When Netflix dropped the trailer for its latest romantic comedy Nappily Ever After over a month ago, I was slightly enamored and reasonably wary. Amid a robust wave of traditional rom-coms with diverse casts, Nappily felt like a purposeful throwback to the popular black films of ‘90s and early aughts—The Best Man, Brown Sugar and Love And Basketball—all of which cemented the film’s star, Sanaa Lathan, as a notable romantic lead. In the first minute of the trailer, we see Lathan as a glamorous, professional woman confined to a life of perfection, and jaded by a lifelong, emotionally fraught relationship with her hair.

Framed as a woman’s path to love and liberation, the plot seemed charming, specific and, to an extent, relatable. Cut to the end of the trailer where a mature-looking gentleman, presumably a love interest, looks into Lathan’s eyes and says, “brothers like women that are real.” She smiles, affirmed by his counsel. Cut to me rolling my eyes.

I held onto that inkling as I watched the film, hoping for fully-fleshed out ideas about black womanhood, intra-racial trauma, and society’s treatment of our hair. Like any projection of marginal struggles, there’s equal opportunity for completely nailing it or getting it all wrong. But stories about black female protagonists can’t be that hard to nail in 2018, right? Wrong.

The 90-minute film follows the main character Violet on a path to self-acceptance through various stages of her hair journey. In the opening scene, she recalls the stringent hair routine her mother inflicted on her as a child—washed, conditioned, and hot combed once a week. When we catch up to her adult life, Violet is a successful marketing executive obsessed with maintaining a perfect but ultimately shallow life, not to mention her straight, shiny locks.

Things quickly go awry when her boyfriend Clint doesn’t propose to her as expected, causing her life to unravel. This leads to Violet breaking up with Clint, attempting (and failing) to makeover her image, shaving her head, and sparking a relationship with a male hairdresser, Will a.k.a Mr. “Brothers Like Women That Are Real.”

We first meet Will in a hair salon where he’s comforting a woman whose appointment gets bumped when Violet snags an emergency walk-in. Staring disappointedly in a mirror at her short, natural hair, the woman bemoans, “brothers like long hair.” Will responds with the same line, “Brothers like women that are real.”

But stories about black female protagonists can’t be that hard to nail in 2018, right? Wrong.
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Cut to me rolling my eyes again. It’s a remark that’s both completely hollow and fully loaded at the same time. Are all “brothers” the same? What is “real” and “not real”? Does it matter what “brothers” think of black women’s hair? Does it matter what Will thinks? The film would argue yes. Unfortunately, this moment encapsulates Will’s entire presence on screen and the false wisdom he provides Violet as a love interest.

While he’s positioned as the antidote to her fragile, insecure life with Clint, he becomes her guiding male figure who somehow knows more about black women’s hair and what they should do with it than the black women in the film. Furthermore, he symbolizes a condescension that many black men retain when it comes to the false perception of black womanhood.

The concept of Will, as a character, feels like a joke. He’s a natural hair guru who considers himself a revolutionary at a time when the natural hair product industry is booming. Despite being a hairdresser, he doesn’t style his daughter Zoe’s hair. It isn’t until Violet strikes up an unlikely companionship with Zoe that she steps in to cornrow her hair in a maternal bonding moment, despite having no experience with natural styles, as if all black women are born knowing how to braid. None of it makes sense. But it’s the black-womanly thing to do, so she magically fills the space with no explanation.

Additionally, Will is a mansplainer. In one scene, Will and Violet get into a brief back and forth about the pervasiveness of perms in the black community, which are becoming less pervasive. When Will asks why black people, who comprise 12% of the American population, purchase 70% of all wigs and weaves. Violet replies that we, black women, hate our hair. Will agrees and argues that black women need to challenge society’s beauty norms instead of reflecting them. The conversation ends there. No talk of who created these beauty norms, no recognition of the pressure on black women to adhere to them. It’s just black women’s fault for buying into the system.

Just like Will’s character, the film assumes that black women are uniquely self-loathing. This false notion has birthed the dichotomy of the Black Queen and the Basic Female that is often touted by straight, black men in our community. A Black Queen, a rare breed, is humble, modest and embraces her natural beauty.

The latter, the majority of black women, is suffering from chronic low self-esteem and wears makeup, weaves, and risqué clothing as a result. Nappily suggests that self-hate among black women is pandemic without offering any historical and political context regarding the way our natural looks are constantly degraded under white supremacy. It does, however, offer a solution to our pain: self-love.

