Coloured Hair

d_kakong March 24, 1999

Hi DivineMiss,

I just wrote a whole response but my time expired before I could send it.

Thank you for your profound comments and I did see the New Yorker article and bought it, but I haven't read it yet. There is a book by Grant McCracken called Big Hair that goes into the same issues raised in that article, based on how you describe it.

It's interesting to contemplate how the political nature of Black hair changes. Just thinking about present times, where there are Black women blonding their hair, could fall right in line with Mariame Kaba's argument about straightening hair as rational choice. Perhaps blonding hair is a rational choice for Black women too, it's not enough to have straight hair to access the White power structures.

I know that colouring hair is nothing new to Black women. An old boss of mine who had gone to Ethiopia had told me that the women there use henna (which I think originally comes from East Africa) so in the pure sunlight there, their hair will shine brilliantly. And it works.

I think definitely that there is an impermanence to the meaning of why women colour their hair - but it depends on what colour. In the Big Hair book I mentioned earlier, a book that concentrates on White women's hair, in the early part of this century it was not desirable to have blond hair. Bad women like Mae West were the blonds and this was a time when exuding sexual power wasn't favoured. It wasn't until Marilyn Monroe came on the scene that blond became such a sought after item. I think the politics of hair colour and hair aesthetics in general can be closely tied to the politics of the male psyche. Do women rule what they do with their hair, or do men? I hope this isn't a heterosexist question.

I will add more once I've read that New Yorker article.