and there were no harms in the lies we weaved…at least for a while
I heavily anticipated the Monday following a February week-long break from school Again, with strict academic-oriented parents, breaks weren’t breaks; they were an opportunity to give “homework”, that is, additional work assigned by my mother. Joy. It was basically school minus the friends and recess, so it unsurprising that I harbored enthusiasm over returning to classes. On that Monday morning, I teemed with excitement to see Lola again and hear about her vacation. When the bus finally arrived at Lola’s driveway that day, I sensed something different about her. An additional degree of fabulousness that I couldn’t immediately pinpoint when viewing her from the icy window pane. When she climbed on the bus, with her fuzzy cheetah-print coat, the source of her confidence was obvious; long black braids cascaded down her back. Lola had three more feet of hair than she did before the break. Previously, like me, Lola had very short and braided natural hair. I was absolutely baffled, as were the other passengers on the bus. Lola was swarmed with questions and compliments, and she reveled in the flattery, attention, and awe. Luckily for us, Lola glowed from the attention, eager to share the secret behind her hair transformation.
“My mom took me to the salon, and the manicure lady combed my hair out and found out it is really this long!” she beamed. “Manicure lady?” I questioned. “Isn’t that for nail polish?” “No, no I was in London” Lola clarified. “It’s different there. My hair is really curly and she combed it out straight and long.” I was speechless. I felt like Lola had beat the competition and found the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, while I was unaware that the contest even existed. Before this moment, my life was so cavalier and simple, but now my naïve little bubble had finally burst and my worries extended. I never thought of my hair, ever, and now all of the sudden, obsession set in. Lola’s hair transformation was a major game changer. I felt cornered, and envious of not only Lola’s new hair, but the inundation of approval and happiness it exuded from our peers. I looked at Lola’s hair: long, celebrated, and good-looking. And then I thought about mine: short, unpraised, and unacknowledged. The hair race started, and I already trailed behind. New, pervasive concerns emerged in my life. Not only how I looked, but what my appearance evoked from others. This experience mandated that I hold my hair to a higher standard. It ignited insecurity about my natural hair and promoted a compulsive desire to strive for hair that aligned to what my classmates considered beautiful. It all boiled down to a simple social equation: long hair plus tame or straight hair equals good hair. And my hair was none of the above. In my mind, the clear solution was to suppress the symptoms of my black hair.
Noteworthy symptoms of what medical professionals call “black hair syndrome” include: kinky and coiled curl patterns, coarse texture, and stiff quality. My mother helped tame these symptoms by always keeping my hair in braids, and eventually transitioning me to a hair relaxing regimen. I honestly have no memories of what my natural hair looked like in my childhood or teen years. Regardless of my commitment to the relaxer regimen, to my disappointment, this routine proved futile in keeping up with the hair standards within my community. I continuously strived for long, straight hair, even though my actions, in some ways directly contradicted with these goals. Logically relaxers would straighten and stretch my kinky unrelaxed new growth, and should have subsequently added length to my hair. It did not. My monthly relaxer treatments left my hair brittle and weak, causing breakage that made my hair shorter and shorter. In obstinate denial of the negative impacts of these treatments, I persisted in their use. This unhealthy quality of my relaxed hair was also due to my rejection of appropriate hair products. I resented using grease and oils, fearful of having a shiny, sticky quality to my hair. In addition to shame, I harbored fear of applying these appropriate hair products, especially since being a black girl in Massachusetts comes with the lifelong agreement to be the subject of impromptu “ethnic hair” petting zoos. My hair symbolized an open forum for constructive criticism, fascination, and ridicule for my peers, who unabashedly reach out to touch and marvel at my hair’s foreign qualities.
To my utmost frustration my black peers disseminated unrealistic standards for black hair that I would then feel pressured to match. In my school, I was the only black girl who wore my “real hair” (not to be confused with “natural hair”, but hair that grew out of my scalp, no weaves of extensions in sight). While I graduated from braids to relaxers, my fellow black classmates remained a step ahead in the beauty hierarchy, progressing from braid extensions to weaves. In high school, other black girls sported luscious, silky, thick weaves, minimally shoulder-length, that achieved a standard of glamour I fell short of. Their weaves featured streaks of dyed hair, had the carefree Caucasian flowing quality that received tumultuous approval and compliments. Although my relaxer treatments were allowing me to better approximate to these Eurocentric standards, I rarely received positive feedback from my efforts. In fact, the process of relaxing my hair only subjected me to comments and recommendations on how to improve my appearance. After a fresh relaxer treatment, when my hair would be subject to more breakage, I would be asked “Did you get a haircut?” and “Why don’t you grow your hair longer?” One of my friends kindly recommended, “You should get a boob-length weave, like Lola.”