In her recently released book Eloquent Rage, Dr. Brittney Cooper dispels this phenomenon that is often used as a means to advise black women.

Self-help gurus, pastors and poets love to point to women’s ‘low self-esteem’ as the cause for all Black-girl problems. Just learn to love yourself, we are told. But patriarchy is nothing if not the structurally induced hatred of women. If every women and girl learned to love herself fiercely, the patriarchy would still be intact.

Additionally, the polarity of Nappily’s two love interests implies another false notion, like other black romantic films, that financially successful men are bad for black women. Violet’s relationship with Clint, a doctor, is vapid and unsatisfying while her relationship with Will, a working-class man who can’t afford a car, is spiritually fulfilling and helps her embrace “realness.” We see this trend in Tyler Perry’s work frequently.

His 2013 drama Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor is a fable about a woman who leaves her less-than-satisfying husband for a wealthy entrepreneur. As a punishment, she is beaten by her new lover and contracts HIV. In Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry illustrates another toxic relationship between the character Lisa and her abusive husband, who’s an investment banker, while the heart of the film is a romance between another woman and a poetic bus driver. In Nappily, Violet doesn’t slow down her career for either man, but Will’s lifestyle ultimately feels more grounded.

While the film overshoots the emotional confinement black women have to their hair, it significantly underplays the way black women support each other. The second most endearing counsel Violet receives on her makeover and breakup from Clint is from her father. At no point in the film does her marriage-obsessed mother express any empathy for her daughter’s life unravelling. And Violet’s girlfriends (one is black with natural hair) might as well be cardboard cutouts. In one scene, at an all-women group therapy session, where a homegirl intervention is likely to occur, Violet is simply told to “own” her shaven head by the group’s leader, and the scene ends abruptly.

Ultimately, Nappily’s ideas of liberation are too male-driven to upend any of society’s expectations of black women. Its hazy narrative attempts to define “realness” as a lack of physical adornment rather than self-actualization. In the end, Violet feels free from her tiresome facade, but it’s men who define where her true happiness lies. In reality, the biggest comfort of being a black woman with black hair is the experience you share with other black women. Nappily would be a much better film if it contained stronger female bonds and acknowledged the romance within our community of women who share care tips, experiment with different looks and uplift each other’s hairstyles, whatever they may be.

I must confess: I have beautiful hair. At least that’s what people say, and I’m inclined to believe them — even though I’m not entirely sure what they mean when they tell me this. My hair is long and thick, it’s true.

Then again, I’m also always compulsively changing it.

I started saying that I dye my hair to “change my life” when I was around 18 years old, much too young to intentionally change my life at all, as it would inevitably change around me — with or without my help.

In this way, I am not unique.

BASE COLOR // DIRTY BLONDE

The grass is greener than most grass or perhaps it’s the vivid green pitted against the softest pink, the palest, sweetest pink, one can imagine. The child with the dirty blonde hair, maybe three years old, we’ll call her Cassandra, looks dreamily to the right of where the flash must be. Wearing a soft pink t-shirt with brown horses on it, she holds cotton candy of the same pale pink color in front of her. The serving size is larger than her head. She has big blue eyes, and her full pink cheeks show a mouth that looks too timid to smile, but she’s pleased with the soft, sweet, pink candy in front of her and the beautiful green grass below.

Her mother and grandmother always call her their “blonde baby.” She’s never been blonde though. Not really. So their words always surprise her. From a young age, she knew she was supposed to be blonde. Somehow, it would make things better.

This is where she starts. This is her base color upon which everything else relies.

STRAWBERRY BLONDE // Copper Shimmer Color 0356

A neon yellow beer bottle — a lime hanging on the rim — shines in the back of an otherwise black background. There may be a TV on in the left corner, but one can’t be sure. The girl closest to the camera has the biggest smile — it stretches the width of the picture. Her perfect white teeth are shining, her light brown eyes barely open. The girl with the huge smile, let’s call her Chesney, has shiny, short black hair. The girl with the strawberry blonde hair — let’s call her A Little Bit Naive — leans over Chesney’s shoulder what appears to be mid-laugh. Her blue eyes are closed tighter, her smile a little smaller and a little more crooked. Her strawberry blonde long hair covers both their shoulders.

“I’ve never done this before,” A Little Bit Naive says.

“You probably won’t even feel it,” Chesney insists, as she passes the packed bowl and starts to light it for her.

