Girls with Curls

Arrow-straight hair is really desirable (to whites — the politics of black hair is another subject), right? So much so that countless women will spend 45 long minutes blowing out the last vestige of curl every single time they wash their hair. So why is the permanent-wave business in such good shape? Ask 90% of curly-haired women that last question, and it’s as if you had switched briefly from English to Sanskrit.

Well, the grass is always greener, you are probably thinking. Everyone wants what she doesn’t have.

But girls with a lot of curls seem particularly unhappy with their “real” hair.

Top hairdresser Roger Thompson, the master of wash and wear haircuts, is discouraged by the fact that 90% of women with curly hair hate it. “If they finally accept it, it’s an incredible release,” he says.

That’s because it’s a control issue. Curly-haired women believe (inaccurately, by the way) that if you have straight hair, you tell the hair what to do, whereas with curls, the hair rules its owner. So the owner fights back. There are three basic methods: blow-drying, chemical relaxing and the movie star’s method of choice — a personal hairdresser. Nicole Kidman can have straight hair any time she feels like it, but most real-life curly heads don’t have the time and money to win an uphill battle against nature.

Still, a surprising number of women are slaves to straightening. Kidman switches between straight and curly at whim (which seems ideal). But there are numerous public heads who so totally reject the image of curly hair that their locks are never seen au naturel.

What’s the stigma? Too “ethnic”? Simple Barbie worship? (Is there a difference between those two?) Or nothing more sinister than the iron hand of conformity in the velvet glove of fashion? Sleek is in, so — as the saying goes — beauty knows no pain.

If you have curly hair, do you like it? What do you do to manage it? Why do many women want straight hair?