The history of my hair - Tortoise (2025)

It is a warm and sticky evening. We’re in a room with about ten people. The walls are plastered with pictures that look like they have been cut from a magazine. The biggest poster displays a woman with long black hair, the type of hair that looks like it would move in slow motion. She’s positioned front and centre, her brown complexion perfectly complements the purple background. She looks blissful. The logo at the bottom of the poster reads “Dark and lovely”.

The atmosphere in the room is lively. You can hear intense discussions, phone conversations and Michael Jackson’s Thriller playing in the background. A small TV is positioned on the shelf in the corner. A young girl is seated on a wooden stool. She is squinting and her eyes are watering. Her small frame is virtually hidden by the three women huddling around her. She tilts her head towards the screen but only manages to get a peripheral view of a blurry red figure. As she turns her head a little more to the screen…

“Now is not the time to watch TV,” one of the women says. She repositions the girl’s head. They are intently focused, with hands moving at the speed of light.

“OUCH!” The little girl weeps. She’s been sat in the hair salon for more than six hours and it doesn’t look like she is leaving any time soon. The girl on the wooden stool is me. I’m six and getting my hair done.

My early childhood memories are generally vague, but hair salon visits remain vivid. Upon arrival, the little ’fro on my head would be on full display. Before salon visits, Mum washed my hair and tied it up in a puffy bun. By the time I arrived at the salon, the bun had shrunk. Here’s the thing about afro hair: when wet or in humid temperatures, it shrinks. My hairdresser prepared my hair for styling by applying heat and blow-drying it. This was very painful; my hair was so dense.

I visited the salon at least twice a month, the frequency depending on which hairstyle I was going to have. Braids, the interlacing of three strands of hair, lasted eight to ten weeks. Cornrows – when the hair is braided tightly using an under and over motion to create a pattern like, well, rows of corn – would only last for two and would therefore require more frequent visits. Reader: imagine someone pulling your hair for three hours straight; that’s how having cornrows felt. Now, imagine trying to move your head left-right, up-down after.

“I won’t be able to sleep tonight, Mai Tanya [“mother of Tanya” in Shona]. It’s so painful,” I say as she wraps my hair with a head scarf. Then she makes me a cup of warm Ovaltine and tells me to sleep on my front.

The excitement of presenting a new hairstyle to friends at school the next day has to be set against the discomfort and lack of sleep it causes me. But the first few days of cornrows are not as bad as the third week. By then, my scalp is on fire: the hair has been pulled so tightly on my skin that dirt has got into the roots and pores. The more I scratch, the more the hairstyle becomes untidy. Soon I will find myself back at the salon.

“Can I touch your hair?” Black women hear this all the time. The question is as intrusive as asking a pregnant woman if you can feel her baby bump. My hair (even when it’s not mine) is not a sideshow for the entertainment of white people. There’s nothing worse than work colleagues asking to touch it or making a big deal out of a hairstyle change. I have spoken to many black women who consciously avoid changing their hairstyles, fearing the attention and questions they might be asked at work the next day. The American singer, Solange, said it best:

“Don’t touch my hair…
Don’t touch my soul, when it’s the rhythm I know.
Don’t touch my crown… when it’s the feelings I wear”

Skin signifies race and hair does too. So when people ask these questions, it makes me feel othered. It’s more than hair but an expression of emotion, heritage and even insecurity.

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The story of black hair starts in the motherland. The frizz and kink of the hair insulated the head from the brutal intensity of the sun. There is no single type of African hair, though: textures from West Africa alone range from the kinky curls of the Mandingos to the loosely curled locks of the Ashanti people. In the early 15th Century, hair communicated messages. The social, aesthetic and spiritual significance of black hair was an intrinsic testament to the strength of African cultures, and the same rituals and beliefs remain today.

“A woman with long, thick hair demonstrates the life-forces, the multiplying power of profusion, prosperity, a ‘green thumb’ for raising bountiful farms and many healthy children,” wrote Sylvia Ardyn Boone, an anthropologist specialising in the Mende culture of Sierra Leone. When Europeans began exploring the western coast of Africa in the 1400s, they discovered thriving African nations and new trading partners. They were fascinated by African hairstyles. One of the first things European and Arabian slave traders did to their new cargo was shave their heads, stripping away a part of their identity.

The Black Power movement in the 1960s challenged the “light skin and straight hair” beauty standard by presenting a picture of blackness that was the complete opposite. African Americans rocked their afros, dreadlocks, braids and cornrows.

More recently, the natural hair movement – an expanding constellation of natural hair-care gurus, fashion and accessories created by black women – has increased the visibility of afro hair.

