NY Observer Gets Curly Hair

Is She Straight, Or… A Secret Botticelli? Girls Scorn Curls by Liz Krieger [Google Cache]

This is a humorous piece about something I’m very familiar with . Curly hair, and straightening it and pretending it wasn’t really curly.

I myself blowed it out in my teens. I also chemically straightened it by myself in my home bathroom. That was the early 80’s. I thankfully realized that I had really cool hair when it was wet … hmm. But it always dried up then, into a big blownup ball of furr. I HAD to blowdry it on HOT with a brush and curl it under and out to get it to go straight. I had to do that or it’d be frizzy and horrid.

I have a school picture of my hair in fine form. Late in the day it was finally my turn to get snapped. The camera chose to unveil the horizontal lines around my head. Straight hair with horizontal puffed out lines around my head at different levels. It was a huge crimped relaxed style, and super ugly.

What happened? Moisture. It was Florida. It was sweaty and hot in the hallways. My hair desperately tried to fluff up … but since it was blown out and didn’t get all wet, just humidity around it … it crimped up funny horizontal lines instead. It took me seeing that picture and thinking about it long and hard to realize that I looked like that more often than not. My “eye” straightened my hair out, but the real vision of me was frightening daily. I mean, I started out the day with it straight and smooth, and without being privelaged to see it happen, transformed to an oddity daily. My first look at the picture was of complete horror! It really was something to have to adjust to, that I don’t look how I think I look. That was a stepping off point somehow, for the time in the near future that I figured out that my hair looked great when it was wet, as long as it stayed wet.

I never had the privelage of a super great hot straightening like Liz Krueger talks about in her article. My hair was weird when it was chemically straightened. It was a strange process and freaked me out … it seemed my hair was gelly gummy stretchy during the process … comb goop through the hair and comb it in well. Oohh, now that I know I’m glad I survived! That was nasty stuff to do to my own hair.

I have other horror stories with my hair. I’ll save those for another time.

I found this article today because someone searched one of my sites for curly hair and lavender … so that set me out to see the page ranking, curious, not WANTING to be on top as some individuals online are … comment spammers, anyhow I got waylaid and started looking at other sites, and a second search produced that article. It’s dated for today, so that was great timing on the searcher to my site! Without that I’d not have been looking around for curly hair articles. Especially since that site is a “registered users” site, I’d not have had access to it. So I linked to the google cache of it, for as long as that’s there. I have a capture of the page in Firefox, so at least I have a good copy of it for my own enjoyment. Too bad it’ll go away to nether regions eventually out here.

I must add here that I didn’t grow up thinking I had curly hair. I didn’t. I seemed to have “hair with body” as a child. Sweet blonde smooth locks that flipped under at the ends, and up on those other ends, but not “curly” not even “wavy”.

Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s that was when we didn’t know so much about hair. We now know that 60% of people (Americans? or ALL PEOPLE?) have curly or wavy hair, different hair that needs to be babied. But it’s WORTH IT!

So for me it was culture shock to find out that MY HAIR IS REALLY CURLY!

It wasn’t just wavy … it was soft corkscrews, some tighter, tighter when I was in my twenties, for sure. My early teens saw me change from girl to turning-woman, which darkened my hair color and changed the texture and wave to distinctly different.

I had no support, and so blew it out to “make it obey”. I never “let it go”.

At the beach my hair looked good, like a walk on the beach with my relatives, my aunt said “you have great beach hair!” with pride and jealousy mixed into the statement. I was proud, but knew that everyday wasn’t a beach time. 🙁 My hair at the beach shone, even blown out, it just got looser, the body evened out and with it blowing around in the ocean breezes it separated into pieces of hair, locks, that just were so nice, but not “curly”. You do know, if you know curly, that is totally curly. It’s just the curly without the curl. It’s just the curly peeking out in supreme conditions (sea air), which would give way to unfurled curls if I got it wet in the Atlantic’s waters. But that’s just beach hair. It never turned out so nice at home day in and day out.

I finally put two and two together and had a love/hate relationship with my curly hair in my late teens, beach good. 🙂

Then “Against All Odds” the movie, was out. Ah, the hair of that girl got me wanting it. I got it cut at a place super close to my house, it was just across the street angularly from us, a small place, not filled with people, a haven for an introvert like me! At any rate, she (the stylist) introduced me to “hair gel” and the “new curly me” was born, but it was short. I had ups and downs with lengths from then on, but always with gel on the outside of my hair. I sought out humectant conditioners and used more of that than shampoo, but all those years I still shampooed first. Silly. Strip it and add it back on. That’s not so good. We know that now. Well, at least I do. I meant the “collective we” of curldom understanders.

It’s been awhile now since I’ve gone to “conditioner-only” washing. My hair is still curly and needs to be worked with everyday. It’s really long though, so is quite a pain to re-wet daily. I have gone about with it in pony tails after a day or two, without daily washing, and it gets less curly. I’m still abusing it those days. I am pledging now to take even better care of my curly hair and always wear it curly, even if it means I have to wash these long locks every single day.

I will make a comparison here to my “before” method, maybe my curly hair looked curlier a day or two after a wash, whereas today it doesn’t, because I was stripping, re-moisturizing, gelling, laquering, and spraying this and that over top — my curls were locked in with that “curly treatment”.

I’m totally “natural” now, and so my loose curls can flatten out (but still be frizzy curly flattened curly, makes no sense, but it’s there.) It happens over night, and when I get frustrated doing something and jam it up into a band to hold it high. So a few days of that and it’s worse every day.

Curly Girl suggests every day, or every other day … and so I admit here it’s true, but I need to come to grips with doing that with long hair. Long Botticelli curls are nice. I’m glad God gave them to me. I wish for curlier sometimes, but what I have is me.

I look best as me. Natural me.

The article linked about talks about that sort of thing. How girls don’t look right sometimes, they are Fake Straighteners. It looks false, worse than a toupee. I’ll take a stab at it and say “Let it out! Let it get wet, moisturize it, work with it, give it a chance to be real for you!” I can say that. I was there once. So if you are a fake straight girl, leap right into the best of treatment for your real curly hair. Get the book Curly Girl, and let live!