By Racheli Jian, Senior Arts & Culture Editor and Layout Editor
Confidence. Everyone struggles with it. For some, lack of confidence stems from intellectual insecurities. For others, it’s their physical appearance. For me, it was my hair.
Growing up, I paid little attention to my physical appearance. I was a self-proclaimed tomboy who despised pink and loved sports. I was a chubby little girl who had been blessed with curly hair. I remember being complimented by many adults on my curls. Even though I put little effort into their care, I was constantly told how “lucky” I was to have this kind of hair. That everyone else was paying a high price for what I was born with. Despite all the encouragement I received to embrace my curls, I couldn’t ignore that most people didn’t choose to embrace theirs.
My curly hair was gifted to me from my father, a sephardi Jew from North Africa. My mom’s natural hair is wavy. The only female relatives I had who had curly hair were in Israel, and on the off chance I would see them, they always wore their hair straight. They would constantly tell me that my curls were beautiful, but if they were to wear their natural curls it would be a mess. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand what they meant, but as I got older my own mess of curls started to develop.
For some biological reason unknown to me, hair changes as you grow older. For me, this meant that my curly hair, which usually never needed any specific product, became a frizzy, dry, tangle of curls. If this wasn’t enough, I was also starting 6th grade which was not a great time to be insecure about my physical appearance. My solution at the time was tying my hair back into a tight ponytail. I didn’t have to deal with my curls and they were never in my face. At most holidays or celebrations, I would straighten my hair because I thought my natural curls were unmanageable. I felt like I had no other choice. This routine worked for me, up until high school.
High school is already a time for growth, but like many, COVID-19 was thrown into the mix. Throughout 10th and 11th grade, a lot of my time was devoted to zoom and long walks, but another big focus of mine was self-improvement. Some people did Chloe Ting workouts. Others learned a new instrument. But I decided it was time I learnt how to deal with my hair. It was a long process which consisted of a lot of unlearning.
At the end of the day, I was tired of hiding and changing something so integral to my identity.
I bought curly hair products I saw on social media (which I would later realize were actually damaging my hair) and started learning how to style my hair the right way. It was definitely a learning process with a lot of days where I looked majorly disheveled. But, when schools went back to in person learning, I started wearing my hair down more often. Again, it wasn’t super easy. I would have to wake up earlier than usual to make time for the new time consuming-routine and I felt uncomfortable at first, but after a while it became normal.
When I started Stern, I expected to see a lot more girls with curly hair because of the somewhat true Jewish stereotype of having curly hair. While there were a handful, most people had pin straight hair. Or at least that’s what I thought. Those first few months at Stern, I heard about more chemical straightening treatments than I ever had in my life. It would usually go something like this: “Wow your hair’s so curly. Mine used to be curly but I did ProAddiction,” or any other permanent straightening process.
Whenever someone said this to me, it broke me a little. These girls didn’t feel confident enough in their natural hair. They felt like they had to permanently change something about themselves to feel good. And I related to that.
I do want to make it clear that I’m not against people changing themselves for confidence. We all do it. Whether that be makeup or nose jobs or haircuts, we all alter our appearance slightly. However, as someone who grew up wishing my hair was straight or more tame, I felt like these girls just hadn’t seen how beautiful their hair could be. In some ways, it invalidated all the growth I had attained about my appearance.
Four years later, in my last year at Stern, I’ve come to realize that confidence doesn’t stem from one universal thing, but rather it comes from internal validation. While I might have found a way to be more confident about my hair through wearing it naturally, others find that confidence by wearing it straight. Instead of tearing down other girls for wanting to change something about themselves, I realized they are also just trying to feel more confident in themselves. I hope that we can raise a generation of little girls who won’t have to straighten their hair, but who might want to.