The curliest of curls are cute on a little girl, but when she grows up, an adorable feature can get ugly… By Sarah Knowlton

There was a little girl, who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead … When she was good she was very good indeed, but when she was bad she was horrid.

So went the nursery rhyme (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who knew?) oft quoted to me as a child. A curly-haired child. My first experience of other-ness. It framed my head in bouncy blonde ringlets, naturally forming itself into perfect little sausages all over my head a la Shirley Temple. I even learned the “Animal Crackers” and “The Good Ship Lollipop” and would perform them on command. Or even voluntarily. Or even incessantly.

My hair made me unique in our family, and was often commented on. My older sister tells me she remembers people stopping us on the street to admire it/me (I was pretty cute.) We have a favorite family picture of me on a picnic table at about 2 years old, brushing my grandma’s Cocker Spaniel, Cookie. We had the exact same hair. My father called me Medusa as a pet name (Note to fathers: Do not call your daughters Medusa when they’re children. It’s disturbing when we eventually learn about that myth. Really.)

As often happens, my blond curls turned brunette and their texture coarsened. My mother—going back to the workforce when I was a child—didn’t want to deal with tangles so she made me wear it short for all of my childhood. But not cute, pixie short. It puffed out horizontally and stood straight up wildly. I was targeted as different, named “Brillo Head,” and teased mercilessly. I remember for one grade school picture carefully coiffing it so that from the front it almost resembled a human head, then feeling abject horror upon seeing the prints: they had placed us at a 3/4 angle to the camera and the giant block of hair captured from that perspective appeared to me to resemble the head of John Merrick. Combined with the glasses, the braces, and the ill-fitting sweater, I can see why I spent so much school time locked in a locker. (I once showed this picture to a shrink and she responded with, “Why didn’t anyone help you?” It was bad.)

My family would say I got all the Czech blood that resulted in my coarse dark hair. My sisters—straight haired, blonde, and very pretty—commented on my hairy (compared to theirs) arms. And somehow, almost imperceptibly, there was a negative value placed on these traits. (Maybe because my sisters seemed to have received more of the Swedish blood.) Even with WASPs there is stratification: Who is the fairest of them all?

But the ugly duckling did eventually blossom. I grew my hair out, fighting through the awkward middle length period with tons of gel to glue it down, and eventually had an enviable mane of wild curls. It was, after all, the 80s, and big hair ruled. Then in the 90s, I found a salon in New York City just for curly hair. Ouidad, founded by a Lebanese woman of the same name who was so fed up with lack of good products for curly hair she went and got a chemistry degree and created her own line of products for kinky, non-African hair. Many a Jew ’fro was tamed in her salon. Your curls came out smooth—formed, not frizzy—and healthy looking. Plus, she had a cutting technique called slicing, which prevented the dreaded triangle head (Remember Gilda Radnor’s spectacular Roseanne Roseannadanna wig? The horror … the horror….) I remember tearing up when I saw a mother leading her overjoyed tween daughter out of the salon after having her hair done. What I would’ve done to have a place to bring Brillo Head.

Working as an actress, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked to straighten my mane. It was one of the first things suggested to me after I finished graduate school.

Manager: “Honey, name me one A-list actress with curly hair.”
Me (timidly): “Andie McDowell?”
Manager: “Sweetheart, she’s one of the most beautiful women in the world. Let’s be realistic here.”
Me (not aloud): “Thanks a lot, bitch.”

Finally, I realized, especially for commercial work, with my curly hair, I wasn’t white enough. My “ethnic” hair could read to the American consumer as Italian, Latina, or even (whispered) Jewish. I, a WASP from Shaker Heights, wasn’t white enough for Hollywood or Madison Avenue.

So I went to the dark side: I got a straight haircut and began wearing it straight all the time. I was also anticipating getting pregnant and wanted a no-fuss ‘do for the anticipated workload of a newborn. But then I got divorced (sad trombone sound). I did the deed at a black hair salon called Curves in Bed-Stuy, a famously African-American part of Brooklyn (I was too ashamed of my choice to go to Ouidad.) The owners, two sisters, half African-American and half Japanese, specialized in kinky hair. They did curl styling and management, chemical softening, and full-on straightening with the old-school hair irons heated in a kiln. I might have been the first white woman to make their before-and-after photo gallery.

I loved the cut so much, I’ve been sticking to short-and-straight since then. Honestly, it’s a lot less work then maintaining a nest of curls. I even wax my arms since coming to L.A. (It’s just part of the culture here.) But I sometimes wonder if after 10 years of denying my roots (no pun intended), it might be time to grow it out and let it curl up again. Short and curly doesn’t work for me—too much childhood trauma associated with it. No matter how cute people say it looks, I just see a shapeless, unkempt blob of frizz. I find myself envying full-maned women from time to time, while also thinking they look a mess. I suspect there may be some unresolved ethnic identity issues there and subsequent ambivalence concerning perceived “outsider” status (Not WASPy enough, but not Black or Jewish or “other” enough either.)

But I also genuinely like how I look with my current straight ’do, and I don’t care if that perception is based on denial of ethnicity or identifying with the aggressor or whatever. Maybe I’m just a traitor to my hair type. So sue me.

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Sarah Knowlton is an actress, writer and psychologist-in-training living in Los Angeles.

For Further Reading: Learning to Love the Scale

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Tags: curls, curly hair, hair issues, sirens, Vanity

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Vanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.