Community Hair

Community Hair

“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. 

But I was still determined to be a product of the times. I wanted a fringe. I needed a fringe. How else would people know that I was a mysterious, cool girl with a lot of angst, but even though I was angsty, I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it. You know the kind? They knew. They knew already because I wore eyeliner on the bottom lid. The tell-tale sign of angsty, mysterious, cool girls everywhere circa 2011. 

I went to the salon, and a lovely man named Stacey straightened my hair and then finally snipped away at the last modicum I had of looking like I cared about lame things like ‘fitting in’ or ‘not having an eating disorder’. I was thrilled.  

The following Sunday I went to Church. Sidenote: I’m not religious but I grew up going to a Methodist Church. It’s an African Caribbean church and always felt more like a community space rather than a religious one. After the service my mum jokingly told me that she’d already been told off by some of the older female members of the Church for letting me cut my hair. ‘Margaret don’t you know a woman’s hair is her beauty’ they had said to her, and both me and my mum laughed about it. But that stayed with me. I didn’t realise my hair was community hair and that my mum, not even me, but my mum could get told off for what I did to it.

Everyone must know by now how tied up black women’s hair is with their identity. It’s a billion dollar industry (wealth which black people do not own the majority share of - don’t get me started on that because we’ll be here all day). Black women spend on average 9 times more on hair products than non-black women. Hair discrimination in schools and the workplace is very real and only really starting to improve now. Most people think of afros in the 60s and 70s but our hair has always been politicised. During slavery black women’s hair was shaved to humiliate them, strip them of their identity and heritage. Because my family is from the Caribbean, I say canerows, because the enslaved people in the Caribbean worked in cane fields, while in the US they worked in corn fields, hence cornrows. And this style itself was used by enslaved people to discreetly share maps and messages that were braided into the hair. 

THIS IS BY NO MEANS AN IN DEPTH LOOK AT BLACK WOMEN’S HAIR AND IDENTITY. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE GO READ A BOOK. THERE ARE LITERALLY SO MANY.

What I’m getting at is that our hair and the relationship we have with it is complicated.

The type of hair you have changes who might approach you romantically. Do you tuck your braids behind your ears? Wear natural hair, or have a middle parting? Well apparently the white boys like what they see when you do that. If enough people on tik tok said it, then it must be true. If you do silk presses or wigs, you might get more black guys paying attention to you. If you wear hats then loads of Italian guys start checking for you. That last one I made up. 

It’s stressful having your identity wrapped up in my hair. I know for a fact when my hair changes, it changes how people treat me. If it’s pulled back I’m more masculine, if it’s out then I’m femme. If I change it too drastically some (white) people won’t recognise me. I’ve stood in front of people carrying a flyer for my show, with my face on it, asking me if that’s actually me. 

Even though I got a fringe professionally cut, I didn’t actually go to salons super often, because my mum always had friends who could do my hair for me so most of the time it was done at home. But this meant that you were always at the whims of what your mum lets her friend do to your hair and what your mum’s friend’s abilities are. 

Hair is built in the community. Everyone knows somebody that can do hair. Salons have always been an important community space and they were my first introduction to black owned businesses. I’ve always loved spaces dedicated to making women beautiful, but the black hair salon is particularly special. Depending on when you go it can be a beautifully informal place, where you get to transform, see other people transform, and back in the day you could also buy bootleg DVDs from the man who inexplicably always came in to peddle his wares. 

My experience with my hair is not a unique one. I have a lot of the same traumas girls my age would have. My gen z sister luckily never had to experience the ear singe that is typical of the hot comb because straighteners had come a long way by her time. I get asked if I’m tender headed at the salon, but the hairdresser never asks themselves if they’re heavy handed which I always found funny.

For the last 8 or so years I’ve worn my hair natural. That means in its natural state. No straightener, no relaxer, but I have dyed it a few times, and occasionally worn braids or crochet extensions. But my main thing is my curly hair. 