“But how do I…”

“You’re overthinking it. Just breathe in, I’ll do the rest for you,” Chesney assures her.

Chesney is right — A Little Bit Naive doesn’t really feel anything the first time she smokes, but she doesn’t want to be rude so she sits in Chesney’s Land Cruiser and laughs and pretends to feel what she thinks she should.

An often quoted (but largely unverifiable) study done by the hair care brand Tresemmé offers up fascinating facts about women who dye their hair, asserting that almost 25% of women who dye their hair “wish they had never started.” While this may not be the most scientific study ever conducted, it nonetheless offers insightful information into the pathology of why dyeing hair and feeling beautiful are so deeply intertwined. These regretful statistics aren’t that surprising, I suppose, considering the effects that long-term hair dye has on hair; indeed, 75% of women believe that hair dye has damaged their hair, leaving it weaker, thinner, and wrought with split ends.

Let’s be clear: Dyeing your hair is not good for it or you and yet, here we are. We continue to dye our hair for various reasons: to cover up grays, to change our life (guilty), or to simply maintain our self-image. It might be argued that it’s not unlike other self-harm, like smoking cigarettes or tanning, but in a much more aesthetically pleasing, socially acceptable way. A study by Texture Media reports that the average woman spends over $250–350 per year on her hair care and color. Meanwhile, statistics company Statista reports that in 2016, the global hair care market was worth $83.1 billion. Let me repeat: $83.1 billion.

It seems the ways that hair dye damages our hair are largely ignored or understudied, or so our spending habits would suggest. Many of the 5,000 chemicals in permanent hair dye have been proven to be carcinogenic to animals, but we continue to blithely slather it on our hair, and thus, into our skin.

A self-help book for women published in the 1600s, titled Delights for Ladies, offered a handy recipe for women to transform their black hair into brown hair using a few simple ingredients, including Oyle of Vitrioll. The advice cautions to “avoid touching the skin,” which is wise since Oyle of Vitrioll is sulfuric acid. You may recognize sulfuric acid as the common ingredient in battery acid, drain cleaner, or other highly corrosive materials — basically every skull and cross-bones warning label your mother told you to stay away from.

I’m not suggesting that the world at large isn’t dangerous and brimming with things that hurt us, but I am arguing that this one particular habit — done in the search of acceptance of ourselves or others — continues to produce evidence of harm. And this is largely ignored.

BLACK // Leather Black Color 0563

A small girl with chestnut brown hair sits smiling on the lap of another — raven-haired — smiling girl. The balcony they’re on appears to be two or three stories high, with car lights and streetlights shining in the background.

The one with chestnut brown hair, let’s call her Vanessa, squints her eyes tight. One hand softly cups the raven-haired girl’s face; the other clutches a red solo cup. The girl with the black hair — let’s call her Mystified — has her arms tightly wrapped around Vanessa’s waist, her smile wide, wide wide; her eyes stretch open as if she’s surprised. A stray hand belonging, let’s say, to Chace, darts high above the girls’ heads in a fist, as if performing a cheerleaders’ move.

“You stupid fat bitch I don’t fucking want you.”

“I’m sorry, Chace, I had to tell her. Vanessa, you deserve better…”

“Get out of here you stupid cunt, you only wish I wanted you.”

Vanessa stands there with her mouth open, looking from Mystified to Chace. Finally Chace starts coming down the stairs swinging his fist at Mystified, and Vanessa steps in. Mystified has tears in her eyes as she grabs her purse and quickly leaves the apartment. On the way home, Mystified sobs and wonders if maybe all the times Chace had said he loved her instead of Vanessa, and all the times she had rejected his come-ons, she had misheard or misunderstood her best friend’s boyfriend.

When she gets home, she steps into a hot shower and watches as the water runs from clear to black: a mixture of her mascara and newly dyed black hair.

One study published in the Indian Dermatological Online Journal found that more than 42% of those who dyed their hair experienced “adverse reactions,” ranging from “sensitivity” or dermatitis to bronchospasms, but continued to dye their hair anyway.

In 2001, researchers at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California published a study suggesting that those who are frequently around hair dye were twice as likely to develop bladder cancer as those who abstain. There have also been various links to rheumatoid arthritis and Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, not to mention the harmful effects on a fetus during pregnancy. Many of these studies have not yet been conclusive, but there are troubling, observable correlations. We dye anyway.

Beauty is more valued than our comfort. Or health. This is not revelatory of course. We’ve always been looking for ways to change. To be beautiful.

