I wrap my hair, deal with it!
The odd responses to black women who wear head wraps and scarves
I stood in the bathroom mirror with my wide-toothed comb, and my hat lay close by on the sink. As I got ready to comb my hair into a swirl that perfectly wrapped around my head, a woman (white, maybe in her late 50s) came out of the bathroom and froze in place.
While I’m sure she was initially headed to the sink to wash her hands, she just didn’t seem to understand what I was doing. I made eye contact with her in the mirror, initially to give a friendly “hello” with my eyes. But eye contact turned into gawking, and my eyes narrowed. The simple flick in my eyes made her remember her purpose, and my eyes followed her until she left the bathroom. I went back to wrapping my hair.
She wasn’t the first person who looked at me like a museum exhibit for wrapping my hair, but I still haven’t figured out why this is such a big deal.
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I’ve been chopping my hair off since high school. Pretty much any kind of haircut Halle Berry, Nia Long and Missy Elliott wore, I also wore. To this day, I’m still just not into really long hair. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never worn weave, although pretty much every relative and/or friend of mine has.
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Once it hits my shoulders, I usually go to a beauty salon to get it chopped off again. I am the only woman I know who enjoys the growing-back process far more than hair hanging down my shoulders and back. But somewhere around my early 30s, I realized I needed to do something other than put a curling iron to it every single day and give it a break from heat. I stopped chopping it off and curling it, and finally let it grow. And my cousin taught me how to wrap my hair so it would grow longer, even thicker and not require constant curling irons.