I really like my natural hair. But it takes a really long time to deal with, detangling, washing and styling takes a full day. And that ritual had stopped feeling like self care and more like a chore. I’m a big advocate for the four day work week, for all the main reasons but mainly because black women lose a day over the weekend when we wash our hair. My hair only really looks ‘nice’ for one and a half days a week, (rendering the tiresome but still vital wash day even more of a slap in the face) the rest of the time it’s in twists or frizzy, which can still be pretty but it’s less exciting. 

When I get braids in the summer I feel like a new woman. Seeing the braids swing down to my butt is like an alter ego for. Suddenly I’m ‘that bitch’, it’s like my confidence grew with the length of my hair. Despite being natural for 8 years, my hair has never quite grown past my shoulders. Or technically I should say, I’ve never retained length past my shoulders. 

Even though this has always been my hair, it took a long time for me to figure out how to take care of my own hair. My mum knew how to do my hair when I was a kid but not so much as I aged out of those styles. 

Can we have a moment of appreciation for black children’s hairstyles? They’re so joyful and I had all of them. I loved the click clack sound of bobbles in my hair, or the sound of beads being secured at the bottom of my hair with a piece of foil, black and white during term time and coloured ones in the summer. And I felt like a princess in neverending butterfly clips. I think I need to start wearing my hair like I did when I was child because that would probably be healing. 

Since my mum grew up in the age of relaxers, jheri curl and pretty bad wigs, I never really saw her care for her own natural hair that much. In fact it was me who did extensive research on youtube and then shared my findings with my mum, my brother and sister.  The longer I was natural, the more I experimented with different ways of caring for my hair. I tried rice water, henna masks, ayurvedic herbs mixed in an oil that I put in an aesthetically pleasing mason jar like all the pretty youtube hair influencers seemed to have. I loved watching these women on youtube dedicate so much time to this self care. It was like I was watching them nourish their souls at the same time that they did their hair and I aspired to have hair as long as theirs. The youtube natural hair community also became another type of ‘community hair’ that I subscribed to, albeit from the sidelines. But I think I sometimes aspired too hard to have hair like theirs, and when mine never grew as long, I got frustrated. If they can do it, being ‘goldstar naturals’ (no chemical treatment that changes the texture of your hair) then why couldn’t I?   

I have known about texture releases for over a year but I ummed and aahed about getting one for ages. I spoke about it in therapy, and we basically figured out that my hair didn’t feel like just mine. 

It felt like it belonged to everyone. It was community hair. And people had a right to get upset if I did something to it that they didn’t like. It shouldn’t really feel like that but I get it. If I see a black or brown girl with really pretty, long, curly hair, and she just cuts it off. I feel like it’s a loss for me too. There is still the stigma that black people can’t grow their hair, so when someone chooses to cut long hair, it’s like ‘no don’t do that! You were our example, you were our representation, how dare you not take this job seriously’. It also feels like they’re rejecting their ‘gift’ of long natural hair. It feels ungrateful. It shouldn’t, they should be allowed to do whatever with their hair that they want, it’s their hair, but we are burdened and blessed with having politicised hair, so there’s more nuance to it than that.

Also when people cut off their long hair, it also feels like a rejection of femininity. That’s not to say that women with a buzz cut and statement earrings are some of the most femme girls out there but the symbolism is still there. 

I realised that I wasn’t letting myself do what I wanted with my hair because I was afraid of seeming ungrateful, and rejecting my ‘gift’. I didn’t want to upset the people who might long for hair more similar to mine in its natural state and I didn’t want to perpetuate the cycle of black women not accepting their natural hair. My therapist is black so I never felt in danger of coming across as vain by spending all of our 50 minute session talking about my hair. She said it was ok if my hair was just hair and if I wanted to get a texture release, I could get one without feeling the need to justify it to other people.

