Bad hair, good hair

Bad hair. There’s a term I hate with my guts.

“Good Hair”, a documentary by Chris Brown about the “good hair syndrome” that affects the black community in the US.

Why the heck people assume (and enforce every time they use that term) that curly hair is bad and straight hair is good?

Good hair, for me, is healthy hair, well hydrated, good smelling, no split ends hair. Bad hair is the opposite of that. Straight, wavy, curly, full of volume, flat, short, long, it doesn’t matter. All of them have their peculiarities, their ways of looking gorgeous or weird.

My dream is to have a daughter with curly hair. I can see my self running my fingers through her curls (for as long as she will let me before start saying I’m a boring mom :p). One day I shared that with friends and they reacted badly. “Your daughter will hate you for wishing that upon her”.

C’mon, people.

The beauty in life is in its diversity. Ugliness is when everyone has the same looks, the same hair, the same speech, no personality.

I don’t want my daughter to feel weird for having whatever hair she happens to have. I don’t want her to live like these ladies at the movie, that shave their natural hair off and wear a wig only because she can’t stand her own hair or, worse, because it will be ruined by all the chemicals it has been submitted to.

Sad scenario, that one. I met two girls recently that wear their very tightly coiled hair with pride. Both come from African countries where, I suppose, this prejudice culture against their hair doesn’t exist. And they look so beautiful, so confident with their awesome hairdos – from black power to turbans.

Why don’t we do something to create a scenario more like this too? Let’s stop sorting hair types, skin color, body figure, eye color and other personal peculiarities between “good” and “bad”? So that, when my little daughter comes to this world she has the chance to be happy as she is!

And here’s a little tribute to my favorite curly hair friends!

Lara Januário, Lili Ferrari, MaWá and Thaís Souza!