“I spent thousands on chemical straightening”: the price of having black hair in a white world

By Tamara Gilkes Borr

You might not remember being checked for head lice at school. I do. I can still see the school nurse looking flustered when it was my turn, her white skin turning red. I thought I must have done something wrong, a horrible feeling for a goody-two-shoes six-year-old. The nurse gingerly pulled out one of my plaits and struggled to get the comb through, before giving up and sending me back to my classroom. I remember the embarrassment of spending the rest of the day with my hair in a stiff, tangled mess.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just failed the comb test. Black people tend to have tighter, kinkier curls than white people, which means a fine-toothed comb can’t get from root to tip. In 19th-century America some churches hung combs next to their doors: only those who could pass it through their hair were allowed to enter.

The nurse didn’t know any better. This was a majority-white school in suburban New Jersey and she hadn’t been trained to check hair like mine. But it was the first time I was made to feel bad about my hair. It would not be the last. I learned to avoid situations where people would make comments. When white friends offered to style my hair at sleepovers it was easier to decline than explain why a hairbrush wouldn’t work. I stopped going swimming with my classmates, tired of fending off questions about why my wet hair curled a certain way. I stayed silent during conversations about personal grooming. And above all I hoped no one would touch my hair.

The message I was getting was clear: my hair was somehow unusual or unruly, and it needed to be fixed.

As I approached my teenage years, I wanted to look pretty. In the 1990s that meant having long, straight, flowing hair. On MTV and BET (Black Entertainment Television), young women were dancing in tight neon dresses with hair swinging behind their backs. My favourite artists – Aaliyah, Janet Jackson – had impossibly long locks.

At the time, black entertainers often conformed to white norms to gain acceptance. For women, this implied having straight hair. Tyra Banks, a model, later admitted to wearing wigs and weaves (false hair sewn into the hair or glued onto the scalp) for most of her adulthood. I had no idea that my favourite celebrities wore wigs. I just knew I wanted to look like them.

Growing up, I wanted to look pretty. In the 1990s this meant having long, straight, flowing hair

When I was about 11 I went to the hair salon for my first relaxer, a chemical process that straightens hair. My younger sister was getting the same treatment. Our mother, who accompanied us, had never used a relaxer because she already had “good hair”: long, loose, curly locks that you could blow-dry straight. Her father was Indian and her mother was mixed race (black and white). She easily passed the comb test.

I remember the stylist excitedly telling me how beautiful my hair would become. She parted it into several sections, before slathering white cream on each one. When she was finished, I told her my scalp was starting to tingle. Never mind that, she said. Just take a seat and wait a few minutes.

My scalp was on fire as I watched my sister go through the same process. I squirmed. The stylist said that the longer it was left in, the straighter my hair would become. Being an obedient child, and desperate to look like my heroes, I bit my lip. As the stylist rinsed my scalp, the pain intensified before subsiding into a cool burning sensation, like when Vicks VapoRub gets too close to your eyes. My hair was dried then pressed with various hot tools.

Finally, I had straight hair! The hairdresser encouraged me to swing it from side to side, as if I were modelling on a runway. I was still in pain but delighted by the cascade over my shoulders. For days I combed out scabs and nursed my burnt scalp with hair oil. But I was able to get a fine-toothed comb through.

I carried on straightening my hair, “touching up” the new growth every two months or so for the next few years. Almost every time, the burn was unbearable. I was told that I was “tender-headed” and it was nothing to worry about. We know now that this was wrong.

A study by America’s Department of Health and Human Services, published in 2019, found that women who used chemical hair straighteners were 31% more likely to get breast cancer than other women. All hair products contain a frightening array of chemicals, especially in America. The European Union bans 1,300 chemicals from cosmetics. America bans only 11.

Many hair products, for all types of women, contain chemicals like formaldehyde and parabens, but black women are more exposed to them because they buy nine times more hair products than white women. One study examined 18 items popular with black women, including leave-in conditioners and detanglers, and found that 11 contained chemicals associated with cancer and female infertility.

Black entertainers often conformed to white norms to gain acceptance

Eventually my sister and I stopped going to the salon. We still had no idea about the health risks. But when we told our parents about our burnt scalps and how bits of our hair kept breaking off, they realised the treatments couldn’t be good for us. They had been spending $1,000 a year to help their daughters look “pretty”. While other families were paying similar amounts for music lessons or soccer teams, we were throwing out money simply to be accepted by white people.