Many like me grew up learning to tame our ’fros, but there is hope for the next generation of black girls. YouTubers have exploded into view with natural hair-care vlogs and afro-hair products are becoming widely available in high street stores. Black women have united and kicked hair relaxers to the kerb in pursuit of loving and understanding the importance of their coils. Afro hair has become more mainstream with the likes of Lupita Nyong’o, Viola Davis, Zendaya and Yara Shahidi showing their natural curls on powerful platforms.

But even at the height of the natural hair movement, there is still bias within the black community. Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist, Andrew Walker, created a hair hierarchy. The system placed straight hair at the top as Type 1, wavy hair below that as Type 2, curly hair thereafter at Type 3 and finally kinky/coily at Type 4. The looser the curl, the better hair you have.

“Mai Tanya please, please can I relax my hair” I plead. Hair relaxing requires a chemical treatment that straightens naturally curly or coily textured hair. Most ten-year-olds ask for toys and games. I ask for straight hair. My mum is concerned that straight hair would make me look “too grown-up”, not by the fact that I want to put concentrations of chemical ingredients on my scalp. The truth is she has always relaxed her hair.

“If you carry on moving, I’ll throw the relaxer away,” my mum says.

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Insisting she does not want the relaxer to mess up her new bathroom tiles, my mum has set up camp in the garden and wrapped me in an old towel. She opens the relaxer container and I get a strong whiff of the cream: it smells like paint. I close my eyes. Her plastic gloves are covered with a generous amount. The feeling of cold cream on my scalp is oddly satisfying.

“Whatever you do, don’t scratch,” she says as she gently combs through it. A few minutes later, my scalp starts heating up. Mai Tanya explains that this is completely normal and instructs me to wait a further two minutes. I run to the bathroom. “Take it out! Take it out NOW!” I scream. When she finally rinses all the chemicals out and blow-dries my hair I am in awe of the transformation.

A few days later, I notice my hair has started to shed. Like most beauty treatments, relaxed hair has to be maintained and nurtured to remain that way. But re-growth meant it was time to top up on the relaxer, so I find myself repeating the process just to escape from the coils – and it ruins my hair.

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When the American comedian, Chris Rock, dubbed relaxers “creamy crack” for black women in his 2009 documentary, Good Hair, he was not far off. Rock joked that black women were fiends for the creamy substance to the point where they failed to pay household expenses for regular hair appointments.

Relaxers gave me a false sense of freedom; I thought I could slick my hair back without being worried about the frizz. When I combed my hair and I was not wincing in pain, that felt like freedom. Perhaps the problem was not the hair but about learning how to look after it.

The Nigerian feminist and author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes this best in her 2013 novel, Americanah:

“Relaxing your hair is like being in a prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you… You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do.”

Getting off the creamy crack came in stages for me. It began with trading the relaxers for texturizers. Texturizers were not as potent as relaxers, but they loosened the curls and made them easier to manage.

For my 16th birthday, a rite of passage into womanhood: I get my first weave. It is a symbolic exchange between my mum and I. It is her way of saying: “Spread your wings and fly.”

Using a sewing needle, the hairdresser sews a weft or track of hair extensions on to the cornrows. Here, cornrows function as a base to attach the fake hair to the natural. The goal is to achieve a fuller and longer look.

Mai Tanya takes me to an Afro-Caribbean salon in Grays, in Essex, near where I live. Black hair shops are hard to find in Thurrock. I am familiar with the owner of the salon, Shola; she has done my hair twice before – I trust her. Most of my coils have returned to their natural form, except for my hairline, which is still chemically straightened. For a natural-looking sew-in, my real hair needs to blend in with the fake hair and this requires it being relaxed or texturized.

Shola is Jamaican. A common belief in the black community is that each demographic is exceptional at specific hairstyles: Africans are good at braiding and cornrows, for example; and Jamaicans, well, they are bloody good at sew-ins.

Weaves are expensive; with hair extensions included, you could spend more than £100 but they last eight to 12 weeks. It is worth the money. A woman’s relationship with her hair stylist is one of great intimacy. But for a black woman there is a deeper bond because, frankly, there is a lot more at stake.

Exhibit one: edges. This is a term commonly used in the black community and it refers to the baby-hairs that grow on the perimeter of one’s forehead. Edges can make or break a good weave.

Shola tells me that “it’s better to have short hair with full edges than a full head without”. They are delicate, so much so that the hairdresser should avoid plaiting these areas. Damaged edges are a result of bad braiding technique and neglect. That is why I need a trustworthy stylist.

