#white people will treat hair texture like the one in the nicole kidman picture as a threat display

[3liza]

long post about puzzling manifestations of White Woman Hair Standards

ok so i realize this is firmly in the realm of White Girl Complaints and i apologize for that. everything i'm describing here is white-on-white friendly fire from the white policing of Black hair and Black people get way more shit about this than i ever will (the history of hair texture's association in white culture with race is extremely complicated and i dont have time rn, but it's really interesting, look up "circassian beauties" sometime). i have the standard 3b-c curl pattern. when my hair is wet it forms ringlets, and then dries into ringlets, the Merida hair if you will, its a pretty common scottish gene. when i brush it out when it's dry, it looks approximately like this pre-raphaelite painting of Elizabeth Siddel. this was a common and even desirable hair texture in the 19th century for white women, and was imitated with curling irons and perms and beer rinses. this state of affairs continued roughly until the 90s, when straight--or if textured, very obviously rollered or curled with tools, never natural--became not only on-trend, but the only permissible hair texture to have in a professional environment. and now, if i go outside on the West Coast of the USA with my hair in the Elizabeth Siddel condition, it is like people have spotted a plague victim. we're talking audible and visible pointing and laughing on many occasions even as an adult, asking me if im wearing a wig, and every single person i talk to will either treat me observably worse than when my hair is straight, and/or have Something to Say About It, ranging from unsolicited advice about "conditioner" to asking me if im "okay". any rude question or comment you can think of that i had to answer with "no, this is just my hair. this is my normal hair when i havent spent three hours on it" has been directed at me when my hair is like the painting, including asking me about my racial background, sometimes just assuming/telling me i'm mixed race (white people LOVE to do this to each other)

i'm not sure what to attribute this to, exactly. it's obviously based in American racism, i'm just not sure how the switch happened from curly/frizzy hair being considered an "exotic" thing that was observed by white culture to be more common outside the white race but still expected to show up on white people now and then, to something that was considered a symptom of freakishness or cause for alarm. it seems to have happened suddenly in the mid 90s, because before then, youd see celebrities with frizzy spiral perms all over the place. i dont think Nicole Kidman has shown her natural hair texture outside her house since the late 80s

she has the same hair texture gene as i do, white australians are mostly scots-irish convict phenotypes like mine. she will appear in public with curls, but not natural ones, always roller sets/curling iron/blowout curls.

Natasha Lyonne is another public example of some texture being allowed through but its because she is always playing characters who are insane, "quirky", lesbian, drug addicts, or just profoundly weird. and even then 1. her natural hair is wavy, not curly and 2. it's still styled to death even if the styling is to make it "look" unstyled. Carol Kane is another one, again, she used to play leading girls in the 70s and 80s and then became a "weird cat lady" character actor in the 90s,partially due to age sure, but even in Kimmy Schmidt when she was supposed to have crazy cat lady hair they were still roller setting or two-strand twist setting it. it was not natural curl pattern, they had to straighten it and then recurl it to make it screen acceptable. even though this is her natural texture (2c-3a and some mixed ringlet/wave pattern, im guessing):

backcombed and scrunched a bit on the left, brushed out dry on the right (possibly with extensions, hard to tell)

and here's how they're presenting "crazy cat lady" in Kimmy Schmidt:

it actually started out longer and frizzier in the early episodes and they made it way more conservative as the show went on

i've been puzzling over this for years. between 1993 and 2010 i just sort of assumed it was lingering Aniston Effect and eventually other white people would stop bothering me about my hair, but the longer it goes on the more puzzling it is.

theres no appreciation for white girls with fucked up puffy frizzy hair anymore. we just sort of lost our way in the 90s and never found our way back out of the jennifer aniston torment nexus