“How dare you get a silk press and not FaceTime me? You better come correct.”

This is what my friend Sacks said to me when I called her the day I got my hair done. I didn’t actually just get a silk press. I got a texture release which is a chemical treatment that would loosen my curl pattern temporarily, therefore altering my ‘natural’ curls. It also meant having straight hair for two weeks for the treatment to take effect.

Before getting the treatment done I felt like I had to get Sacks’ permission for the treatment because I wasn’t quite able to make the decision on my own. It wasn’t just a ‘would this suit me?’ permission. More like, an ‘are you ok with me doing this?’ permission. I felt like I had to justify it to my sister and I couldn’t even tell my mum properly, I just did it so she didn’t have a chance to stop me. 

When I was a teenager, I used to straighten my hair. That was pretty standard for lots of black and mixed race girls in the late 2000s and 2010s. It was the era of the side fringe, indie music and normalised cruelty in the form of tabloids. People wore arm warmers and didn’t care about their mental health as much. It was a different time. A time when I had Alexa Chung  on my Pinterest board, but I never quite managed to get my straightened hair to look as effortless as her choppy bob. Truth be told, my hair always took effort, in whatever form, straight, curly, braided. There was nothing effortless about it.