Lorraine Massey bounded up Michigan Avenue, her step as springy as her curls, looking for curly hair and seeing it everywhere.
“See that?” she said, nodding at what looked like a straight bob. “She has curly hair.”
Yes, and so did that apparently straight-haired woman, and that one, and that one, Massey revealed, breezily outing women under her breath as they passed. She can spot fake-straight at 20 paces, mostly by the “blowfly,” wisps that have been broken by fierce artificial heat and pulling.
So many gloriously curly heads blow-dried into submission; it saddens, but also galvanizes her. Massey, 37, a New York hairstylist and author of a manifesto called “Curly Girl” (Workman Publishing, $9.95), is out to free curly-haired women from their hair-straightening bondage.
The prisoners have spent years sleeping with their hair wrapped around coffee cans and fearing humidity. They grew up with vicious nicknames, recounted by curly-haired contributors to naturallycurly.com, a Web site devoted to curl pride:
Nesthead. Medusa. Chia Pet. Chewbacca.
Even so, many of the women wrote that as adults, they have embraced their curls. A 13-year-old girl wrote that she always has loved her golden-red curls, although people stare: “It gets old, and the PETTING!!!!! Goodness, you would think they had never felt hair before, like it is an entirely new concept. Geeeeeez!”
However, the call of straight, swingy hair is powerful. Gwyneth Paltrow feels ugly without it. “Straightening my hair is big for me in terms of feeling confident,” she said in the March issue of Vogue. “If I have frizzy big hair, I feel like I have zero sex appeal and charisma.”
Chelsea Clinton had her curls straightened for a Paris fashion show in January. “Chelsea! Chelsea! Have you forsaken us?” howled naturallycurly.com, which put her in its “Hall of Shame.”
Why do people fight their curls? “People with curly hair feel they look disheveled, not really polished,” said Joseph Cartagena, director of Genacelli Salon & Day Spa on the North Side, who said requests for straightening hair far outnumber requests for curling.
Her hair “doesn’t look finished” when curly, said Tiffany Wegmann, 20, who was visiting Water Tower Place from Cedar Rapids and who spends an hour every day blow-drying her blond hair straight. “It’s wild and crazy and frizzy. It’s nasty.”
“When it’s curly, I feel like my face is fat,” said Jocelyn Tegeler, 26, also of Cedar Rapids.
For black women, the question has historically been about more than aesthetics. Before the civil rights movement, blacks had to straighten their hair in order to get jobs or even walk down the street unmolested, said JoAnne Cornwell, professor of Africana studies and French at San Diego State University and founder of a hair technique called Sisterlocks, in which African-American hair is rolled into tiny, neat locks.
Straightened hair is still more popular than natural looks, she said, but by choice rather than necessity, and by a narrower margin in recent years.
When Massey was growing up in England, she was not a curly girl, but a surly girl. She “hated, hated” her hair. When she was 2, she asked her mother for a straight-haired wig.
The turning point came in adulthood, when a hairstylist friend abetted her fight against nature by designing a highly creative ‘do that was parted in the back and dyed red.
A friend told her the back of her head looked like a baboon’s butt. That was her last straight style. She has spent the years since figuring out how to turn frizzy masses into cascading curls. Her own hair, luscious corkscrews gleaming with good health, is a spectacular testimony to her success. As she walked through Water Tower Place on a journalistic hair research trip, mouths opened in wonderment.
“Can I touch your hair?” asked Giovanna Ladu, 25, an Italy-born flight attendant whose own long dark curls were knockouts.
Even women who claimed to have straight hair eagerly plied Massey with hair questions. Massey encouraged the clearly curly, and challenged the allegedly straight.
“Excuse me, do you have curly hair?” she asked a smooth-haired woman.
The woman backed away as if Massey had suggested that she had lice. “No! I have body,” she said.
Massey wasn’t buying. “She had a head full of curls” in its natural state, she declared after the woman hurried off. “That lady has a misconception of her hair.”
Massey’s devotion to curly hair is impossible to overstate. In her own case, it extends beyond death. A clause in her will forbids anyone to straighten her hair in the event of her demise.
`Honor each curl’
She sees the curly head as a complex tonsorial ecology containing many different types of curls. “It’s like an environment in there,” she said. “You have to honor each curl.”
She has as many words for curly hair as Eskimos do for snow. The top layer is the “canopy,” which suffers the most environmental abuse. The protected layers underneath are “crouching curls,” as in “crouching curls, hidden gorgeousness,” as Massey likes to say.
Curls that extend sideways are “east-west,” as ones that hang straight down are “north-south.”
Her own curls, she said, show what happens naturally with proper care.
“People ask me what I do,” she said. “But it’s what I don’t do.”
Which is two things: She doesn’t blow-dry it and she doesn’t shampoo it.
Shampoo–“poo,” she calls it, a term that only hints at her hostility–is the mortal enemy of curly hair, she said. It dries out hair that is already desperately thirsty for moisture. It is a detergent that highly-porous curly hair absorbs like a sponge. It is the prime cause of frizz.
“Shampoo makes dry hair feel like pubic hair. There’s a lot of pubic hair running around here today,” she said, glancing around at the shopping crowd.
Poo-less cleaning
Massey has not shampooed her hair in three years. Instead, she wets her hair every day in the shower and massages any dirt out with conditioner. Her hair looks shiny clean, and there was no discernable hygiene or flaking problem.
Potential converts blanch at the no-poo prospect. For lifelong pooers and blow-dryers, it is a daunting regime. Some of her own clients have fallen off the curly-hair wagon. “They were secretly blowing it straight more often than they were telling me,” she said, with unfortunate results for their hair.
In the SoHo salon where she is co-owner, she refuses to blow-dry clients’ hair. If die-hards insist, they must go to another stylist, who does it discreetly out of Massey’s sight.
Winning women over
But she won over a rapt curly-haired audience at a book-signing at the Bookstall in Winnetka, which turned into a bonding experience for a roomful of curly girls.
As radical as the no-shampoo regimen seemed, “I’m going to try it,” vowed Robbyn Singer, 24, of Evanston.
Janet Forte, 46, of Winnetka, already had. She had bought Massey’s book two weeks earlier and hadn’t shampooed since.
“It looks fabulous,” breathed Jan Tranen, 46, a lyricist from Glencoe. “Can I touch it?”
Massey is a patient woman. She foresees the day when more girls show curls, and the $1.81 billion in shampoo sales last year starts to see a dent.
“It’s going to take time,” she said, “but I’m here for the long haul.”
