“Love your Curls”
“You need a perm” Was something I heard a lot as a kid and I believed it. Sounds like the most cliché story, but I honestly used to want long flowing hair like the girls at my school. It wasn’t okay to have hair that defies gravity and doesn’t blow in the wind; not to me, not to my family and not to everyone around me. It was hard to ‘deal with’ so we kept it chemically straight and destroyed, and I internalized that as ugliness. Fast forward about 10 years and it’s become socially acceptable and beautiful to rock your natural kinks and curls, and it’s amazing to see the transformation, and spread of information on hair types and care. The “woah what’s going on with your head” turned to “oh my gosh I love your hair!” Not because it’s ‘cool’ to be natural, but we’re actually accepting natural hair as beautiful for the first time. My hair journey has taught me that beauty is really in being authentically YOU and not conforming to what anyone else’s definition of beauty is at the time, because people’s ideas can change, but who you truly are won’t.