Black women straighten their hair in search of acceptance – 07/03/2023 – Equilíbrio

At the age of 25, Luany Airão doesn’t remember exactly when she started straightening her hair. She remembers perfectly, however, the situation that led to her decision. “I was walking down the stairs at school with some classmates when a boy in my class pulled my hair and called it hard hair.”

Luany was still a child when offenses like these led her to ask her mother for help with thermal straightening on her hair, with a hairdryer and flat iron. “Before the age of 15 [eu] I was already using chemistry”, he says.

But after years of straightening, she decided to go with her natural hair. In 2022, however, an occurrence similar to the one she faced in childhood motivated her to resume using a dryer and flat iron constantly on her hair, which was curly.

“I started to feel bad when I started to live in certain groups in which people used terms like hard hair, bad hair”, he says, who had moved from Feira de Santana (BA) to Foz do Iguaçu (PR). For her, the biggest nuisance is not due to the decision to straighten it, but to having made the choice as a result of the judgments she heard. “I want to allow myself the freedom to do whatever I want with my hair considering what I like and what’s best for me, not external causes.”

Luany is one of the women who, after years of using natural hair, decided to go back to using straightening techniques due to personal discomfort or comments from others. The movement is reported by Internet users and was noticed in beauty salons consulted by Sheet. Although it is not a generalized trend, those who give up frizzy and curly hair claim practicality and a search for acceptance, in addition to asserting their right to choose the texture they prefer – and complain that their hair and their decisions about their own image are always on the agenda .

The difficulty of acceptance is faced by many black women who decide to maintain the natural texture of their hair. Zaine Regina, 26, from Minas Gerais, also started straightening her hair after negative childhood experiences in Belo Horizonte (MG). His frizzy hair was associated with steel wool marks by colleagues.

The decision to stop straightening came at a time when I was unemployed and no longer wanted to spend money on chemical procedures. During the process, she learned to appreciate her natural hair and look for beauty references that she identified with.

However, personal satisfaction was not enough to shield her from difficult situations. “I recently did a job interview where the form asked how many times a week I would be willing to work with my hair tied up or straight. Since I needed the job, I said ‘all,'” she says. “Despite that, I don’t see myself going back to the straightening routine and the constant panic I felt that my natural hair would be seen.”

The difficulty of dealing with aesthetic pressure, however, remains a problem even for women who choose straight hair. This is the case of Cinthya Santos, 26, who lives in Cidade Tiradentes, in São Paulo.

Since she was a child, her closeness to her mother, who is a hairdresser, has facilitated access to relaxing and straightening products. When launches arrived at the beauty salon, the matriarch offered them to her daughter, who performed the procedures.

She reports that she liked her natural hair, but was bothered by the volume, in addition to hearing criticism from her schoolmates.

At the age of 12, he started using progressive brushes and started to like the smooth texture. Despite the discomfort with the chemical process, which is time-consuming and, at the time, included products with large amounts of formaldehyde, Cinthya got used to straight hair and her new appearance.

The pandemic caused her to go a long time without straightening, which was a stimulus to deal with completely natural curls. She has come to the conclusion, however, that she doesn’t have the patience to take care of it the way she deems it necessary to keep her hair curly the way she likes it. “Today, my choice for progressive is for practicality”, she says.

Cinthya uses a product that she considers “weaker” and, with the long intervals between chemical procedures, she manages to use her hair with a curlier texture when she wants to. For her, however, going back to completely natural hair is not an option, even if she often feels pressured to do so. “What bothers me is my hair always being put on the agenda.”