What I Learned About Beauty After Straightening My Hair

Deciding to start my natural hair journey had been long overdue.

My hair had been so damaged from heat and the overuse of products not meant for it that I could hear it laughing at me every time I ran my fingers through it, contemplating to just let it be.

It was hard at first. It was in this awkward transition stage of being both dead and alive. It was kind of like that awkward stage women go through with their eyebrows when trying to grow them out.

Somehow, I managed. For months, my hair went untouched by straightening devices like flat irons, blow dryers, even serums and hair treatments that were designed to take away from its naturalness. My curls were making a come back!

Before embarking on my journey, I agreed that once every six months, I would straighten my hair to see how my growth was progressing. This week marked the sixth month. So I pulled out my flat iron, blew the dust off, and prepared to be amazed at my growth. But boy, was I disappointed. It went nowhere near as straight as it used to, and my ends were deader than I knew what to do with.

Maybe its time for a trim, I thought to myself. The very next day, I was in my hairdressers seat asking Leann to keep it as long as possible while trimming away the lifeless ends that really hadn’t looked that bad when my hair was curly.

I walked out of there feeling great. My hair was healthy and it looked good.

But before long, there were a series of unusual remarks, stares, and whistles that got me thinking about society’s standard of beauty, who fits into it, and what it means for those that don’t.

“Its like having two girlfriends,” my boyfriend said to me when he saw me that night. This was something I had heard before from men whose girlfriends alternated between straight and curly hair. I was tempted to ask him which girlfriend he liked better, but opted not to.

Before I met up with him that night, I had several clients compliment my appearance. Three of them asked for my number, and one of them told me I look “Spanish.” He seemed startled that I wasn’t grinning at his lame attempt to flatter me by essentially encouraging me to identify with something I didn’t.

It was strange. These were all clients I had served before. They had seen me on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. They hadn’t said any of these things to me when I wore my hair naturally. Where was all this attention coming from?

Walking to grab tea from Tim Horton’s, an older white man said “How you doin’ beautiful?” I note his colour only because I haven’t been hit on by a white guy since the last time my hair was straight.

Strangely, my treatment from women also underwent a shift. The female clients I had that were typically quite rude or standoffish were either extra nice or extra quiet. Why? I wondered. Be rude to me! I can handle it. But then I thought about it.

Personally, when I am face to face with a woman who fits into society’s standard of beauty better than I do, it can be intimidating. I find myself to be either extra nice or extra quiet. Hm. Was I being paranoid or was this an inferiority complex? If so, does this mean our treatment towards people depends on how they appear? How well they fit into the “skinny with white features” depiction of beauty?

For the six months that I wore my hair curly, I felt confident. I felt like I had been a one-girl revolution who walked with purpose, making a statement with every step. But when I wore my hair straight, I felt safe.

What’s the difference?

With curly hair, my sense of approval, the validation of my beauty, and my self-love came from the inside. It meant that even without the series of remarks, comments and whistles, I knew I was beautiful because damn it, I felt beautiful inside.

But with my straight hair, I felt safe. I felt like I looked racially ambiguous; maybe Spanish, maybe mixed, maybe straight white with a tan. Or maybe even full-black, but light enough to escape the dreaded implications of what that might mean in today’s society for my success in a job interview or the preferential treatment that men or women may have towards me because it was validated to me.

The truth is; natural hair represents an absence of fear. And for a lot of men, especially the men who specifically go after a woman based on her closeness to “beauty”, nothing is scarier than a woman who publicly displays an absence of fear. Natural hair represents an ability to ignore the media’s messages about what beauty is. It’s like wearing a fluorescent yellow t-shirt that says, “Yeah, I saw the commercial for that new L’oreal crap and I’m not interested.”

Last week, I had to hand in something called a privilege diary for my Women’s Studies class. We had to detail how privileged or unprivileged we were in certain cases. I noted that the fact that I am a woman of colour makes me less privileged than a white woman. But the fact that I am a lighter skinned woman of colour makes me more privileged than a dark skinned woman. The fact that my hair can transition, naturally, from kinky curly to bone straight makes me more privileged than women who have to use artificial hair, relaxing treatments and the like, to be more like what the media tells us is beautiful.

Despite all of that, here’s one thing I know to be true: I am not my hair. But society sure has a way of making us feel differently. Especially women of colour.

