Should I big chop, or nah?
It's a baby hair, but still.
Don’t let winter snatch your soul.
Gwen Jimmere, CEO and founder of Naturalicious, tells BuzzFeed Life that hydrating your edges with a good moisturizer will help to keep them soft and manageable. It's important to know that most effective moisturizers have water as the first ingredient, and do not include mineral oil or petrolatum. Checking the ingredients of your moisturizers is very important because some of the more common ingredients, like petrolatum, used in styling products are actually moisture resistant. Try Naturalicious Moisture Infusion Styling Creme.
vreg.com / Via theodysseyonline.com
"A quick 10–15 second scalp massage with a fatty oil around the edges two times a day will help to stimulate blood flow near the roots of your hair, and can help regrow thinning edges," Jimmere tells BuzzFeed Life. "The key is to ensure you use an unrefined oil, which means that all the oil's naturally occurring minerals and nutrients have not been stripped from it."
Stacy Hill, CEO of DyeVerCity Salon, suggests massaging vitamin E, pumpkin seed oil, or products containing the horsetail herb on your edges, as they promote growth. Gently massaging your edges daily is stimulating and helps to improve blood circulation, which is necessary for the hair to grow back. This can be a great way to unwind each night before going to bed.
Warner Bros. / Via j3wsdid911.tumblr.com
“Underneath that hair is my soul…” -Taraji P. Henson
"As an actress that's what we do. We are vulnerable every time we put our art out there," she told the magazine. "Underneath that hair is my soul, and it's me, it's mine."
Slay on!
Hold onto your tresses, girls.
Andrew Stiles / Via maneaddicts.com
Sims told Mane Addicts he created "an old style, a high top fade" to achieve the Jones look, and it was completely different from anything Zendaya had done before.
Andrew Stiles / Via maneaddicts.com
He told MA that Zendaya rocked a very similar look a few years back at the AMA's, wearing an all white outfit.
Andrew Stiles / Via maneaddicts.com
“I hope that people who look at the series would feel the positive energy of youth and the spirit of undiluted individuality.” —Emily Stein
She likes food, traveling, and cool denim jumpers! All the makings of a best friend!
These barrettes just gave every black woman instant flashbacks!
Dark hair just makes color pop!
Hair on loc!
Zach Thomas for BuzzFeed News
The HBCUs, Spelman and Morehouse, joined forces for the annual event.
"Showtime The Barber" cleaned up Morehouse alum Darius Copeland extra proper at the campus barber shop, Statz.
Zach Thomas for BuzzFeed News
Zach Thomas For Buzzfeed News
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
The tangle of blonde-streaked curls that sprouts from my scalp baffled my parents from the very beginning. They were somewhere between my black mom’s tightly wound Afro and my white dad’s European strands — a mass of kinks and coils, constantly attracting playground wood chips and classmates’ curious fingers. In my small, mostly Irish-Catholic town in Massachusetts, it wasn’t long before I noticed I was the only one at the pool party whose hair seemed to magically repel water and inflate to twice its size after air-drying.
My kindergarten and elementary years seemed like an endless journey of discovery for my classmates, who would look on in wonder while I wrestled the mass into tiny scrunchies. Friends would blurt out whatever question popped into their minds. “It’s so fluffy, you could sleep on it. Do you?” “Do you dye it? ‘Cause black people don’t have blond hair.” “How does it dry so fast? It’s like it never got wet!”
I would answer as well as I could (“No, I use a pillow, like you.” “Yeah, but I’m not black, I’m half-and-half.” “I don’t know, OK?!”). But I always felt like an oddity at slumber parties, as the other girls sat in a circle brushing one another’s hair. Whoever sat behind me just picked and prodded at my curls, testing how far they would stretch before springing back into place.
My mom sympathized as much as she could with my complaints that no other girls had my hair, but she couldn’t help lamenting that I didn’t love my curls as much as she did. She made sure that my hair was the star of every family photo, fanning and teasing it out a good three inches past my shoulders. I wish she were here to see how much I love it now.
Me and my hair, both clearly loving life.
When my mom died two years ago, she left behind countless unanswered questions. It hadn’t occurred to me until my dad called me, a few months after it happened, that the fate of my hair was one of them.
“Have you found a new hairdresser down in D.C.?” he asked. “Mom would have wanted to make sure you did.”
We half-laughed, because we both knew it was true, and then paused to make room for the pang of guilt that now always seemed to trail laughter. I examined my loosely relaxed hair in the mirror: the inch of new, tousled growth at my roots, the frayed ends. I told Dad I would start my search for a salon that could relax my hair, but I think on some level I had already made the decision not to.
In my newly motherless state, inducted into a community I wanted no part of, I remembered all the time I had spent with my mom in our hair salon, enduring hours in the chair in order to fit into a community — any community — that would accept me. I thought of her unconditional admiration of my hair, no matter what state it was in. I thought of how far I’d come from being the awkward mixed girl on the playground, or the only middle-schooler whose hair wouldn't take a crimp.