In the past, a pigment was added to the hair to dye it. Using henna, indigo, saffron, even gold dust, civilizations as far back as the Paleolithic era found it desirable to have an unnatural color on their head. The ancient Romans lightened their hair with pigeon dung, while the Venetians chose to use horse urine. In the Roman Empire, prostitutes were required to have yellow hair in order to alert others of their profession. As civilization has evolved, the relatively small percentage of natural blonde hair has continued to make it rare and thus, favored. It seems hair color has always been an indicator of status and worth.

BROWN // French Roast Color 0934

Three girls pose together in what appears to be a foggy, maybe smoky, room with red neon lights and many, many people in the background. The girl on the far left with the olive skin and dark hair squeezes her eyes closed and sticks her tongue out. The girl in the middle peeks between the two girls; her eyes are wide-open and flanked by a beautiful smile. Her long blonde hair rests on the shoulder of the girl to her right. The girl with the brown hair winks with one eye and leaves her mouth agape. A tiny airplane bottle of liquor peeks its head from between the brunette’s low-cut shirt, just grazing her sterling silver necklace. The girl with the dark hair, we’ll call her Shelton, has a perfect manicure that gives a peace sign to the camera, joined by a photo bombing hand that echoes it. The girl with the brown hair — the one winking, who we’ll call Happy — leans into the other two girls, perhaps steadying herself.

The lineup for the Beale Street Music Festival offers three different musicians playing at the same time on three different stages on the Mississippi River bank for three days straight. After the first night out, the girls had taken the second day to eat BBQ nachos and rest up for the third day’s main event — Snoop Dogg and Three Six Mafia — the only concerts that all three had agreed to see.

“It’s pouring rain,” Happy says.

“Let’s not go,” Shelton responds.

“We have to go,” Lauren snaps back, “Snoop Dogg.”

“Well we need rain boots because it’s going to be muddy,” Shelton demands.

After going to two different stores with no luck, Happy called a Bass Pro Shop 30 miles away. They were in luck. They only had one style so the three very different girls match out of necessity.

The concerts are great, probably, but as the girls stomp around in the mud, the more the brown mud splashes about their boots, the less they listen to the music. The mud and the rain could’ve been a nuisance, but it isn’t. Not to them. After a few minutes they realize there was no reason to try to listen to the music, no reason to try to stay clean, no reason for their brand-new boots not to be covered in mud. Eventually Happy starts tossing mud, first at Lauren and then at a pissed-off Shelton, until they start laughing and tossing it at each other like kids, and stomp through puddles. The rain keeps pouring down.

Rebecca Guerard wrote a fascinating article for The Atlantic called “Hair Dye: A History.” She, too, is interested in the ways that this ritual has shaped beauty and cultural standards, but even more so, the chemistry behind it. She, too, ponders: “Why do so many people still color their hair? Why would someone go through the rigmarole and tolerate the expense, the itching, and the smell? Whatever drives our desire to change the color of our hair, one thing is certain: People have deep emotional ties to what covers their scalps.”

She travels to a conference for hairdressers from around the country learning as much as she can about the truly magnificent process that goes into hair color chemistry. Even our hair, a living breathing, chemistry project, is comprised of 50% carbon, 21% oxygen, 17% nitrogen, 6% hydrogen, and 5% sulphur.

The natural color of our hair is determined (like our skin tone and eye color) by two types of melanin — eumelanin, and pheomelanin. Eumelanin is responsible for darker hair (like the amount of melanin in our skin tones) and the most prominent melanin in our hair; darker hair colors are, therefore, far more common.

People have deep emotional ties to what covers their scalps.
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Pheomelanin accounts for red hair, and the various shades of color depend on the genetic balance of these two types of melanin. Blonde hair is the result of relatively little or no melanin. This is, like skin color and most features, determined by genetics.

When we attempt to change genetics and construct a preferable shade to color our hair, the chemistry continues to get more intricate. It’s the reactions of the chemicals that make a perfect shade. If you’re hoping to achieve a brown hair color, you achieve this by applying two chemicals — neither of which are brown. They simply turn brown when they react to each other; it’s the reaction that makes the color, not the pigments that are applied.

Not unlike in elementary art class — where we learned that the rainbow was actually made of just three colors combined with one another — the hair color process works with three compounds usually grouped in red, blue, or green. The key is how these three colors interact with each other.

The length of the reaction — the 30 minutes or an hour or what have you — that you sit with the chemicals on your hair, determines the color that you walk away with.

