None of the three female leads sported any makeup at all (not even the no-makeup makeup look) and their hair was kept so natural. Premam was a revolutionary cinema in so many ways, but undoubtedly, the biggest impact it had on the general public was this: too embrace the beauty in the ordinary. My next inspiration for embracing my curly hair came years later, with the 2016 Malayalam movie Premam. The first time I found some semblance of representation was when I saw Indian actress Kajol in blockbuster movie, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jaayenge (1995). Deranged, wild people are also portrayed with unkempt curls - Bellatrix Lestrange from Harry Potter for example.Īfter growing up with these examples and many more, it was hard not to hate my hair. If curly hair does exist on a protagonist’s hair it’s usually movie curls, or it’s only a matter of time before it goes under a heating iron. Outside protagonists, you see curly haired girls often play second fiddle to the female protagonists. Gradually by the last film, she had straight hair, and a great loss of volume. In the Harry Potter series, we see Hermoine’s hair exist in its wonderful frizzy-ness at the beginning, which was so much more accurate to the books. Over the seasons, we see her become more confident and take care of her hair more, but somehow, to the show executives, this meant straightening it out and artificially curling it instead of taking care of her curls better. Her curls weren’t defined, but they existed. The top half was brushed through and pinned back for work, but the bottom half was left to do its own thing. The earlier seasons had her hair more curly, more tangled. As she’s changing and coming into herself, she’s also quite visibly undergone hair evolution. Over the nine seasons of The Office, we see one of the main characters, Pam Beasely, undergo a lot of change. (Don’t even get me started on the glasses.) This means getting rid of the glasses and straightening her hair. But when she finds out she’s the heir to the throne of Geneva, she undergoes a transformation to make her look more princess-like. Mia Thermapolis, the main character has huge, frizzy hair (look at that volume!), glasses and is clumsy. In reel-life, the most famous example of this is Princess Diaries. You know, delicate waves, perfectly curled locks of hair, all of it consistent and ever so bouncy. The curly hair you do see on screen? Most of the time, it’s hair that’s been straightened, and then curled with a curling wand. But unfortunately, that’s what the media and by extension, society propagates. Maybe I wouldn’t have staunchly believed that straight hair = better. Maybe if there was better curly hair representation in the media, I would’ve been more confident in my natural hair. I eventually bought a straightener, because all I was doing was fixing what was making myself better. I brushed my hair excessively and dreaded hair cuts because none of the hairdressers could figure out how to cut my short hair without making it look like a cloud. So it seemed like I was just grooming myself to be better as I bought straightening shampoos (I actually believed when the commercials said it’d help my hair). I dreaded parties and functions because it meant that despite my best efforts, my hair was still going to look like a mess, ruining the whole outfit, the whole picture, and eventually, my day. As a child, my hair was oiled most of the time, to make it easier for my mother to comb through it every morning before I headed out for school. Hair ties had to be scrunchie-size, always. The cloth ones were rarer to come by, but lost their elasticity quite quickly. Headbands never fit my head: the plastic ones always snapped as I tried them on. What this meant for me was that my mother didn’t know how to take care of my wavy, curly, forever tangled mess. A good portion of their days were dedicated to taking care of their hair and helping another family member take care of it as well. My father’s side of the family, however, has the curliest hair I’ve ever seen. Dreamy and flawless, never a hair out of place. To top it off, their hair was incredibly easy to take care of and shone brilliantly ( without oil!)Īt home, my mother and the rest of her family have straight silky hair. They got away with messy braids, because even though it was not prim and proper, it still looked decent. They didn’t have to stick to the one hairstyle that made them look the most tidy. One day they wore it in cute pigtails, one day it was loosely-tied braids and another day they left it untied. They could sport short hair and look chic and cool and stylish and not like a haircut gone wrong. All the popular girls at school had pin straight hair that framed their face perfectly and behaved exactly the way they wanted it to. Growing up, there was nothing I wanted more than having straight hair.
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