I finally felt ready to go “natural,” whatever that meant, and to embrace the part of me that had always felt like such a visible manifestation of my mixed-up identity. I wanted to love the hair that my mom had given me half of, if not as much as she had, then as much as I could.
Mom and me.
While my mom had rocked a very chic Afro in her younger days, she started chemically straightening (“perming”) her hair after my brother was born in the ‘80s. As far as I knew when I was a kid, her hair had always been short and straight, and I had always envied it.
For years I begged her to straighten my curls, but she was hesitant to do anything drastic or heat-related herself. The closest she would come was blow-drying, which just made The Puffball, as I called it, even puffier. My constant requests eventually drove her to ask her hairdresser, Celeste, if she thought relaxing my hair would be a good idea. And finally, one Saturday when I was 12, my mom asked if I wanted to come with her to the salon.
The first thing that hit me was the smell, almost like a kitchen: oily and heavy, and a little bit burnt. But when I walked in, I felt like I was entering a secret grown-up club, for grown-up ladies. Mom even let me choose any magazine I wanted, from the very same ones she insisted were “too mature” when I reached for them at the grocery store. I went with Glamour.
Best of all, everyone adored my hair, and not in a way that made me feel like an alien. They didn’t pick or pat, but rather stroked and fawned over the golden highlights. I was in a black hair salon surrounded by older black women I already respected and admired, and they thought my hair was beautiful.
I was nervous, but this was what black women did, right?
Celeste sat me down in her cushy black leather salon chair and explained how she would be “relaxing” my hair: “We’re not going to get rid of your curls, we’re just gonna make them chill out, loosen up.”
She set out a bucket of yellow-beige goop and proceeded to coat my scalp with Vaseline. She explained that this would protect my skin from the chemicals in the relaxer, which I hadn’t been worried about until I realized I would need protection from them. Mom assured me Celeste knew what she was doing, and all I would feel was occasional tingles. I was nervous, but this was what black women did, right? If all these women survived unscathed, I was assured I would, too.
And I did, for the most part. By the time Celeste had sectioned and coated my scalp in the oddly cold goop, the tingles had begun to escalate into sharp pinpricks. But she blessedly rinsed and conditioned my hair just in time, before cinching it all into big rollers and guiding me to a spot next to my mom under one of the sit-down dryers.
“Now you just sit tight for about…” Celeste reached above me and turned a knob I couldn’t see. “Let’s say...50 minutes.”
I was more than willing to deal with the upkeep of relaxed hair if it meant my best friend could French-braid it for soccer.
I looked at her in disbelief, but she just handed me the Glamour I had already read and walked back to another customer. My mom reached over, squeezed my hand and half-shouted over the dryers that she was proud of how well I’d done. So I settled under the dryer, resigned to my fate, and re-read a cover story about the comeback of Vivica A. Fox.
As I would many times over the next decade of my life, I nodded off under the dryer. Celeste woke me when it was time and led me back to the chair. She unraveled and blow-dried my hair (“You have to dry it again?” “For the finishing touch, yes!”) for what felt like ages.
When she spun me around I laughed out loud in delight: My hair was straight! She had left a lot of volume, and I would learn to ask for smaller rollers, but I was thrilled to finally join the ranks of the smooth and silky.
With friends in high school, sleek and smooth and...fitting in?
When I showed up at school that Monday, it was like elementary school all over again. (“How did you get it so straight?” “How long did it take?” “Is that a wig?”). I was frustrated that every compliment came with a follow-up question, and sure, I still had the year-round tan, but I was one huge step closer to fitting in. I bought a brush and flat iron. I was more than willing to deal with the upkeep of relaxed hair if it meant my best friend could French-braid it for soccer.
I continued relaxing my hair for the next 10 years, and whenever I needed a touch-up, about every three months, I would go with Mom to Celeste. When I started college, Mom and I would meet up in Boston at a new salon she had found after diligent research through black friends whose hair she admired.
There I worked with Danielle, who was funny and talkative, while Mom preferred Sabrina, an elegant Sudanese immigrant who loved mourning the decline of society and telling Mom she had perfect skin. I looked forward to going, in spite of the goop (which I actually loathed), because I loved spending time like this with Mom: surrounded by fellow black women, feeling like we could tell our deepest, darkest secrets and not only would everyone keep them, but they would probably have the same secrets, too. For those few hours on Sunday morning, I felt intimately bonded to the community my mom came from, which had always seemed just out of my mixed-race reach.
It felt as though I had to pick a side — that one part of my race would always be a descriptive but ultimately superfluous adjective, and the other would be the tangible, indisputable noun.
Growing up, I received constant mixed messages about my racial identity. Friends and classmates would ogle my hair and admire my skin, but jokingly call me "Oreo" and ask if I considered myself more of a black white girl or a white black girl. It felt as though I had to pick a side — that one part of my race would always be a descriptive but ultimately superfluous adjective, and the other would be the tangible, indisputable noun.