BLONDE // Pure Diamond Color 0134

The blonde girl in the photo, we’ll call her Sexy, leans in toward the camera drinking out of a martini glass. The tall martini glass is filled with brown liquid and topped with foam, like a perfectly prepared latte. In front of her long, golden blonde hair, a glass of water sits to her right. Vodka bottles appear like children lined up by height on a shelf behind her, above a computer, giving the appearance of a bar. At the end of the bar sits a dirty, empty wine glass. Sexy’s expression can’t be seen under the foam hiding half her face. It can only be seen through her light blue eyes turned red by flash, which shine and smile directly past the empty wine glasses into the camera.

Sexy agrees to have a drink with him. Although she barely knows him, they work together, so she assumes it is harmless enough. They settle into the corner booth of the patio underneath a dogwood tree.

“So how long have you been married,” she asks.

“What?” he acts confused as she points to his ring.

“Oh yeah, we’re not really married anymore, it’s complicated,” he says simply.

She watches as he slips off the silver wedding band and puts it in his pocket.

She drinks her vodka tonic. He scoots closer to her.

He smiles at her and she laughs and darts her eyes away, not knowing what to do with the look he gives her. She isn’t used to anyone looking at her this way. She runs her fingers through her newly dyed blonde hair, pulling it to one side then the other until he grabs her hand and pulls her into his lap and she turns to face him. His stubble grazes her face as he starts kissing her. Sexy starts kissing him back just as forcefully, reaching for his softly shaven head. Her free hand feels him get hard beneath her. In the dark corner no one can see as he parts her legs under the table. Under her simple blue cotton dress he begins to play with her clit. She bites his lip harder to let him know that she likes it. She opens her eyes to see him staring at her while he keeps moving his fingers around, knowing exactly how to please her. She feels him getting harder as she gets wetter until her concentration is broken when the thin blue strap of her dress slips off her shoulder. As she reaches to pull it back up, he grabs her hand to pull it back down.

In 2001, Hillary Clinton gave the commencement speech at Yale. She spoke about the importance of hair. “Your hair will send significant messages to those around you. What hopes and dreams you have for the world, but more, what hopes and dreams you have for your hair. Pay attention to your hair, because everyone else will.’’ I would like to insert a sarcasm font here, as I like to imagine she did, but she’s not wrong, and that’s why for centuries women have searched for the right color to send the right message to the world.

She runs her fingers through her newly dyed blonde hair. She isn’t used to anyone looking at her this way.
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The reason blonde hair (at least in the U.S.) is vastly preferred by men and women can in part be traced back to the fact that darker hair is much more prevalent. Psychology Today reports that 90% of the population has darker hair, while only 2% have naturally blonde locks. Basically we all want something different, something that sets us apart, to catch a mate’s eye. And that something has historically been blonde hair. The scarcer the color appears, the more it is preferred. There is also an innate youthfulness in the hair color, and a seeming sexuality that follows.

A strange, confusing sociological dichotomy appears, the further you dig into these preferences, however.

Anecdotal study after study shows that men approach blonde women more often, and women feel more confident and beautiful with blonde hair. But men and women alike reportedly find brunettes to be the preferred friend or mate; they’re often considered more intelligent. And yet, more interesting still: If you want to be a successful woman, you should have blonde hair.

Professor Jennifer Berdahyl of the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business researched this correlation after attending a conference for women at the Harvard Business School, and noticed that most of the speakers were blonde. Her research found that 35% of female Senators in the United States are blonde, as are 48% of female CEOs of S&P companies.

Her study found that the same words being said by women with blonde hair versus dark hair had a vastly different reaction from male counterparts. The darker haired women were seen as more authoritative and negatively regarded. Perhaps it’s not that surprising, because after all, it is a Man’s World, and the innate sexuality and youth of blonde hair is a clear favorite among the male sex.

This obsession with blonde hair also taps into racial bias. You can’t talk about hair without acknowledging its undeniable power in determining how one is perceived, overlooked, or Othered. Many pieces have been written about the socio-political underpinnings of black beauty being negated—even criminalized—by a racist, Caucasian-centric aesthetic.

Research from the infamous “Good Hair Study” exposed the implicit bias surrounding black hair. Conducted by the Perception Institute, the study found that in asking 4,000 participants to take an online test—which involved “rapidly-changing photos of black women with smooth and natural hair, and rotating word associations with both”—white women held the greatest bias. They rated natural hair as “less beautiful,” “less sexy/attractive,” and “less professional than smooth hair.”