Despite the harmless intention of these comments, I interpreted insulting undertones. In actuality, there is nothing wrong with short hair, but it was nonetheless evident that it was expected to aspire to longer hair. I couldn’t use blackness as a scapegoat for not having Caucasian hair, because achieving it was well within my reach thanks to relaxers and weaves. I felt like the black girl left behind, not fully tapping into the potential of the resources at my disposal for achieving good hair. Simultaneously, I couldn’t even imagine making the transition to hair extensions. I couldn’t be as bold as ten-year-old Lola, audaciously going from ear length to butt length braids overnight. I’d feel like such a fraud, acting as a character of myself rather than actually being myself. And the alternative? Remain on the outskirts of mainstream beauty. I confusingly clashed with this dichotomy: not willing to fully commit to my own natural hair, but unwilling to fully commit to a completely Eurocentric hair charade.
Retrospectively, I view many of my hair choices as a form of social brainwashing, a realization I couldn’t comprehend until I left my hometown social bubble. Entering college in Ithaca, New York, in many ways, bore a resemblance to a foreign experience. For one thing, relative to my hometown, Cornell University is amazingly racially diverse, and with this came an illuminating meshing of cultural experiences and ideals. Instead of being asked “Why don’t you have a weave” or “Why don’t you have long hair?” I got “Why don’t you go natural, relaxers are so bad for you.” Like at home, at Cornell I received unwarranted advice on how to improve myself, but instead of inciting insecurity and self-dissatisfaction, these novel messages liberated me. Relaxing my hair, such a socially conditioned part of my routine, literally seemed like the only appropriate option for my hair. It was such an unquestioned beauty norm; socially mandated, but inherently unnecessary, like women shaving their armpits. I felt like a social norm robot who just discovered the off switch to the “white beauty” mode.
It took me a while to accept the idea that going natural would suddenly be okay. My hypochondria around black hair syndrome had been fed for most of my life, and it would take time for it to starve out. My tenacity towards achieving tame, long, and sleek hair, essentially boiled down to my stubborn adherence to white beauty standards. I had no complex about being black regarding my skin tone or facial features, but my hair was definitely holding me back from what I wanted aesthetically. To put it bluntly, I had not shaken the “white girl dipped in chocolate” ideals, and I couldn’t unsee my hair as a major obstacle in fulfilling this vision. However the overarching issue in fully considering going natural stemmed from my hair’s extreme addiction to the “creamy crack” that is hair relaxers. Little did I know that my college life came with long periods of withdrawal, especially since I swore off a primary public locale for receiving relaxer treatments. I was never was, nor would ever be, into the salon scene, which was nothing more than yet another realm for me to feel inadequate and dissatisfied with my hair.
My older sister, Idara occasionally took me to her hairdresser, and consistently the outcomes were negative, to say the least. First of all, wasting an entire Saturday for this activity is an obscene sacrifice with virtually no reward. For one thing, skipping an opportunity to sleep in is borderline sacrilegious, and being at the salon by eight am is a must for “quick service.” By salon standards, quick service means you’re lucky to get in the chair within two hours of arriving. And that was true of my experience the first time I went to Zela’s Beauty Shop. I sat in a flimsy chair in a cramped salon for hours, flipping through a comic book stolen from my brother’s room, impatient yet dreading the impending process.
Finally being called to the beauticians chair was not a happy relief, but more like taking a spoonful of cough syrup. Unpleasantly bitter, but necessary to get the desired outcome. I sat in the chair silently holding my breath, jaw clenched; almost anticipating hearing the beautician tut in disappointment over my lack of growth, and breakage. The conversation paralleled to a criminal interrogation. “Have you been greasing your scalp?” “Have you been using oil sheen spray?” “Do you cover your hair at night?” “With a silk or cotton scarf?” “Aha! Just as I suspected. GUILTY!” And that is just the beginning of the torture. Next, commenced the Russian roulette edition of hair relaxer treatments. This entailed the sadistic act of leaving in the relaxer on your head to the precipice of burning, a gamble between physical pain and optimal hair treatment results. “The longer you leave it in, the better the perm” was an implicit mantra that a customer would follow if they wanted the process to be worth their while. The only moments of solace I experienced in a hair salon was under the dryer. The eye of the storm, the final stretch, I could finally see the finish line.
The final step, having my hair styled, served as just yet another friendly reminder that I didn’t measure up to the standards of good hair. It seemed like the only style the beautician could fathom, given what she had to work with, involved using hot curlers all over my head and then calling it a day. I often ended up with a mop of short curls, to my repulse. Yes my hair achieved the bone straightness I sought, but the curling only made my hair shorter, and what I considered “worse”, given my long hair aspirations. I look liked someone from the 1950s. If I had not been black, I would have easily passed for a character on “I Love Lucy.” No offense to Lucille Ball, but at the time, I wanted to avoid hairstyles that set me back sixty years.
