A couple of years ago, I met a white American woman with a short, blonde, wavy bob at a party in Cairo. When she started talking about how impressed she was to see so many young Egyptian women “embracing their natural hair”, I pointed out the difference between natural and curly hair, explaining to her that women here were embracing curly hair. I then launched into the history of the natural hair movement and its basis in the work of Black women. While it was great to see more and more people deciding not to straighten or chemically treat their hair to perpetuate eurocentric beauty standards, this was still a cast-off of mainstream western/US culture disseminated back to us, and utterly removed from any recognition of the work of Black people. I told her that the natural hair movement, outside of the context of Black women and without their input, was watered down and being co-opted by the many—mainly for profit. Yet, this embracing of curls aligned, still, with what white supremacy allowed us to look like. A new style and trend, the rules of which, are again being set by those in power, namely the producers of hair care products: often large corporations who do not care about our hair and have long been edging out Black owned hair and beauty businesses, as they suddenly see the profitability in curly and natural hair in mainstream beauty dialogue. Needless to say, she remained quiet before walking off and eventually leaving the party which was predominantly occupied by upper and middle class Egyptian women with curly hair.

In Egypt—a place that likes to proclaim itself a melting pot beyond color, religion, or hair texture with a shared homogeneity of ‘Egyptianness’—curly and natural hair is having a moment. Vivian Yee of the New York Times recently examined the trend in “The Freedom of Natural Curls: Egypt’s Quiet Rebellion”, and likened the embrace of curly and natural hair to overthrowing conservative tyranny—a revolution that happened a decade ago and left many feeling empty and unfulfilled. When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted, many in Egypt were quick to show their support, likening it to the Egyptian revolution and showing their solidarity and support in empty words while most platforms took a delayed or a largely on the fence stance to critiquing the deep roots of colorism and racism that plagues our own society.

Yee’s piece doesn’t delve into this, nor does it address the predominantly white beauty standards still in place in Egypt. Her article fails to address how the natural hair movement comes from the commodification and packaging of Blackness, and it does not provide any analysis or critical reflection on the socioeconomic class of the people she interviews (most appear to be upper or middle class with access to the internet, Western pop cultural trends and a conversational fluency in English). While curls are increasingly appearing all over social media and in ads, it’s only a certain kind of hair that’s being championed: bouncy, loose, type 3 curls (think Zendaya) and rarely the kinky, coily type 4 kind (think Lupita Nyong’o). This is a reality whether you live here in Egypt or in the west.

Reductive hair typing and the hair type chart that many use, was created in the 1990s by Oprah’s personal hair stylist Andre Walker. Apart from the fact that many of us have multi-textured hair, others have critiqued this chart for continuing to reinforce the same hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ hair in it’s numbering and grading system—with the current ‘ideal’ being somewhere in the type 3 category.

Time and again people who tell me they love my ‘curly’ hair and try to talk to me about it, soon have a glazed over look of regret when I go off on a tirade about how my hair is not in fact curly. My curls are manufactured—this is a twist-out, or a bantu-knot out, created by an armful of products layered and ritualistically applied to my hair. In reality, my hair contains textures from what is considered a type 2, all the way to a type 4. No one wants to hear this. What most people want is a quick fix, a magical hair product that will give them perfect curls without the effort. The actual labor of curly and natural hair is monumental. It is physical work as much as it is mental and emotional work. Having a head full of uniform curls and hair that looks a certain way is just another standard to be met, and is part of the reason why many Black women have abandoned the natural hair movement, now considering it a space filled with criticism and vitriol, instead of one that uplifts and supports them.

Roots of the Natural Hair Movement

With the rise of the internet, vlogging, and social media, Black women and women of color have been able to communicate, share and access information on how to take care of their hair on a much larger scale. A lot of us all over the world—either through colonization or erasure—have become far removed from the history and knowledge of our natural hair care traditions and practices, instead perpetuating the white, eurocentric model of hair straightening handed down to us. The mission of the movement was to encourage wearing the hair that naturally grows out of our heads without maintaining socially informed or culturally fabricated ideas and constructs of beauty.

The foundation of the natural hair movement was a rejection of white supremacy, and the reclamation of what is deemed ‘beautiful’ in our societies. For Black people, hair has never just been hair. It has always been politicized and complicated by the racism, colorism, sexism, power, history and politics of time and place. From the dehumanising pencil test performed during apartheid in South Africa to arbitrarily classify people by race, to the Tignon Laws of 18th century Lousiana that forced Black women to wear their hear under turbans and scarves so that their beautiful hair styles didn’t entice white men and upsatge white women. In short, throughout history, Black people’s hair has been everyone’s business but their own. The natural hair movement is often traced to the 1960s in the US, during the civil rights era, a time of Muhammad Ali famously proclaiming loudly that he was pretty, and the mantra and cultural movement of ‘Black is Beautiful’ exploding into everyone’s collective consciousness–not as a suggestion but as a given fact. Black natural hair became a symbol of rebellion, self-love, confidence, and was an open indictment of white America. To wear your natural hair unadulterated has always been a transgression, but to wear it in kinky, coily, type 4 natural form? Even more so, and this notion still resonates to this day. 