A 1993 study examined the long-standing purveyor of beauty, Playboy magazine, assessing its Playmates of the Year between 1954 and 2007. This study illustrated an increase in the percentage of blonde playmates through the magazine’s duration; the fewest blondes were found in the mid 1960s (about 35%) while the year 2000 found the highest (around 66%).

These numbers reflect what society defines as sexy. As the authors explain in their abstract, “The study’s findings have numerous implications for social issues and research regarding the psychology of physical appearance.”

Similarly, it’s not unrelated that in the 21st century, 75% of women feel sexier and more glamorous when they go blonde. Being blonde sits at the cross-hairs of intersecting socio-cultural phenomenons, including femininity, finding a mate, the ability to procreate, and the appearance of youth, fertility, and desirability. It stems from a desire to be something or someone that we may or may not be — something we believe to be rare, more beautiful, and worth suffering for.

I’ve dyed my hair so many different colors I could fill these pages twice over. Red, purple, black, brown, dark cherry red, blonde, blonder, brown, strawberry blonde, red red — you name it, I’ve tried it. I should say, colored, not dyed, because you dye wool. You color hair.

Whenever there is a big change in my life, something goes right or wrong, I hit the bottle. I want to see this chemistry make me perfectly shaded — even when I don’t know what that means. If I don’t like what I see — if things are going horribly — perhaps a different look is all I need. If things are going perfectly, then I should probably look even better. Hair color offers one more way to categorize people, to categorize ourselves.

In truth, I am all of these people at once, no matter my hair color. But sometimes I like to think that it affects my life in ways I can’t otherwise control. Or rather, my hair allows me to better control my life with a choice of chemical reactions.

Psychologist Viren Swami, who teaches at the University of Westminster, suggests a compelling explanation for my need to dye: “Because hair is so malleable, it can give women a feeling of control over their bodies that they don’t otherwise have.” When I dye my hair, I feel I am taking control over the way I am perceived.

And yet I also know the person that I am remains the same no matter the color.

My mother says that she has to color her hair to hide the grays or I won’t recognize her. Is this true or does she mean she hopes no one will recognize her because gray hair is not how she sees herself? Is it in pursuit of beauty that we feel the necessity to color our hair or in the effort to hide our true selves? Or is it both? Is that what we’re fighting with hair dye—the fear of being seen for what we really are?

Sometimes gray hair means we are aging. Sometimes we are aging.

Being blonde sits at the cross-hairs of intersecting socio-cultural phenomenons.
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Dyeing my hair does change my life. It changes my public self and my private self, and I’m not alone — 69% of women reported a vast increase in attractiveness and overall good feelings immediately after dyeing their hair.

After dyeing my hair recently, a friend complimented me on it the first time he saw it, and I said, “oh thanks. I really don’t like it.” “Why?” he asked. “Does it make you insecure?” I laughed and said, “Yeah…I just haven’t gotten used to it yet.”

And then I pondered his immediate response about my insecurity and realized this might have been the single most relevant answer anyone could offer for why we don’t like our base color or our gray color or our new color.

Insecurity. Dyeing our hair is a way to make us publicly feel, maybe even look, more beautiful, more acceptable. For whatever reason, we prefer to cover our insides with a more desirable facade. Our public selves must be much prettier than our insides. The private self — the self underneath the color — must be covered. It feels like therapy for your public self; your insides don’t necessarily feel better for any other reason than you feel like your outsides look better.

Maybe that’s what hair color offers us in a sense, too: an opportunity to be better than what we feel. If you’re blonde, it’s a way to be blonder. If you’re getting older and going gray, it’s a way to be younger. If you’re just bored, it’s a way to excite yourself with something transient. A way to be you, but better. A way to be you, but sexier. A way to be you, but more likeable. A way to be you, but more successful. A way to be you, but more approachable. A way to be you, but happier. A way to not be you.

By Robin Babb

Teenagedom is largely a parade of awkwardness, self-doubt, and one’s body rebelling against its owner. It’s a time of newly forming identities and changing bodies, and many will go to extremes to try to outwardly represent the inner turmoil. (Hence these years being frequently accompanied by a fashion sense even more worse than the psycho-sexual torture of growing up.)

For young queer girls, this time can be especially unwieldy, marked not only by burgeoning sexuality, but by a slew of quickly shifting hairstyles that let the world know they’re “not like other girls.”