This was the antithesis of my sister, Idara’s salon experience, which is probably like she, unlike me, is religiously committed to the salon rituals. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had her beautician on speed dial. Here are the highlights: The beautician fawns over her smooth, healthy shoulder-length hair. She praises Idara and showers her hair with compliments, calling to her fellow beauticians to gaze upon my sisters wondrous head. And of course, she leaves happy with a beautiful up ‘do. On the other hand, the typical results of my salon experiences are as follows: I’m out sixty bucks (not including tip), with the best eight hours of my weekend gone, confidence down a few pegs in the idea of being the daughter with “bad hair” freshly branded in my mind, all with a hairstyle that I cannot wait to go home and comb out. I cannot emphasize this enough. I am not a salon girl.
As a result of these cheery experiences, my primary beautician is my mother. I rationalized I could easily forego the excessive waste of time, expenses, and deprecating remarks that encompassed the salon experience. Getting my hair treated every four to six weeks became a natural rhythm to my life. I couldn’t wait until the fourth week came around, so I could conform my new growth to the straight and stiff texture that I proudly comb and style. However, going to college over four hours away from home threw a wrench in this schedule. My visits to home were based around holidays, meaning my relaxers would be stretched to the max. Let me tell you, going from August to Thanksgiving relaxer-free is not pretty, as a mini ‘fro would creep like a weed beneath my brittle straight tresses. It looked like my hair was battling itself in an epic identity crisis with no obvious victor.
This external hair identity crisis was a mere reflection of my internal changes. As I was forced out of my routine, I really began to question my subliminal abhorrence towards my ethnic hair. I didn’t realize the racial undertones to my perception of myself, and what I thought would make me look and feel better. And I receive a sundry of mixed messages from society. As always, there’s an emphasis on natural beauty, but there’s a hidden addendum. The emphasis is natural white beauty standards, at least in the mainstream society I frequent. Where beauty features are most racialized and ethnic is where ascribing to whiteness is most evident, with the overarching theme of white beauty standards taking precedence over natural ones when it comes to minorities. And as a black woman, a major component of my aesthetic deviation was hair. My satisfaction in my natural beauty, contingent on what my peers deemed beautiful, boiled down to suppressing my ethnic features. Perhaps because my hair was such a tangible and alterable part of my body, it became my major focus in this visual approximation to white aesthetics. I repeatedly struggled with this striking this balance. At what degree could I commit to adhering to my natural appearance, while also fulfilling the standards of mainstream beauty? I didn’t want to admit to my insecurities by totally rejecting my real hair and plopping a mop of synthetic crap on my head. But at the same time, my lack of confidence inhibited the bravery necessary to veer left from the standards and do nothing to alter my hair. And of course I had the handy little rehearsed line that “relaxed hair is easier to comb and manage,” which allowed relaxed hair to win by default for several years.
Eventually, I realized how lame these excuses were and I waved the white flag in the war against my natural hair. More than anything, my decision to go natural rooted from a declaration of independence. I did not want my hair to rely on when I could go home and get my hair relaxed by my mom. I wanted a change, something that I could manage entirely on my own. And I couldn’t picture keeping up with relaxer treatments once I moved out of my house, especially with my strict resolve against going to salons and my fear of relaxing my own head.
I am still working on finding my stride in my transition to natural hair. To my surprise, the ownership and embracing of what naturally grows out of my scalp is more empowering than scary, most likely because I chose to undergo this process in a large college campus, instead of under the microscope of a small suburban white-washed high school. Moreover, I could finally admit some sad truths about my self-esteem. I have put my hair through hell, and I never enjoyed or benefitted from it. When styling my hair, my objective wasn’t to show it off, but to tame and hide it. Reflecting on my hair history shows that I had to first expand my definition of beauty to minimize the influence of extrinsic approval, and instead emphasize intrinsic approval.
Ownership, self-acceptance, and self-confidence are a must when it comes to beauty. These qualities provided the strength necessary to put to bed the implicit competition I felt with black women with extensions. I realized the hypocrisy in thinking, “Damn you for setting these unrealistic standards for what black hair should be” while I actively contributed to perpetuating the normalcy in distorting and masking my own black hair. I have come to accept what I saw as my hair’s shortcomings as facts that were open to interpretations, not just from others, but from myself as well. My hair is kinky. It’s poufy. It’s volatile in the elements. It will never flow like a kite in the breeze. It sheds horribly in the shower, looking, as my sister charmingly says, “like pubes”. But that does not mean that it is bad. This is not to say that I am at a stage of absolute acceptance. While I could put my obsession with straight hair to rest, I still cannot shake the desire for my hair to be longer. I don’t think this fact should detract from the progress I’ve made towards the acceptance of my culture and appearance. In fact, my diagnosis is that my black hair syndrome is finally in remission. The remedy is expanding ideals of beauty to not have a color, but to allow the power of beauty standards to lie on an individual level, endorsing self-confidence and assurance that there is no inherent “wrong” or “right” of one being compared to another. Beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder, but beauty stems from the view of one’s self. In my honest medical opinion, this is the only real cure to black hair syndrome.
