Status quo or wild woman, is Hollywood afraid of curly hair? It’s a question I began asking as I binge watched my way through sci-fi, action, mystery, romance and comedy TV series and began to notice a pattern. Watch nearly ANY series and you’ll notice that any female main character with curly hair in the first season will have it straightened by the second or third season. Once I noticed this pattern I couldn’t stop noticing and sure enough, every show, this is the pattern.
While such a phenomenon on TV could easily be brushed aside as meaningless, I would argue it’s actually essential to look at and question because media has a huge impact on our lives. Hair, how we wear it, what color and length it is, defines our personality. We typify people when we meet or see them by how they dress, carry themselves and by their hair. Take the “who has more fun, blondes or brunettes?” argument glamorized by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russel in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Hitchcock apparently cast blondes as his leading ladies because he felt blonde hair personified innocence which contrasted nicely to his dark themes and cinematography. The number of bottled blonde celebrities is a clear indication of our belief in that edict and who can blame women for wanting a hair color idolized in the media?
Clearly hair is powerful and matters, so much so that women have been stoned over leaving their hair uncovered. Women who lose their hair to cancer often feel as much grief over the loss of their hair as they do over their illness. Growing up as a mixed-race woman with curly hair in an all-white town, I lived in a kind of limbo of acceptance, envy, ostracism and self-hatred about my hair. As a young girl I was often ridiculed and made fun of for having darker skin and hair that was different. “Don’t sit next to her, she has cooties” was said on the bus and when a line of 9 year old boys made fun of me one afternoon and called me ugly I was convinced they were right. I didn’t realize that they were simply doing what humans do when they see something different, they fear it. I longed for the golden curls of the girl down the street. I could see how people responded to her differently because of that beautiful hair and did everything I could to straighten mine out, including getting up at 5 am to hike to a friend’s house to use her blow dryer (we didn’t have electricity), only to have my hard work undone at any hint of moisture. In college I was vindicated as the compliments and looks of envy rolled in I began to see my hair as beautiful, a gift and an attribute rather than a curse.
We see short hair as boyish, tough, elfish, cute, gamine or rebellious (if spikey and colored). Which brings up another interesting pattern in Hollywood TV shows in which the lead actress usually starts with long hair that gets hacked off by the second or third season. While this may be a great way to breath new personality into a character, it makes one wonder if Hollywood hair stylists and producers are just lacking on time to come up with something more original like dying it another color or making it curly. It makes one wonder how the actress feels about having her long locks chopped off. Long hair is a big part of a woman’s femininity.
Looking at perceptions about curly hair in America, we associate it with innocence when it’s long and flowing on a princess or an elven queen. That’s when curly hair is seen as pure and sweet and safe. We also don’t mind curly hair when it’s on the quirky, geeky girl (preferably with braces or glasses). Just think of Sarah Jessica Parker as cute side-kick in Footloose before she changed to Glamazon in Sex in the City. Even there, her curly hair helped to define her as adventurous and different from her friends. Actors have “fros” when we want them to be fierce. We give that tussled, curly “just out of bed” look, to female temptresses and sirens. In short, see curly hair as wild and wanton. We see curls, waves and frizz as a metaphor for the untamed animal/nature side of ourselves with the exception of the 1970s when everyone wanted curly hair, even those who couldn’t rock it, as many thousands of photos of terrible perms can attest. Was this due to the African American influence on fashion during this time. Black neighborhoods are known to have had a big influence in disco fashion. Is this Hollywood pattern of “straightening out” it’s leading ladies merely a reflection of trend and innocent, or is there a deeper, darker side to this choice? Women are influenced by photo shopped models in magazine and desire impossible standards of thinness. How many African American celebrities let their hair go au natural? Are curly haired women being subtly told what they have is inferior by these changes in hair styles in TV shows? Is it mirroring our own cultural stereotypes about curly hair and straight hair as it does so many social issues? It’s an interesting question and one, that for us curly haired girls, cuts deep.