I had never felt particularly cut out for the role of "black girl" as I understood it, and I didn't think of my curls as anywhere near what I considered to be “black hair.” So I had relaxed them to ease my acceptance into the overwhelmingly white community I lived in. But in doing so, I ended up gaining a deeper knowledge of the black community, finding other women whose relationship to their hair was as layered as my own.
By the time I reached college and found a multicolored community in a diverse city, I still relaxed my hair, but had taken to letting it air-dry, striking a balance I felt comfortable with. I ended up with an appropriate contradiction of straight ends and curly roots, which did the work of conveying my confusion for me.
After losing the most enthusiastic and devoted source of unconditional love in my life, I had to start supplying my own.
It wasn’t until I was standing in front of the mirror, after hanging up with Dad, that it seemed obvious: Relaxing my hair for so long was just doing what I had always done, trying to tread the intangible line between black and white. But I was sick of the confusion. I had never taken the time to understand and appreciate my hair, and now it was starting to feel as though I had never taken the time to understand and appreciate myself.
I know that by bringing me with her to the salon, Mom was only ever trying to make me happy, to make me feel like I fit. But I realized that I no longer needed that. After losing the most enthusiastic and devoted source of unconditional love in my life, I had to start supplying my own. I wanted to be just what I am: a mulatto with a tangle of blonde-streaked curls.
And if suddenly no community wanted me — black, white, mixed, brown — then at least they would reject the version of me I actually wanted to be.
Mid-transition, post-college, with natural roots coming in.
It has been indescribably liberating to let my hair be: to let it do what it wants, to stop fighting it. The actual transition was pretty smooth — a casual metamorphosis in plain view. I simply shepherded in my new growth with lots of detangling and tons of conditioner. It never felt like a political statement or drastic turning point: It felt, well, natural.
That isn’t to say it’s been seamless. The coils seem to have amplified with a vengeance since my childhood, and the monthly inquiries regarding whether I’ve cut my hair (followed by polite yet vacant nodding when I explain that it’s just shrinkage) have become predictable. But it’s worth it.
I’m now as fascinated by my hair as my friends have always been, tugging at spirals and piecing apart young, ambitious locks. I am learning to appreciate my hair’s unique temperament and color, its unwillingness to conform to any of the myriad categories lining the hair-care aisle. It’s helped me stop worrying that I need to pick a side. I can look in the mirror and feel, finally, relaxed.
Is it dirty? It looks dirty.
BuzzFeed Yellow / Via youtube.com
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
Half a year into being 25, I dyed half of my hair blue and the world shifted.
It was a lot like getting a tattoo, in that I was immediately, almost supernaturally aware of every human around me who also had dyed hair. I spent the Greenpoint leg of my morning commute appreciating the pastel dream-witch hair of former teens and felt nearly maternal toward the kids painted with a fresh coat of Manic Panic getting off the train in Clinton Hill. If I saw someone with blue hair (true blue, like mine; not teal, never teal), I felt a deep and earnest connection with them: Clearly, this was a good soul making great life choices.
Most often, the people I noticed were women of color, with dyed hair in twists or mini-dreads, or braids woven through with a contrasting hue. A lot of them were young, but plenty were older, rocking bolder shades than I could pull off.
I didn't realize it at first, but when I was noticing these women and their hair, they were noticing me, too. Part of my method for city survival is to appear aggressively unfriendly in public, so it took a few weeks of insistent taps on my shoulder for me to realize that these women were trying to talk to me: They wanted to tell me that they liked my hair.
My hair is curly and big — enough so that people feel compelled to comment on it on a daily basis. My hair is the thing I talk about with my dentist once we’ve covered the weather; it’s the way people find me across the room; it’s the reason people always remember that they’ve met me at a party.
But I was used to talking about my hair with people who (I assumed) were intrigued by my curls being kinkier and more tightly coiled than what you usually see on white people — not realizing that that’s because I’m not white people. I wasn’t used to having those conversations with people who saw my hair not as a novelty but as a desirable and feasible goal.
Until I dyed my hair, I’d never really talked about it with other women of color — that is to say, with people like me.
Those taps on the shoulder quickly turned into conversations with CVS checkout girls about what kind of dye I used, questions from teens in the library about how to keep the color vibrant and my hair healthy, a discussion with two women outside the chichi health food store by my office about whether the bleaching had changed my curl pattern (it had) and how I was dealing with that.
On my way to get a slice of pie with a friend, a teen with kinky hair swept up into a doughnut bun came up to me and blurted out, "I love your hair! Not to interrupt, but can I just ask how you got it like that?" My friend smiled at her and said, "Oh, she loves talking about her hair."
"I don't love it," I said, and promptly launched into a two-minute lecture on DIY bleaching and why you should always wash dyed hair in cold water. "You know, you're probably doing a lot of the right stuff anyway, because it's pretty similar to what you’d do with natural hair. And I’m sure it’s going to look great!”