Why is it that when women wear their hair naturally they are complimented by being called “unique” or “brave”? When I started wearing my hair naturally, people joked that I had “tamed the beast.” I still have no idea which beast they are referring to. But when women have straight hair, or straighten their hair, they're “sexy” or “beautiful.”

So to all the men, especially the black men, who felt the need to compliment me on my “remarkable beauty”, ask for my “digits”, or tip toe around my temporary whiteness, thank you. But men like you are a huge part of the reason black women have taken so long to begin embracing their natural hair. You are a huge part of the hostility that exists between light-skinned women and dark-skinned women. You are a huge reason the media hasn’t changed the message.

And what message does that send to young women? What message did it send to me when I was growing up? Because in retrospect, the media was a big, scary adult that whispered this in my bi-racial ear, “Kid, you’re gonna wanna identify with your white side more if you really wanna make it out there.”

It wasn’t until I saw the Charmsie’s and the Halfie Truth’s and the Lipstick n’ Curls of the world that I realized that curly hair is okay, natural hair is okay.

And it certainly is beautiful. And sexy.

And brave. 

Growing Up in the "Mixie" Millennium

A recent article published in Toronto Life, “A New Mixed-raced Generation is Transforming the City: Will Toronto Be the World’s First Post-racial Metropolis?” takes the ever-increasing wave of mixed-race children, marriages, and culture emerging in Toronto head on.

While the article is a very interesting and quality read, especially for a mixed-race person like me, it also highlights the fact that this is a rather untouched subject for a metropolitan city like Toronto, whose motto is “Diversity Our Strength”, and that perhaps there is a discussion to be had.

“Returning to Toronto always comes with a palpable sense of relief, [for those who are mixed]” writer for Toronto Life, Nicholas Hune-Brown says, and boy is he ever correct. Whenever my family would make our voyages up to Peterborough, Ontario for our camping weekends, I knew that the feeling of being visibly different would haunt me until we returned back to the “Welcome to Toronto” sign. My dad was the only black man in the whole of Red Setter Resort, and everyone knew that my sisters and I, with our curly and “ethnic” hair that people loved to fawn over, and touch, were his children.

It wasn't people knowing that I was his child that bothered me. It was the fact that people didn't have to guess, the fact that the only mystery people ever had to solve was figuring out why my sisters and I looked so different. Although this case often closed the moment they saw my white brunette mother arm in arm with my dad.

The other thing that worked against me was that my dad was Guyanese, which, although considered part of the West Indies, is located in South America. This allowed me to play with my response to, “What is your background?” The question that like Hune-Brown writes, “Every mixed person is subjected to.” I would often say “My father is South American, and my mother is Scottish.” You would not believe the ooos and ahhhs that this response would get. People would begin listing off all sorts of Latin countries in South America; most often starting with either Venezuela or Brazil, only to be let down, for whatever reason, by the fact that I wasn't half-Latin; I was half-black.

I can even recall visiting the pool with my sister, and upon our arrival, this girl started singing "Window to the Wall", as if to say, "The black people are here. Time to be cool." I laughed, even at the age of eleven at how ignorant it was to assume that rap would be our common ground, especially since I was going through my rock phase and really had no clue where the window or the wall was. 

Now, at the age of twenty, I look back on my journey growing up in the new millennium as what Hune-Brown calls a “mixie”. Despite the challenges of properly identifying myself, I see that a majority of the challenges I had were largely self-inflicted. I felt that because everything was either black or white, pun very intended; that I too had to be either black or white.

While it is comforting to know that there has been a drastic increase of mixed-race marriages, children, and cultural influences, I cannot help but feel that I missed out on the wide acceptance that has been on the rise as of recent. I do, however feel that by growing up a generation ahead of the new wave of “mixies”, that perhaps I was a pioneer in making a name for ourselves in Toronto.

Ultimately, it is my pleasure to have sacrificed enjoying the newly opened minds and acceptance throughout the first half of my life. Especially if it means seeing even more racially ambiguous children gallivanting around the city, sinking their teeth into life entirely unconcerned with committing to being “either or”.

The fact that we have been granted the option, although a little overdue if you ask me, of choosing more than once race on national censuses, is a sign that as a society we are progressing. Not only in terms of racial identification, but sexual identification, gender identification, and everything in between, because as we have come to learn, there is a lot “in between”. The more we embrace that, the more we allow these “in-betweeners”, like myself, to flourish, ultimately making our city in all of its multicultural glory, a better place.