Texturism

Much like colorism, texturism is the hierarchy that communities uphold in relation to what is a ‘preferred’ hair texture. You either have ‘good hair’, or you work damn hard to pretend you do. This toxicity and pressure has led to many who don’t have the idealized texture to ‘quit’ the natural hair movement. When this happens, many subsequently face backlash from their community for straightening their hair and are accused of not ‘loving’ their Blackness enough. Black women not only face a stigma for having highly textured hair, but also for alternatively straightening it. This cycle once again dehumanizes and further impedes on their sense of agency and choice. 

While the rhetoric of embracing your healthy natural hair is spouted everywhere you look, it doesn't include textured, kinky, afro hair. There is only ever a certain level of transgression allowed, and only when white people or white women decide it is acceptable and fashionable does something enter the mainstream (take for example the popularity of braids and braiding styles after Kim Kardashian wore them, while young Black girls are still oscratized and sent home from school for wearing braids or natural hair). Highly textured hair is not in the conversation unless it is how to ‘tame’ or ‘fix’ it, with products focusing mainly on ‘curling’ or ‘elongating’ hair (often highly priced), and styles that showcase it are minimal to nonexistent. But products and tutorials for trademark “perfect curls” are easily at hand, and often done by women with looser textures and lighter skin tones. 

In reality, marginalized communities and women are not being ‘uplifted’ and ‘freed’ from western beauty, nor are we doing something ‘good’ and ‘healthy’ for our hair.  

Everyone Wants to be Black, Until…

Any hair that grows unaltered out of your head is technically ‘natural,’ but do you have ‘natural hair’ and are you progressing the radical rhetoric and beliefs of the natural hair movement? Or are you profiting off the latest trend which, like most trends, has become monetized off the labor of Black people who originally set out to empower their communities?

Journalist Dina Aboughazala’s article for the BBC, “Beauty standards: Egypt's curly hair comeback”, begins by telling the story of Eman: a light-skinned Egyptian woman with curly hair, who claims she needed to emigrate to Spain because of how she was treated for having curls. While it’s true that curly and textured hair are still not considered the norm in Egypt (especially as the majority Muslim country has a high percentage of women who wear the veil), for a light skin woman of color with slightly textured hair to need to relocare because of it, is an unrealistic notion, and extremely privileged on at that. What, then, is life like for a Black woman with afro-textured hair in Egypt with no upward mobility? If those with curls and loose textured hair, light skin and the socioeconomic ability to emigrate can’t get by, this should give one a clear idea of what Black people are facing. Aboughazala’s article does not include the perspective of any Black people in Egypt, for whom life is compounded by colorism, texturism and an ‘African’ othering that is traumatic in the least and deadly at worst. Little to no representation exists for Black people or Black Egyptians, except in the form of racist caricatures, portraying them as subservient. Society has purposefully turned a blind eye to any open dialogue about its past, and has yet to reflect on the faulty claim that ‘we’re all the same’.

While some have elevated themselves off of the work of Black people and culture, Black people, especially women, are still very much at the unacknowledged, unwelcome and unaccommodated in the very spaces they created. When one of the first ‘natural’ curly salons opened in Cairo, I went for a consultation. I was told my hair care routine was wrong as the stylist stood staring at a lock of my hair, before arbitrarily deciding that it was ‘low porosity’. She claimed that the ‘damaged’ part of my hair could come to resemble the more ‘curly’ parts at the back of my head with some deep treatments. I did not explain to the stylist that my hair is multi-textured, that the kinks she was seeing were my natural texture and had been so for over ten years of healthy hair growth and maintenance. This stylist hadn’t worked with textured hair before, despite insisting she had when I asked her. She didn’t understand my hair and was doing exactly what every salon and stylist had ever done: performing guesswork, and then making me pay for a travesty instead of just saying they did not know how to deal with natural, coily hair. 

Curly hair commodification isn’t going anywhere, in fact it’s thriving and using the bones of the natural hair movement to propel it increasingly forward. I learnt everything I know about my hair from Black women: from how to style it to how to take care of it, and, above anything else, I learnt how to love it. Black women deserve for all of us to make room for them in this movement and listen, instead of co-opting something they pioneered to free us all.