Black American families are already at a disadvantage socio-economically. The net worth of a typical white family is ten times that of a black one: homes in black neighbourhoods don’t appreciate in value as much as homes in white ones, and lack of access to education and other forms of discrimination prevent black people from earning higher wages. Looking back, it seems perverse that, while my school friends’ parents were investing in their kids’ social capital, my parents felt obliged to spend money on hair treatments that turned out to be putting their daughters’ lives at risk.

Twenty years ago natural hair wasn’t cool. There were no black YouTube vloggers sharing homemade concoctions and styling suggestions for people “transitioning” from chemically straightened hair to natural hair, as there are now. I had to work it out for myself. And things did not go well. My hair was messy and I felt insecure. This wasn’t great for my dating life during high school and university, but no matter: I could focus on my studies.

Other families were paying for music lessons. We were throwing out money simply to be accepted by white people

Things changed when I set foot in the working world. In the late 2000s I was living in New York City and hungry for an internship. I started to feel uncomfortable when I went for interviews. I sensed that prospective employers were judging me for my not-quite-straight ponytails and jagged hairline: the result of using hot styling tools to try to straighten my curls.

I made a calculated decision. If I wanted to get on in corporate life, my natural hair had to go. A weave would cost more than getting my hair straightened; I was a student and also working part-time, earning the minimum wage. I would have to get my hair relaxed again, which meant saying goodbye to a quarter of my annual salary. I tried not to think about the health risks.

I wasn’t just being paranoid about my looks. An experiment published in 2020 found that black women with natural hair were perceived as less professional and less competent than black women with straightened hair and white women with curly or straight hair. Many black people, from news anchors to hotel hostesses to FedEx workers, have been fired or disciplined because of their natural hair. Until 2014 the American army banned many hairstyles typically worn by black people, such as twists and dreadlocks. Until March this year, female soldiers couldn’t have buzzcuts. Instead they were required to style their hair in a bun or ponytail – an impossibility for many with curly hair.

It’s a serious issue. CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) is an organisation trying to ban hair discrimination in America. In 2019 California became the first state to pass the CROWN Act, which makes it illegal to discriminate against natural hairstyles in schools and workplaces. Ten other states have passed the act, and in March Cory Booker, a black senator from New Jersey, introduced the CROWN Act in Congress, paving the way for legislation at a federal level.

But laws don’t guarantee acceptance. Hair discrimination has been illegal in Britain since 2010 but prejudice persists. According to the Halo Collective, a British campaign group, a fifth of black women feel obliged to straighten their hair for work. I have felt the same pressure.

It was a few years before I seriously considered going natural again. In my late 20s I got a job as a teacher in Brooklyn. It was the first time I’d worked or studied in a place where non-white people – the students at least – were in the majority. One of my colleagues, who was mixed race, had beautiful natural hair. Could mine ever look that good? I doubted it. Mixed-race women, who tend to have looser curls, are idolised in the natural-hair movement. It is a sad fact that the darker your skin and the kinkier your curls, the more barriers you will face. You are more likely to see a mixed-race woman advertising a shampoo for natural hair than a darker-skinned black woman.

I envied mixed-race women like my colleague whose hair seemed easier to manage. There was a certain irony in this. Growing up in a predominantly white environment, all I knew was that my skin was dark and my hair was “bad”. I hadn’t stopped to think about whether other black women had a harder time. Actually, my own mixed heritage (one of my grandparents was biracial, the other Indian) put me in a relatively privileged position.

Even as a lighter-skinned black woman with tight but not quite kinky curls, I felt that embracing my natural hair was risky. I was carving out a professional identity for myself: becoming more confident in the classroom and gaining the respect of my students and their parents. Would I still look the part? What if my hair went haywire? I could barely remember what my natural hair looked like, and most of my memories involved fighting what grew out of my head. I didn’t have time to apply layers of products and couldn’t wear a hat to work.

A study found that women with natural hair were perceived as less professional and less competent than black women with straightened hair

I was also scared about dating. My friends were getting married and I was looking to find love too. Intellectually I knew that the right man would love me whatever my hair looked like, but those ingrained ideas of what men find desirable are hard to shift: big boobs and booty, and long, swishing hair. I was never going to have the boobs or the booty, so I thought I might as well aim for one out of three.