“You look so different – you look all grown-up,” Shola says as she completes my new do. The tightness of the cornrows and the pulling of the hair give an instant facelift. Remember, I’m 16.

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When people ask why I change my hair so frequently, I reply: “Black girls are magical.” A quick scroll on my Instagram page would show that in the past year I’ve been six different people. My hair has managed to go from a short bob to a bone-straight 24-inch weave in 24 hours. Rihanna was my biggest “hair-inspo”. When Rihanna dyed her hair red, I knew it was time to get myself some gloves. When she shaved the sides of her head, it was time to get straight to the barbers.

I came across Judith Butler’s work in one of my social theory classes at university. Although her theories were framed around gender, I felt they spoke to issues in race too. In Gender Trouble (1990), Butler said: “The act that one does, the act that one performs is, in a sense, an act that’s been going on before one arrived on the scene.”

Changing my hair frequently was a way of performing my blackness, but it was a performance that continued to oppress me. I saw no value in my afro and found myself looking after my extensions more than my actual hair – after all, it was always covered.

I have just spent £260 on my first wig. It is 22 inches long and platinum silver. I call her Storm, after the character played by Halle Berry in Marvel’s X-Men. She comes from Brazil: hair extensions from there are wavy and full.

After months of dating, my crush and I are ready to take things to the next level. My first date and, of course, I bring Storm along. She is dressed in loose curls.

His name pops up on my phone with a message that reads “Outside”. Another quick glance at Storm and I’m ready to go. “Come here,” he said as he embraces me in the car. This guy is seriously HOT, so you can imagine how fast my heart is beating. He leans in and kisses me. I kiss back. Then he ruins the moment. “What are you doing?” I shout and jerk back. He panics. “What’s wrong?” He has touched my hair. I honestly don’t know what he is looking for back there but it is the strangest thing. An invasion of privacy.

In my final year of university, I decided to do a dissertation on black hair. The research and analysis challenged my ignorance and the excuses I had previously made for not wearing my natural hair. The moment I submitted my work felt as though I’d handed in my weaves too. It took time and wigs to get natural hair back to its original curl pattern, after the damage done by relaxers and texturizers. But by early 2017 wigs had become a thing. They were the perfect protective style – I could wear a wig one day and then leave my hair out the next without the hassle of a weave.

Where am I now? The good news is that I’ve stopped putting chemicals in my hair and I’ve been wearing it naturally more often. It’s a journey. My wig collection has increased. In my dressing room you will find two wigs placed on a dummy at the top of the wardrobe. On one of the shelves, you’ll find £500 worth of wigs, all of which are ready to wear. I wash them regularly and to maintain the shine, I smother them in hair conditioner and put each wig in the microwave for 30 seconds and the application is as easy as putting on a hat. I know what you want to know: has it ever fallen off in public?

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It is summer. I am in Cancún with my girlfriends. We have decided to go cenote diving at Chichen Itza. “The water is so deep that no one has ever hit their head on the bottom,” the tour guide warns us. “If you can’t swim, you’re gonna sink like a rock.”

He tells us a bit about the history of the cenote: the Mayans used to come here to pray to the rain god. They performed rituals that often involved human sacrifices. At the bottom of the cenote there are still human remains from the sacrifices, he says. I am worried about something more serious: the fate of my beautiful Brazilian wig.

I start to climb the stairs towards what looks like a red mark painted on the floor. “Go on Tan,” my girlfriends cheer me on. They are wimps. They are too afraid to jump after hearing the sacrifice story and are also worried their wigs would fall off. But I figure that with a good set of bobby pins, there is no way the wig comes off.

I shut my eyes and jump. My heart is beating a mile a minute. What if the rain god decides he wants my wig? What if the god confuses it for an offering and doesn’t give it back? I gasp for air as I come to the surface. I look around and people are laughing and taking pictures.

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My wig has fallen off. Trying not to drown through all my panic, I start looking around frantically, wondering if it has dropped into the bottomless darkness below. But there it is, the elastic band at the bottom of the wig is wrapped around my neck like a scarf.

“I’m gonna do it, otherwise I’ll regret this,” my friend Stephanie announces above me. Before you know it, the rest of the group follows. I giggle as each person jumps in and each wig comes off. Here we are, swimming and diving in the cenote. This is by far the best moment of the trip. In a corner, there are slippers, locker keys and seven damp wigs stacked on top of each other.

My hair journey has only just started. So this year, when I turn 25, I plan to chop it all off.

All photographs courtesy of the author

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The history of my hair - Tortoise (2025)

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