I left the encounter smiling and only later realized why: Until I dyed my hair, I’d never really talked about it with other women of color — that is to say, with people like me.
Growing up, I was the spitting image of my dad: I have light skin, the same gray eyes, the same smile, and was already just a few inches shy of his 6’2” by the time I was 12. I inherited a lot of my mother’s features, too: We have the same freckles and the same slope to our cheekbones, the same stupid ankles that are always getting sprained.
When your ethnicity is mixed, it can be tempting to try and “sort” your features, and sometimes I would worry about how I stacked up. If I looked more like my father, did that make me white? And if my outlook on the world was more like my mother’s, did that mean I was black? The idea that this didn’t matter, that being biracial could be an identity in itself — that even the actual fact that I was biracial could supersede anyone’s notion of what that should look like, or what that meant, because I could define it for myself — well, that would take years to sort out.
I grew up in a very small town in a rural and seriously white part of the country. No joke: The 2000 census for my hometown reports that 0.13% of the 770 residents identified as African-American. If you do the math, that’s a single person: my mom. Light eyes and light skin turned out to be enough for me to read as white, and, with the exception of standardized tests, I was rarely called upon to identify otherwise.
My best worst hair decision, age 14.
Kaela Myers
Even though I was always aware of my ethnicity, it generally felt like it only mattered to me, and by the time I entered high school I had largely disassociated from it. I regarded it as a fact about me rather than a facet of my identity, something that wasn’t really a part of me and who I was. It felt uncomfortable to claim any kind of African-American identity, largely because people seemed so surprised when I told them about it. If no one around me could see it, maybe it wasn’t really there.
When I got accepted to colleges and realized that one of my scholarships was specifically for “scholars of color,” I marked it as a both a pro (“scholarship”) and a con (“for nonwhite kids”) when I was trying to decide what school to pick. When my future alma mater sent me the invitation to a pre-orientation week specifically for students of color, I filed it in the recycling bin: “Of color” didn’t mean me, not then.
The correct term for my hair, if I’m looking for Tumblr inspiration, is “natural.” This seems so obvious to me now that it's almost stupid to point out. But there were years and years — formative, tender, pre-Solange years — when I truly believed that hairstyling ideas from Sarah Jessica Parker might work for me, when I washed my hair daily and then shellacked it in Herbal Essences mousse, when I paid top dollar for a Ouidad “curl-enhancing” haircut that left me with ratty ends in two weeks.
And yet: During those years people told me constantly how much they loved my hair. "I'd kill for hair like yours," girls I'd just met would say, a hand already halfway to my head. "Can I just...?"
It wasn’t a compliment I took particularly well, and soon we would be cinched into a tight feedback loop, them saying they wished they could “just take your hair!” and me insisting that they should: I certainly didn’t want it.
It was better when I was young enough to believe that an interest in my hair also signaled an interest in me.
Because the truth about my hair was that it sucked: It was annoying and it bred annoyances, not the least of which was how much time I had to spend talking to people about it. In elementary school, other kids would ask if I spent all day playing with it and be genuinely surprised that I didn't. They would speculate that I didn't need a pillow at night, that they could throw anything at my head — a pencil, a brick — and it would bounce right off.
It didn’t occur to me that there was anything rude or offensive about those theories, just like it didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to let people touch my hair. It was better when I was young enough to believe that an interest in my hair also signaled an interest in me, when it still felt like some kind of power to allow a friend to sit behind me and spend an in-class movie or a boring pre-calc lecture searching for that one mathematically perfect spiral. But more and more it started to seem like the point of my hair was to make everyone else happy, and it was just my lot in life to share this gift with the world, whether I was interested or not. Increasingly, I wasn’t.
For everyone else it was just hair, but for me it felt like much more: the most visible connection to my mother and her family, to a heritage I didn’t know how to understand. The problem with hair, of course, is that it’s rarely just about hair.
It wasn’t until I was 23 that I started to understand my hair, and to like the way it looked. I had always viewed my hair as an obstacle when it came to my personal style: If its texture wasn’t under my control, how could it ever be a part of my self-expression? Since moving to New York, my style had started evolving as I experimented with new looks and ideas, and, slowly, I began to experiment with hairstyles beyond just “up” and “down.” I practiced French braiding in front of my mirror on lazy weekend nights, learned to roll my hair up into a bouffant like Janelle Monáe, discovered the virtues of slathering my hair in coconut oil and the sheer volume — and possibility — that comes when you’re four and five days out from a wash.
The more time I took to mess around and develop styles that I liked, the less I thought of my hair as a separate entity or as something that only mattered to the people around me, and the more it felt like a part of me, and a part of how I moved through the world. The apprehension I’d often felt about my biracial identity growing up was fading as I began to see it as something that I built for myself, informed by my own experiences. And now my hair, too, was under my control, and — at long last — it looked good. Good enough, in fact, for me to pick up a Manic Panic Flash Lightning bleach kit and set about intentionally damaging it in my bathroom.