This might be one of the reasons why queer women love to talk about their hair. At the risk of generalizing here, I think there’s good reason that this subset of the population has the hair fixation that we do. Histories of femininity and of gayness inform so much of the way that we feel about our identities, and hair has so much to do with the external manifestation of an identity. For some, short hair is the most obvious flag of queerness. Others experiment with dye and crazy cuts simply for the sake of marking ourselves as “other.” For me, the series of bad haircuts I had as a teenager sort of paralleled my own awkward coming out to myself, a process which continues today.

Hair has so much to do with the external manifestation of an identity.
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I decided to talk with a few queer women I know about their relationship with their hair, and how it’s evolved over time. Every one of them had a different story (although a lot of them have had the same hairstyles), but they all admitted that their sexuality did affect the way they viewed their hair. While there’s no great objective truth to be reached on the topic — spoiler alert! — my hope is that by sharing and listening to these stories, other queer ladies can feel justified, validated, and heard in their own hair feelings.

Behold! Seven rad women reveal their respective insights on the intersection of hair and queer identity.

Shawné Holloway

Shawné is American artist who is currently living and studying in Paris. When I called her, she was in Berlin for the holidays. Yes, she has a cool life.

Growing up, Shawné wasn’t allowed to do anything drastic to her hair — it stayed long and curly throughout her childhood. “I was already an outlier as a Black girl wearing braids in this very small, white town. So I didn’t really experiment with any crazy hairstyles until I was older,” she says.

For the past five years, she has worn her hair cropped close — a minimalist and gender-non-conforming cut that she says allows her a modicum of respect in the highly competitive (and highly sexist) world of digital art that she works in. It also allows her to wear wigs more easily, something that she does mostly for performance art projects. She’ll wear natural-hair color wigs in public occasionally, but also says that the social injunction for Black women to wear wigs or weaves can definitely feel oppressive.

I Was Supposed To Have Good Hair

“Having the option [to wear a wig or not] is important, and I shouldn’t have to feel like I have to pass it off as my own hair because mine isn’t good enough,” she explains.

“I love this haircut!” she says about her current style. “It allows me all sorts of social mobility. It could definitely read as gay, but not so much that like, men won’t talk to me. And it’s weird enough that people in the straight world recognize that ‘oh, she must be an artist or something,’ but not so wacky that I scare anybody away. It’s like my passport.”

Kamala Puligandla

Kamala is a writer for The Establishment living in Oakland, California. She’s currently working on a novel about almost-adult life, tentatively titled Zigzags.

“I’m half Indian and half Japanese. Which means my hair is thick and straight, straight, straight. And, honestly, I love that,” says Kamala. She wore her hair long for most of her childhood and into college. Mostly because it was so heavy that she didn’t know what else to do with it. But also because she resented the idea that she had to have short hair to be read as gay.

“In college, all my queer friends started getting short haircuts and I thought, ‘No, that’s not my style, I’m gonna keep my hair long.’” But then, after a breakup in college, Kamala was visiting an old friend when they both spontaneously decided to get mohawks. It was love at first sight, and she’s had only small variations of the same haircut ever since.

“Everyone reads a short haircut as masculine, and I have a lot of trouble with that,” says Kamala. “Because, honestly, I’m pretty femme! And I don’t love the assumption that I’m not because of my hair. It just goes to show how much our culture centers masculinity, I think.”

Anna Horn

Anna is a 27-year-old philosophy major/former pro-domme queer lady. She loves Hannah Arendt and hates Heidegger. She and her hair are currently in therapy to repair their relationship (which was almost destroyed by a long affair with bleach).

“I definitely look straight now,” Anna says of her shoulder-length brown hair, adding that her hair went through some interesting iterations in her early twenties, but has been getting “more boring since then.”

When I first met Anna back in her non-boring-hairstyle days, her hair was dyed black on one side and white on the other, Cruella de Vil-style. For a while, she had a mohawk-pompadour, and pixie cuts in various colors. She has a few wigs that serve to create characters for her domme work, and encourages everyone to try wearing a wig at least once. “It’s fun trying on a new identity for a day. You get to be Daphne today! Daphne is such a badass.”

It’s fun trying on a new identity for a day.
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Anna isn’t totally comfortable with how straight-presenting her hair appears now, as she’s growing it out. She says that the way she’s treated in public has definitely changed since she swapped the black/white dye split for this more “normal” style — it gets her a bit more respect in certain circles, but it also changes the nature of the street harassment that she deals with. “It used to be dudes leaning out their car window to yell ‘dyke!’ but now it’s more like ‘hey girl.’ And, you know, I don’t really know which one is worse.”

