The science and history behind curly hair, and their changing perceptions in India and beyond

Hair is integral to an individual’s appearance and is closely associated with one’s identity. Historically, African-American people’s hair has been perceived as “ugly, unruly and unprofessional” by powerful racial groups in Western societies, for not meeting Eurocentric standards of beauty. Non-straight hair has been seen and treated “differently” in other societies, too. Even in India, this perception of it being “different” persists, albeit less evidently. Here’s how.

First, what qualifies as non-straight hair?

American Stylist Andre Walker has given a popular categorisation of hair types, putting them into four broad categories: Straight, Wavy, Curly and Kinky, with Kinky including hair so curly that is in “tight coils”. Each category has subtypes. Walker’s rationale for this classification was for people to identify the category their hair fit in, and he then suggested different ways of caring for different types of hair.

What makes hair curly or straight? The science behind the strands

Dr Chytra Anand, a Bengaluru-based dermatologist and a trichologist, told indianexpress.com, “Almost 99 per cent of these variations in hair are determined by many genes and genetic polymorphisms. One per cent can be attributed to a combination of environmental and external care factors.” Hair tends to curl up more in hotter climates, making curly/non-straight hair more prevalent in South India, she added.

Further, curly or non-straight hair texture (Types 2, 3 and 4 as per Walker’s classification) is a ‘dominant’ gene trait, said Dr Stuti Khare, a skin and hair specialist based in Mumbai. “Frizziness, a characteristic of curls that is caused due to lack of moisture and hotter weather, also ends up being incorrectly equated to curliness,” Dr Khare told indianexpress.com.

Natural hair and its history

Beyond skin colour, hair type as a feature has also been discriminatorily seen as something antithetical to the European beauty standard throughout African-American history.

Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps in their 2014 book titled Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, talk about hair texture as one of the divisionary and racially discriminatory methods used during the forced enslavement of Africans. The White planters treated women with “good hair” better than the women they considered as having “bad hair”. “‘Good hair’ was thought of as long, lacking in kinky, tight, or frizzy curls”, they stated.

This has continued in some ways, to date. A 2020 paper titled ‘Natural Hair Bias in Job Recruitment’, by Christy Zhou Koval and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, published in the Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal, outlined hair biases against Black women that persist in contemporary workplaces.

Through several studies on job applications in the US, they concluded that the bias and subsequent discrimination are because professional standards and norms are based on the physical characteristics of white women with straight hair. Black women with natural hairstyles were considered less professional and less competent when compared to White women, and even those Black women who had straightened hair, the paper read.

Byrd and Tharps mentioned in their book how the perception of “good” and “bad” hair has continued across generations. “Later on, to have ‘good hair’ meant to have a hair texture that was equated to economic opportunity and social advantage. While ‘bad hair’ was believed to be markers of backwardness and justification for one’s inferiority,” they wrote on issues surrounding natural hair in the 21st century.

What about the Indian perception of hair?

While the treatment of curly hair in India is not the same as in the US, given its loaded historical associations with slavery, there is a less-than-positive perception of it. This is the trickle-down effect of the discriminatory beliefs that exist in the US, said Anshita Mehrotra, the founder of FixMyCurls, an Indian curly hair brand aimed to help people embrace their natural hair. Mehrotra, who also has non-straight hair, said “It also gets problematic when people don’t see it (curly hair) as something that can originate in India, the South perhaps.”

This perception starts from a place of judgement and is ultimately rooted in standards of beauty that are implicitly Eurocentric, said Asha Barrak, founder of an Indian curly hair care brand Ashba Botanics. Being curly-haired herself, Asha was among the first in India to start a curly hair care blog called ‘Right Ringlets’ in 2014. She also started a social media community blog called Indian Curl Pride on Facebook to “further the movement.”

In line with Byrd and Tharps’s findings, Barrak said: “Straight hair is considered the ‘ideal’ hair: ‘clean’, ‘proper’ and ‘perfect’. Curls are seen as “unkempt and out of control”. “From personal experience, I can say that how non-straight hair is perceived in India speaks volumes of us as a judgemental society which has internalised Western beauty ideals,” she added.

This persisting perception of non-straight hair in India is also seen in its representation in media and popular culture. Every person playing the female lead or “heroine” in Indian fiction movies or television is largely shown with straight hair with not a strand out of place, Mehrotra said. “Negative roles, male and/or female, are most likely to be shown with curly or non-straight hair. I could never spot any lead character with curly hair, let alone an Indian one,” she said.

“Teenagers still mostly hate their curls and waves wanting the ‘perfect’ straight hair they see in pop culture all around us,” Dr Anand said. However, she noted that people, especially women, are embracing their natural hair in their mid-20s and 30s.

Embracing curls and change

The most commonly enforced hair care routine in India – wash hair, oil it, comb it, braid it – is being reimagined to fit the reality of more people, according to both Dr Anand and Dr Khare. “The internalised routine that all our parents passed down to us does not work for all types of hair,” Dr Khare said.

“Initially, I’d get a lot of people wanting a ‘permanent’ fix to change natural hair texture to supposedly look better. Now it is changing, going more towards treatments to manage natural hair,” Dr Chytra Anand said. Hair care experts and entrepreneurs in the expanding curly hair care industry credit this to awareness through social media.

Having started out as a global ‘Curly Hair Movement’ on social media around 2018, it gained momentum with hashtags such as #CurlyisBeautiful and #CurlyHairDontCare on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. “I found Asha’s Indian Curl Pride on Facebook in 2018, a year before I started FixMyCurls. It had close to 40,000 members and we’ve only grown since,” Mehrotra said.

“Our society does not like anything that cannot be controlled. Non-straight hair, especially curly hair cannot be controlled. It is better accepted and embraced,” she added.