The impulse to dye my hair wasn’t new, just the conviction that it would actually look good. I’d wanted to dye it since hitting the stride of my emo years in high school, but was haunted by the fear that it would look like a clown wig. It’s not totally clear to me now if I believed that or if I just knew the boring ways that high schoolers tended to be mean (someone had already — jokingly! jokingly — tried to nickname me “Pube Head”), but it was a hard notion to shake, even through college, where I mostly left my hair alone.
Plus, my track record for drastic hair alterations was not great: I had had my hair chemically altered exactly once before, and it had been a low-grade disaster. Convinced that I would be able to love it more if I could make my hair slightly less curly (largely because I’d be able to pull off a more emo, swoopy hairstyle — the irony that Pete Wentz and his slick little bangs were biracial all along is not lost on me now), I had my mother drive me 90 minutes to the “ethnic” salon in Burlington. There, the hairdresser enlisted a man who may or may not have actually been a salon employee to help paint a lye relaxer into my hair. It was the first time I ever saw The Wiz and the first time I ever got a chemical burn. The final effect was both subtle and bad, and one that I spent the next three years growing out.
This time would be different, I told myself, and it was. It turns out that what you really need to make your hair look good is to actually try.
What I said earlier, about my world changing when I dyed my hair? It’s not really true. I’m very guilty of trying to fit my life into a narrative arc, always looking for a clear action and reaction, always wanting to write in the ending before something’s finished. In that sense, it’s very easy — very neat — to say that dyeing my hair changed the way I thought about my hair and, because of that, the way I thought about myself.
But that’s work that takes time, and it’s work that I’d been doing for years. By the time I bleached out my first test strand, I’d already started to shed the ideas I’d developed about my hair and about my identity as someone who passes among people who aren’t looking any deeper than my freckles. And I’d been doing it by treating my hair like what it was: not a vestige of something, not a hidden doorway, but my hair, a part of me and a reflection of me, an extension of myself and my style. The color has evolved, along with my style, from that deep blue to a lush jungle green, and I’ve invested fully in my hair’s health and longevity by finding a stylist (hi, Sarah!) who I can trust to keep it looking rad.
What dyeing my hair has done is allow me to change the signal, to flex a kind of control over the way people perceive me that I’m rarely allowed. Dyeing my hair doesn’t camouflage anything. Instead, it reveals much more about who I am, and, if only for the briefest moment, it forces people to deal with who I am before wondering what I am.
For some people, I have the sense that I’ve slid a little farther along the scale of ethnic ambiguity. For others, the color itself (and, I suspect, the concern over what sort of person would do that) overrides anything else that might be coded in my appearance. But for some, it offers a reflection, or a way in. However other people see me, when I look in the mirror I feel sure of one thing: I’ve never looked more myself.
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze / Graphic by Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
My parents finally caved when I was 14.
I took a detour from our weekly Walmart trip to go to the beauty supply store down the street. I walked through a sea of barrettes, numbered and lettered weaves, and relaxer kits until I got to the back of the store, a tiny oasis of products for black men. There was a soft and hard two-sided brush, a can of Sportin’ Waves pomade, and my holy grail: a silky, steel-gray durag with an extra long cape. Nine dollars for the whole haul, damn well spent. And so began my curious personal history with the durag, in which a cloth and a string ended up being something more.
That was the golden age of durags. Fourteen-year-old me’s favorite song through most of 2003 was “Pimp Juice,” in which Nelly wore a durag under a fedora (an iconic look) and rapped about switching to a waved-up fade while the rest of the industry was still wearing braids. R. Kelly’s “Snake” video, where he wore what is still perhaps the most iconic durag in history in the middle of the desert, hit the charts in ’03. A year before, Allen Iverson gave the “practice” rant in a durag and a fitted hat.
For the greater culture, the durag was not just the narrow pursuit of perfect waves. It was a universal accessory; a symbol of belongingness to hip-hop. It was the cool. What a time to be alive!
But there were rules back then. My parents, like so many black parents, trod the line between teaching their children what they knew was right and teaching them how to survive. For us, the two ain’t exactly the same. Even then, I knew that I should be able to dress as stereotypically as I’d like, but I also felt a drilled-in responsibility to appear respectable for personal and familial safety, social standing, and opportunity. So at first there was no sagging, there were no double negatives at dinnertime, there were no chains or earrings, and there were no durags inside or outside the house.
“But the girls all love Johnny’s waves!” seemed like a damn ironclad pro-durag argument to me at the time. My hair is jet black, dense, kinky, and coiled about as tightly as human hair can be. It is undeniably and totally nappy. It formed somewhat neat rows of curls when I used to cut it, but those didn’t quite add up to the perfect cranial striations, known as 360 waves, that I yearned for.
At least in rural North Carolina, where mixed ancestry was somewhat tied up in social status, that yearning was partly colored by color. Light-skinned brothers had the juice. In my adolescent mind, my hair was a disadvantage to overcome, and unlike them I needed all the tools I could get to achieve 360s. Chief among those tools (in addition to at least 200 brushstrokes a day) was a good collection of durags.