Although I met my partner when I had straight hair, it was partly his support that gave me the confidence to get rid of it. Together we moved to California for graduate school. On campus, nearly all the black women rocked amazing natural styles. Could that be me? I definitely couldn’t afford to keep up my bi-monthly salon visits. Plus, graduate students generally look unkempt, so there was less pressure to appear polished. With my partner’s encouragement, I took the plunge.

I let my hair grow, disguising the in-between stage with two-strand twists pulled into buns and bantu knots (smaller buns) hidden under hats. I devoured YouTube tutorials and bought a vast array of hair products like shea butter and jojoba oil. And I psyched myself up for the big chop.

The big chop, in natural-hair lingo, is when a woman cuts off the processed part of her hair. Some women do this immediately after deciding to go natural, revealing what’s known as the “teeny weeny afro”. Others let their hair grow for years before cutting it. I was terrified by the thought of chopping off all my hair. But a year in I could see my curly hair peeking through and I couldn’t wait to meet it.

Eventually I grabbed a pair of office scissors and started cutting. My straight processed hair, which had come down to my shoulders, fell into the sink. Underneath was a short, soft afro. Halfway through, my partner came home and ran over to embrace me. This was the moment he had been waiting for. I had finally joined the naturalistas.

When I first went natural in the early 2000s there were hardly any products designed for black women with natural hair. You couldn’t walk into Target and find a conditioner for curls. Many natural hair-care companies, like Curls, Miss Jessie’s and Kinky-Curly, were started by people stirring up concoctions in their kitchens and selling jars out of their homes.

Slowly things began to change, as an increasing number of black women ditched the relaxers. Mintel reported that spending on relaxers among black Americans fell by a third from 2011 to 2016. In that year nearly three-quarters of black women reported wearing their hair naturally at some point.

Suddenly natural hair looked like a good investment. CurlMix, a natural-hair-care company, received only $25,000 in venture-capital funding in 2018 but managed to bring in $1m in sales that same year. By 2020 that had risen to $6m. Large cosmetics companies wanted a piece of the action. L’Oréal developed a natural hair line in 2013 and Pantene followed in 2017.

Although black hair is now a multibillion-dollar business, prejudice persists

What’s surprising is that it took so long. Black people have always spent a lot on hair care. The first black female millionaires, Anne Malone and Madam C.J. Walker, owned black-hair empires in the early 1900s. By 2017 the black hair-care industry generated $2.5bn in revenue a year. You know natural hair is becoming mainstream when you can find your trusted hair gel at Walgreens.

Although black hair is now a multibillion-dollar business and there are celebrities with natural hair for tween girls to worship, prejudice persists, in the workplace and beyond. Going natural made me aware of forms of discrimination I’d never even thought about.

For most people, the airport body scanner is just the latest annoying impediment to seamless travel. They are meant to scan human bodies for irregularities, like concealed explosive devices. Unfortunately, to determine what is abnormal, the scanner must also determine who is normal. And black hair doesn’t come into that bracket.

On several occasions I have been told to step aside and turn my back to the agent. As with my school lice-check, a public employee fishes their gloved fingers through my hair. At least airport-security workers are often black women so they know the drill.

I’ve tried several hairstyles in the hope of avoiding this. No luck. Airport-security staff have squeezed my hair buns, poked at my afro, run their hands over each twisted strand, and asked me in front of my fellow passengers to remove hats that were hiding unflattering styles. I now know to get to the airport early.

A friend insists that airport staff change their gloves before they run their fingers through her hair. It’s the least they can do if they are going to inconvenience me, she says indignantly. I wish I had the guts to demand a glove change. Usually I’m so mortified by all the white people staring at me, I just close my eyes and wait to be dismissed.

Diverging from the norm is not only an issue for black women. Transgender people, Muslim women wearing hijabs and people with disabilities face similar indignities at airports. If only “the norm” had been questioned at product-development stage rather than after the scanner had inflicted its trauma.

When I was growing up, I never questioned the way the world worked. I didn’t imagine how different things would be if the white world had thought to accommodate me. I know how much conforming to white beauty standards has cost me and my family in financial terms – a few thousand dollars, maybe a job or two. But other forms of damage aren’t as easy to quantify. And they’re the ones that often run deepest. ■

Tamara Gilkes Borr is The Economist’s US public-policy correspondent

ILLUSTRATIONS: ALEXIS TSEGBA

ADDITIONAL IMAGES: GETTY, ALAMY. Model: @blueSPIT