“What’s my hair type?”
When I started my natural hair journey, figuring out my “hair type” is the first thing I did. Created by Andre Walker, Oprah’s long time hairstylist, the hair typing chart goes from 1A — straight hair — to 4C — the tightest, kinkiest hair — and was originally designed in the 1990s to sell Walker’s line of hair products.
The natural hair movement has evolved — for the worse, some say — from an online community of women sharing tips and tricks on how to take care of their hair to a multi-billionaire dollar industry, one that is lucrative for brands and content creators alike. Hair texture, rather than hair health, has become the dominant focus of natural hair content on social media, and the hair type chart is the underpinning of it all. Content on how to define Type 4 curls and “fight” shrinkage subtly reinforce the very ideas the natural hair movement was started to fight against. The message is clear: Kinkier hair needs to be tamed into submission.
“The natural hair community failed Type 4 naturals by trying to implement Type 3 hair care onto kinkier hair,” Sharmaine Joy-el, a natural hair and lifestyle content creator, told me in an interview.
Joy-el did her big chop in 2018. She said that while her sister would often receive compliments on her Type 3 hair, she didn’t receive a single one until her hair grew to shoulder length: “I had already mentally and emotionally prepared myself for this kind of thing before I let the scissors touch my hair. I knew that by revealing my true hair texture that how others would treat me would change pretty drastically. I had to be stronger than the insults and treatment that would be thrown at me.”
Looser textured natural hair is still overrepresented in natural hair brand campaigns and on social media, while creators with kinkier hair receive less partnerships and views. This is not the fault of Andre’s chart; it just gave more legitimacy to a dynamic that was always present. In an interview with The Stoop podcast in 2018, Walker said it was never his intention to do so and he just wanted to create products for different types of hair. He said, “It’s going from zero texture to highly textured, so going from one, being straight, to four, being the kinkiest. I’ve had people that have been very sensitive about that because they thought I was giving kinky hair less importance by putting it at number four … but that just goes to show you how sensitive hair and texture is.”
Beyond the obvious hierarchy the hair typing system reinforces, it doesn’t actually tell you much about how to care for your hair. It’s arbitrary and subjective. Most people, including myself, have multiple different curl patterns on their head. My “4A” hair will behave very differently and respond to different products than another woman with supposedly the same texture. What you consider 4B hair, another person will argue is actually 4C hair. The system doesn’t take into consideration things like porosity, density, and elasticity — all extremely important things to know when figuring out how to actually care for your hair. Like snowflakes, no two curls are the same, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Though the hair typing chart may have served some purpose at some point, it’s really time to let it go. Hair is complex and can’t be neatly organized onto a chart. Kinky hair doesn’t need to be managed into something it’s not.
“Do not have expectations on what you think your hair should look like,” Joy-el said. “Let it grow freely and accept it in whatever pattern or type it shows you … Listen to your hair; it will show you what it needs.”
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