Those 360s I wanted. A family that waves together together stays together!
So I spent that nine dollars. I never achieved full 360s status, but I did manage a few waves on the top after almost brushing it bald. I doubt my parents were persuaded by my argument about Johnny’s waves, but they caved in the interest of letting me find my own way. And after they allowed that barrier to fall, others fell too: A fake diamond stud earring from a mall kiosk. Tall tees. A gold link crucifix chain. Velour suits. Durags outside of the house. Camouflage durags. Dollar bill durags.
As a black nerd — and I’m talking memorizing pi digits contests and Yu-Gi-Oh championships–level nerdery — whose life was moving increasingly toward isolation in mostly white spaces, these ridiculous fashions kept me tethered to the thing I loved first: hip-hop. Through my high school’s college-prep track and a move to boarding school, and then again as I dealt with that racial isolation in my professional life, that tether — or rather, durag string — kept me in place.
College was a respite. Morehouse College is, of course, historically black and all-male, and the campus was practically a sea of multicolored durags my freshman year. As I experimented with different hairstyles and the way my own natural hair grew, I embraced and rejected durags in many turns. My hair was a mini-exploration into my own aesthetic identity and feelings about the ubiquitous slipperiness of “respectability.”
My final haircut as a student before graduation — back to an office-appropriate number two taper fade brush cut — was to me a sign that the respite was over. I nestled my brush, a new durag, and that same can of Sportin’ Waves in a box to pack for the next chapter.
“We’re all Jackie Robinson at least once.” I can’t recall who said that to me back in vacation Bible School, but it’s stuck with me ever since. Part of the black experience in America is that so many of us manage to be the first black person to do something. I guess that’s the way the centuries-of-segregation cookie crumbles, but making history can be stressful. Even the Jackie Robinson of baristas at the Starbucks on 14th felt a version of that same pressure.
Isolation is difficult. Being treated like an impostor is spiritually degrading. Sometimes, the little rebellions and embraces of cultural taboo — even if it’s just what’s on your head — are all we have to keep sane.
Sometimes, the little rebellions and embraces of cultural taboo — even if it’s just what’s on your head — are all we have to keep sane.
The stress of isolation followed me through a recent job. I sat in a cubicle in a building where I was one of maybe four black employees. I absorbed micro-aggressions for breakfast, stirred into my morning coffee. I watched chaos erupt in Ferguson one night and sat through a deafening silence of office gentility the next day as the world burned inside me. I managed the isolation with those little rituals and rebellions: jokes with my friends on Twitter, growing my hair out, slipping Jay Z quotes into reports, and coming into the office with durag lines creased into my forehead. These things seem frivolous, but I needed them.
My digital community — Black Twitter — became the home where I expressed my frustration, campaigned for social justice, used my vernacular, and generally blew off steam so I could keep a veneer of “respectability” in my professional life. Black Twitter became my secret life, my breaking activism news source — part support network, part incubator for my own forming thoughts, part comfort food for my spirit.
Capes are formal attire, right?
Courtesy of Vann R. Newkirk II
We took jokes and the wide spectrum of black experiences and turned them into connective tissue. Ordinary things like orange cans of Murray’s, bowls of grits, NBA jeans, and that old hair ritual — the durag — became totems imbued with something more.
When we started the #DuragHistoryWeek trend on Twitter a year ago, just weeks after I sat in my office in tears, these things were in my mind. The meme and the hashtag were jokes, yes, but also a vessel for a greater spirit. Not to read too much into a piece of polyester used for hair management, but I believe that we all felt the need for something fun, celebratory, and undeniably black to enjoy in solidarity. We turned to that symbol for laughs in the face of pain and confusion. We managed to discuss the origins of our culture, respectability, and appropriation, all through the prism of the durag. And hell, we had plenty fun doing it.
I never managed to get 360 waves. My hair is still nappy as hell, and I love it the way it is now. But I’ll always remember hunting for rare durag patterns at flea markets and strip malls and Africana markets like I was browsing ancient bazaars. I’ll always remember struggling with those cans of thick pomade, brushing so hard the bristles fell on the floor, and tying durags so tightly I gave myself migraines.
Our collective memory is made of those things — curiosities turned phenomena — and those connections are what keep us whole. And so the durag, for me, is really about celebrating those connections, reveling and rebelling in joy in all the corners that we can.
Ain’t nuthin but a G thang, baby.
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Actually, yes, Snoop. We kinda are.
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It’s not cultural appropriation, it’s appreciation…right?
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Oh, the embarrassment!
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"Oh, I think I can see her...!"
Because sometimes your twistout could use a little extra sparkle.
Amy Sefton / BuzzFeed
Get the tutorial for this style for medium to long hair on Naptural85's YouTube channel.
YouTuber KyssMyHair's tutorial's for this chic style is blessedly easy to follow.
You'll need some Marley hair to recreate this festive look from YouTuber Crystal Michelle.