Stevie Lange

Stevie is a queer hairstylist, so of course I had to talk with her. She lives in the Houston area and performs as a drag artist and in The Rocky Horror Picture Show shadow cast. She’s currently rocking a hot pink mohawk that she dyed herself.

A mohawk was her first gay hairstyle.

I got a mohawk my junior year of high school. I lived in a really small town in Texas, so nobody else there looked like me. My hair kind of came out for me. In cosmetology school, they actually teach us to ask if a customer has recently had a big change in their life whenever they ask for a really dramatic, really different cut. It’s just psychology. People want to mark a big change in their life with a big change in their hair. But they sometimes end up regretting that big hair change, because they were in a very particular frame of mind when they got it.”

(My post-break-up buzz cut has nothing to say about this.)

Lilly Barrett

Lilly is a non-binary trans lady studying and engaging in witchery in Chicago. Since we went to school together a few years ago, she has cycled through even more hairstyles than I have, which is an impressive feat.

Lilly got her first “gay hairstyle” when she came out as trans about two years ago. It was around the same time that she started dating “very visibly queer” people with very queer hair, and began taking notes. That summer, she dyed her hair teal and started growing it out.

“At first, I was told a lot of things about how ‘girls like me’ are supposed to dress, supposed to look,” she says. “But like, I’m 6”6’ and have shoulders like a battleship and frankly, I don’t fit into anything Forever 21 makes, and I never will. And that’s okay!” She cut the sleeves off a leather jacket, got some pins, and cultivated a witchy punk look.

I don’t fit into anything Forever 21 makes, and I never will. And that’s okay!
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For Lilly, hair is the main way of flagging as queer.

“People have no idea what to make of me most of the time — I’m pretty gender-ambiguous. But at least with my hair, people tend to think ‘whatever this person has going on, it’s really gay.’”

When I asked Lilly to comment on the state of queer hair in the nation, she thought for a moment and said: “Fuck bangs.”

Crystal Chen

Crystal is a culinary mastermind living and working in Oakland. For her, hair has always been a matter of practicality versus style. She works in the kitchen of a fancy restaurant, so she can’t have hair getting in her face.

“I have to look passably professional, too,” she says. “I used to have a little rat tail I was growing out, but I had to chop that off. People eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant don’t want their server to have a rat tail, turns out.”

When Queer Girl Friendships Burn Too Brightly

Crystal cut her hair into a mullet when she was 17, mortifying her parents. These days they’re a little bit more tolerant of her life choices (hair and otherwise), “but my mom will ask me to, like, reign it in on special occasions. Like, ‘honey, can you not shave your head? Your father’s birthday is coming up and we want to take family pictures, please let it grow out a little.’” Now, she goes for the shaved sides look and relies on a little bit of product on occasion to sculpt it up.

According to Crystal, typically gay hairstyles are starting to hold less and less significance, especially in the Bay Area. “I guess I have a pretty gay hairstyle, but so does everyone else here,” she says. “It’s really not a reliable method of telling if somebody is queer anymore. Turns out you have to actually, like, talk to people to figure out if they’re queer these days.”

Angela Tann

Angela is a Chinese-Indonesian queer person studying theology at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She moved to America to be gay, by her own admission.

She was very femme-presenting, with very long hair, for most of her early life. Then, once she moved from China to America for college, she chopped off all her hair and really came out. “A normal, boring, schoolboy haircut,” is what she got.

Back when I first met Angela in 2012, though, she had a bright pink mohawk. “There are so many cool gay people I wouldn’t have met without that mohawk; it was like a beacon for queers” she says. “But I can’t do it anymore. Bleach is so toxic, and I have to bleach it for so long to get it to stick because my hair is so dark. My lymph nodes would be swollen afterwards!”

There are so many cool gay people I wouldn’t have met without that mohawk.
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Now, she has a less dramatic style, short but simply styled, with no dye. She says that it reflects where she is in life: She’s less concerned with her appearance, with flagging as queer, and more focused on her studies and her inner life. She thinks that when people first come out as queer, their instinct is frequently to get a crazy gay haircut to signal their out-ness to the world.

“But later on in life, you start to realize that there are more important things than hair, than making it obvious to everyone that you’re gay. Because you’re more than just gay, there’s other parts of who you are, too.”