I definitely felt like my hair belonged to my mum. When I was a teenager and in a particularly rageful state, I used to cut my hair because I felt like that was a way to punish her. I was also just a bit of a basic insane girl. Not the imaginative insane girl I am today. But I remember impulsively buying blue box dye and cutting my hair off in anger, because there was pride in my hair, and in those turbulent moments I wanted to destroy it. Maybe subconsciously I was trying to upset my mum by ‘rejecting’ the ‘gift’ she gave me. Only by cutting and dyeing my hair did it seem like I was breaking the rules, straightening it was fine for special occasions. I don’t make the rules. 

My hair is also of course tied up in my Blackness. I’m a black mixed race woman. When my hair is curly, I don’t look that ambiguous. I look like a black mixed race woman. I’ve also expressed myself with different styles, but those styles always had to show my Blackness. Braids, crochet extensions, canerows, twists. I never got straight styles like wigs or weaves. Mainly because they weren’t quite my style at the time, but also because I would worry that I would look more racially ambiguous, and less obviously mixed race.

When my hair isn’t curly or in a black style, maybe it’s not so obvious who I am? I’m not sure as I’ve really not had straight hair all that often as an adult. As a black mixed race woman I benefit from colourism and I know that my curl type is more palatable in the UK and in the West. Which made me hesitant to change or complain about it, because it already comes with privilege.

It’s loaded for me. Am I adhering to European beauty standards if I have straight hair? Am I trying to assimilate? What does this say about me to other black women? Is it even actually that deep? Am I making a decision about my privilege or am I just changing my hair? If I didn’t have an obviously Black hair style what would happen? What if it was like on tik tok when people realised that Sophia Richie is biracial because she knows how to two-step? Could that ever happen to me? Could people ever be surprised that I know how to two-step? No, I think I’m fine. I’m quite a publicly good dancer.

When my hair is curly, when it’s in a Black style I know that I’m visually connected to my Blackness. I didn’t want to risk losing that connection by changing my hair with this texture release. That is my community. My mum is a first generation immigrant from Grenada in the Caribbean. It’s her side of the family that I grew up with, that I’ve always been closest to. I lived on the same street as my maternal grandma for as long as she was alive. But that context isn’t visible if you just looked at me, and I worried that that context would be even less visible if I changed my hair. 

You can imagine this thought process doesn’t make it easy to change my hair on a whim. It was actually quite an impulsive act I made to book the appointment. I worried that if I didn’t just bite the bullet and book itt, I never would. I got the texture release. I went to a gorgeous salon in Brixton where the lovely stylist asked me lots of questions in order to get a better understanding of how I usually do my hair and what results I was aiming for. During this process I started to doubt my decision, she said if it was just curl definition I wanted, maybe a keratin treatment would be better? But I said no, I wanted a bit of a change, so on we went with the treatment. And I got to watch myself transform for hours into my alter ego, ‘silk press Mary’ who I will have to stay as for the next two weeks before seeing how the treatment has changed my natural curl pattern. Throughout the process I could see all my potential selves, blow dried Mary, curly Mary, silk press Mary. It felt good to look in the mirror and see opportunity and not loss. Getting your hair done is so transformative because you can watch the change happening, you get to watch who you’ve decided to be next.

My hair is bone straight right now and I’m not used to it. It keeps getting in my face, I’m terrified of water now like the Wicked Witch of the West. But it’s something different, and it’s fun. And I can flick it, like Glinda the good witch. So I think 2025 is the year I experiment even more with my hair. I have done to an extent before, but I’ve never emotionally experimented before. 

What I have to recognise is that I’m still connected to my identity even if my hair is different. My context doesn’t change even if I do change my hair, I’m still on that journey but it is getting easier. 

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UPDATE

It’s been a month since I got the texture release now. I had two weeks of straight hair then I washed my hair and with baited breath I waited to see how drastically my curl pattern had ‘loosened’ with the texture release. And to be honest, it doesn’t even look that different. I really like it but it’s not as drastic a change as I was worrying about. I think if I never said anything, I don’t think people would’ve noticed. It takes way less time to wash now though.