Spare a thought for the girls with curly hair

There’s something about having curly hair that sounds so romantic.

Imagine yourself sat by a lake, your beautiful locks swaying gently in the summer breeze, imagine your lover lustfully running their fingers through your mane as you talk about your childhood dreams, imagine your curls bouncing round your face and you and your friends recount last night’s VK fuelled debauchery.

It’s beautiful, it’s like something out of a renaissance painting and it’s totally, utterly untrue.

Whoever decided that curly hair was romantic and picturesque had obviously never spent three hours trying to get a Tangle Teaser through it.

Curly hair is a curse. It’s a lifetime sentence of hard work and patience. You’ll never known real pain until you’ve spent four hours on your hair only to realise it’s raining and you’ll never known true sadness until you’ve had to cut out one of your precious curls because it’s turned into an unbeatable knot.

Weathering the storm

Curly hair is a hair for no season. In the winter, the wind just adds to the tangles, in the summer it’s like constantly wearing a massive furry hat. A touch of humidity and you instantly become a yeti-like monster. And don’t even think about going out in the rain.

Classical conditioning

I’ve got boxes filled with half used products promising me all sorts of miracles. De-tangling, de-frizzing, definition. I don’t know who they test these products on but guaranteed they don’t have a curly hair on their body.

Is this normal?

Any magical products that do actually work are relegated to special aisles, hidden out of view from the lucky straight haired folk. We’re forced to feel like social outcasts just to keep our locks on lockdown.

Teenage nightmares

As a teenager I desperately wanted to fit in with all my emo mates. A childhood filled with my mum trying to get a comb through my hair should’ve given me more than enough misery to be the greatest, saddest emo around.

But having curly hair meant my dreams to be Hayley Williams could never come true. I spent hours straightening and combing out my curls but I’d always be left with a big frizzy mess.

Beauty behind the frizz

I know I could have it worse. In the grand scheme of things my hair could be so much curlier. I keep it pretty short so that it’s vaguely manageable. But every time someone tells me they wish they had curly hair like me it’s like nails down a chalkboard. They don’t – but they’ll never believe you.

But that’s because most people don’t see all the work that goes on behind the scenes. They don’t see the mountains of empty conditioner bottles or the sad, broken hairbrushes.

When it’s behaving, curly hair is beautiful. It’s undeniably hard work but that’s the curly haired secret. Most people wouldn’t be able to cope with it for more than a day but we’ve developed the patience to work it for a lifetime.

It takes a special kind of someone to rock these curls.