Cree Ballah wants the company to review its policies.
Cree Ballah said she had a series of confrontations with Zara managers over her hair, and was told her braided hair looked “unprofessional” and “extreme."
As a biracial woman who is half black and half Métis, Ballah told BuzzFeed Canada that braids are a way for her to connect with both sides of her heritage.
Cree Ballah
"When I got hired I had grey braids, but they told me I couldn't wear them. Company policy was against coloured hair."
But Ballah said the policy wasn't enforced evenly.
"There were white people who had grey hair, so I was kind of confused as to why my hair wasn't allowed but a person with straight hair was OK."
Cree Ballah
Her HR manager approached her and told her her hair was "too extreme for the store," Ballah said.
She took her braids out of her ponytail. But the same HR manager then took her out of the store along with a second manager, where they told her "the look you have now is not the clean, professional look we're going for."
While standing outside the store, Ballah said she tried three different hairstyles for her managers, in full view of passersby, until her managers were satisfied. She told BuzzFeed Canada she found the experience humiliating.
Cree Ballah
A spokesperson for Zara denied that managers cut Ballah's hours.
Ballah said things came to a head in a meeting that included company directors. In this meeting, she said she was pressured to sign a confidentiality agreement, and that the company seemed intent on scolding her and minimizing the actual incident.
"The meeting was definitely intimidating," she said.
Ballah no longer works at Zara, but she says she still wants the company to look at its training and policies.
Cree Ballah
A colorful story about loving the thing that makes you different
BuzzFeedVideo / Via youtube.com
When it goes from #blackgirlmagic to black magic real quick.
Naturally Curla / Via youtube.com
@brosiaaa / Via instagram.com
😍 And can we also talk about how stunning she is?!
@iamnovibrown / Via instagram.com
Amazon.com / Via amazon.com
L'Oreal USA / Via lorealusa.com
Amazon.com / Via amazon.com
Geragos & Geragos, Levi & Korsinsky / Via documentcloud.org
"The ingredients in the product are very harmful," Lori Feldman, an attorney with Levi & Korsinsky, which is representing the plaintiffs in the suit, told BuzzFeed News. "This product is advertised as having amla oil that will help, but it's trumped many times over by very harmful toxic chemicals."
The product contains a number of potentially irritating ingredients, including lithium hydroxide, hexylene glycol, butylene glycol, cocamidopropyl betaine, and fragrance, according to the complaint.
"What you're really getting is a garbage dump of chemicals that cannot possibly do what L'Oreal promises to do," said Feldman.
Amazon.com / Via amazon.com
One reviewer said they had "never experienced burns like the burns from this product."
Another person said their 26-year-old daughter was crying because "her hair is gone." She said she followed the directions, but "now she has no hair on the sides or back of her head."
Matthew DiGirolamo, a L'Oréal spokesperson, declined to discuss the specifics of the allegations with BuzzFeed News.
"We do not believe the allegations in this lawsuit have merit," he added. "For more than 100 years, L’Oréal has been committed to the safety of its consumers."
Aurélie Extiff / Via youtube.com
Michelle Obama, reality TV personality Cynthia Bailey, and several other celebrities attended the brand's Optimum Salon Haircare AMLA Legend product launch in 2013, according to a press release.
Beyoncé has also been featured in L'Oréal makeup and hair color commercials.
Read the full complaint:
Are you the type to have a new ‘do everyday?
Andy Lyons / Getty / Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
To the naked eye, LeBron James has everything in the world that a man could want: Gorgeous wife. Beautiful children. Yet another championship ring proving he’s the best in the world at his profession.
And yet, it’s not enough.
You know how we know it’s not enough? Because we see his hairline rise and fall every year like high tide, and you can see a scar in the back of his head which either came from a hair transplant or by erroneously trusting the new barber at the shop.
Timothy Clary / Getty / Chris Trotman / Stringer / Mike Lawrie / Getty / Robyn Beck / Getty / Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
We don’t!
It’s a sign of virility. Go three weeks without a lineup and see how fast your girl packs her bags. (Side note: Don’t actually do that. She WILL leave.) It’s roasting fodder. An easy target for any and every joke.
Lineup. Shapeup. Edgeup. Whatever you call it, don’t you dare get caught without it. A defined hairline is essential in the Black community. LeBron is paying thousands, maybe millions to keep his in his life. Steph Curry had a fresh lineup for his MVP ceremony but not his wedding ceremony. Jamie Foxx’s is creeping slowly but surely towards his eyebrows. Barack Obama fought eight years of egg avis all over the world and left office with his intact.
Before we dive deeper into the origin of the lineup, we (I) must first ask ourselves (myself): Why we (I) even care? And if we care so much, why are lineups a relatively recent discovery?
Associated Press / Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
Why is that? And more importantly, when did the lineup become a mandate and not just an option?
We’ve gone from an era where those without one will paint one on with shoe polish, to an era where now you might get laughed at if you don't paint one on with shoe polish. How did we get here in such a relatively short amount of time?
Malcolm’s conk in the 1960s took us to the Jackson 5 Afros of the 1970s, which gave way to Lionel Richie’s Jheri curl in the 1980s, which begat Bobby Brown’s hi-top fade of the 1990s...and still not a consistent lineup was to be found.
Uptown Records / ABC / CBS / Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
My Kings, my Kings. What the hell was going on in the 1990s?! These were some of our most prominent figures, our role models. People from across the world were looking at these people and wondering if every Black barber in America had gone on strike.
The worst part is that these aren’t random pictures that fans on the street took of them. I didn’t wake Al B. Sure up out of bed and just snap a photograph. That’s his album cover! Eddie Winslow posed for cast photos for one of the longest-running Black sitcoms of all time with taco meat on his chest and no lineup on his head.
Keenen Ivory Wayans and David Alan Grier are at an awards show, for crying out loud. Three names apiece, zero (0) lineups between them.
Marvel / Warner Bros. / Warner Bros. / Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
But what changed from then until now? The 1990s weren’t THAT long ago, and today you might be locked up for treason if you walk outside with your hairline looking like David Alan Grier’s.
Whatever it is still hasn’t made its way across the pond yet, because our British brothers are still lost in the sauce. What was our cultural epiphany? Was an on-point hairline just not a barometer of masculinity back then? Did the prevalence of paparazzi make it a must to have a lineup at all times because you never knew when you might end up on the front page? Or did we all just collectively grow the fuck up?
It almost goes without saying that a good head of hair goes a long way in attracting potential love/lust interests, unless you’re Tyson Beckford. Which you’re not.
Now, is a full mane 100% of attracting #potentials? Of course not, don’t be silly...we’re talking 80-85% tops. This isn't just about lineups; that would be ridiculous! A smooth half of that remaining 15-20% is, of course, the luxuriousness of your facial hair.
Those of us born without either (hello, ladies!) have been forced to readjust. My own weak hair genes have forced me into the gym, as I refused to be the corpulent beardless guy with zero hairline (so, Snapchat, anytime you want to add a hairline-ify option, we ready). Two out of three I could stomach. But genetics wants to have me out here looking like Carl Winslow, and I won’t stand for it. I laughed at my own father for “voluntarily” going bald when I was in high school. Now the tables are turning and I can see him looking at my hairline with a devilish grin, as if to say, “Soon.”
And it’s not just women who give us flack. I’ve seen many a man say something stupid and have his beardlessness mocked on the spot by other men. Hell, I myself don’t trust men who can’t grow a mustache, and you shouldn’t either.
Neither of these men has a mustache. Makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it?
An abundance of facial hair is associated with dominance and aggression. It’s no coincidence that Shaft wasn’t a clean-shaven man or that King Leonidas from 300 had the fullest of the beards. The University of Arizona did a study in which photographs of bearded men and non-bearded men made the same exact facial expressions, and the bearded men were consistently rated as more intimidating and dominant. Additional studies have shown that beards are associated with power and elevated social status, by both men and women.
But who needs studies when we could just ask the good people of Twitter?
One bad exchange and suddenly you’re getting roasted on “The Twitter,” and you’re getting flamed by people around the country, if not the world. It’s bad enough racing genetics in real life; now you’re at the mercy of anyone with a touchscreen phone.
There are people from Des Moines, Iowa, with 142 followers zooming in on your hairline and laughing at you. Man, you don’t even know anybody in Des Moines, but now the native Iowans are having a hearty laugh at your expense. Even worse, while they’re laughing at your lack of a hairline, somebody else is going to zoom in on your underdeveloped beard.
Twitter: @JimMWeber / Twitter: @robertcramb / Twitter: @wesleysnipes /Twitter: @rudygobert27 / Charlotte Gomez
Some of us are fortunate enough to have the self-awareness or loved ones in our lives to tell us when to call it quits on your hair dreams. Some of us (Wonder, Stevie or Major, Alan) need an intervention to receive the news. This alone should tell you how important the hairline is to the Black experience. It’s something that you don’t even know how much you need until you don’t have it anymore.
My biggest regret in life is that I didn’t take more pictures with mine intact so that one day I could look fly on my funeral bulletin. I see Kevin Durant wasting perfectly good genetics by refusing to brush his hair at all, and it makes me visibly upset. I’m shaking now just thinking about it.
One of the toughest decisions a man has to make in his life is when to go to the #1 ATG lowest-guard-on-the-clippers against-the-grain haircut— and watch all the hopes and dreams he had for his hair fall into his lap. I’ve long said that Kobe Bryant knowing when to give up the ghost on his hairline and go with the bald fade is far more impressive than him scoring 81 points in a game.
Ask LeBron James if he’d rather have championship ring number four or his hairline from when he was 18 years old. He’ll laugh for a second and look away. A single tear might roll down his cheek before he pauses and then gives some politically correct answer about how a fourth ring would mean more to him that anything outside of his family.
But deep down, I know which one is more important to him.