Eventually my parents enrolled me in a Catholic private school, where I went from being one student in a melting pot of many ethnicities to one spot of color in a sea of white. As one of fewer than ten Black students in a student body of roughly six hundred, I felt like my appearance was at odds with the natural order of things. Still, I knew my hair was this magical thing.
There was only a handful of us Black girls, and we kept showing up to school each month with new beginnings on our heads—that’s how each new style always felt to me.
Things took a turn when I hit the age of fourteen, when my cousins began to call me White because of the way I spoke or because my body was a skinny, hapless bag of bones they said no Black man in their right mind would ever settle for. So I started trying to prove my Blackness and in the process felt like I was failing at the very thing that was the most obvious about me. Meanwhile, at school, where everything from my body to my very being was up for constant scrutiny, I was too Black. My small curves looked large in comparison to those of my White classmates. They’d call me grosses fesses (“big bum” in French). This was confusing to me.
One day my English literature teacher even went as far as to call me out in front of the class, telling me my people have an arched back, as she traced a line with her finger down the dip in my spine to where it swerved into a pair of round butt cheeks, which she said were distracting the boys. She urged me to wear baggier clothes. I wanted out of this state of limbo, in which I felt too big and too small, too Black and not Black enough.
America, or at least the idea of it, seemed to offer a gateway. I discovered this at the age of thirteen when a cousin, having returned from a visit to the States, gave me a present she bought during her travels there. “Just For Me” read the brand name in bright, graphic, multicolored type on the box of hair relaxer. On its front, a photo of a little Black American girl with smooth skin and long, straight, lustrous hair that curled at the ends. I was mesmerized. Perms were the latest African American fashion to make its way over to France. The girl on the box was my first view of a global family that existed elsewhere. I imagined a world of Black people abroad and in my future.
As for my hair, I got it relaxed. And my sister, who is seven years older than me, relaxed hers too. We’d curl our hair in rollers and, along with our cousins, give each other oil treatments every weekend. Relaxed hair is more fragile and prone to damage than it is in its natural state, but we were all figuring it out together. As we do.
I spent my teen years in the early aughts experimenting with a range of hairstyles inspired by pop-star versions of the little girl on the box. There was Aaliyah’s long layers and Alicia Keys’s braided crowns. At school I became popular for braiding my classmates’ hair, replicating Alicia’s zigzags. And my Blackness became a form of social currency.
This was also around the time I discovered India Arie and spent my weekends trying to translate her lyrics into French. I felt like she got me. She looked happy and free, a place where I wanted to be. And then there was Jill Scott, who showed a strength I aspired to have. But none of my friends knew these singers. They were my secret happy place—a kind of contraband source of Black wisdom and inspiration.
A few years later I went to business school, where I felt even more alien than I did at private school. I wasn’t just Black, I was also from the suburbs. Regardless, I did the braids, the roller sets, the experiments, and I wore all the things that made me, me.
When I began a career in banking in Paris’s financial district, I started experimenting with sew-in weaves. In a lot of my social circles, they were a visual signifier that you’re doing okay in the world, polished and glamorous. So I followed suit. Not to mention having a weave could save time during the workweek; I didn’t need to spend extra minutes and hours doing my hair.
Most of all, I loved going to the salon to get the hair put in. It was another world. I loved sitting next to so many different kinds of women, where everyone felt like family and we could be our lively selves, with a feeling of warmth on tap. With all the sew-ins, I stopped bothering with the hair relaxers. And as my original hair texture—those springy, bouncy ringlets—grew back in, it became crystal clear: this hair is precious.
I began to play with the texture, apart from the sew-ins. I wore an Afro and discovered a new face. My bone structure, exposed in a different light, took on a new shape: the big cheeks, the high cheekbones, the wide nostrils I never quite liked, the lips I was always unsure of—they all made sense now. I fell in love with my face, which was framed in the candy floss–like texture that grew out of my head—fuzz, jazz as I like to call it, moisturized in coconut oil. I fell in love with me all over again. And my facial features combined to tell a glorious tale. The change unleashed a more fully realized me; I leaned in to my personal style.
I’m a natural chatterbox, who likes to lay it all out. So when I discovered social media in the early 2010s, I began to find my space. I shared my hopes, struggles, and wins online, but I also documented the looks that helped me to express all those things. After having spent so much of my life feeling like a misfit, I found solace in being able to speak freely. It felt so natural I barely noticed when my following grew from a few hundred to more than 230,000—many of them Black, many of them learning to embrace the fullness of themselves, as I was.
In the span of a few years, the very attributes that alienated me when I was younger made me popular. And eventually, the internet inspired me to launch a beauty startup that would allow women to buy and wear the very springy, bouncy coils (my life always coming back to the hair) that I loved so much growing up.
Hair has been a pivotal part of each life transition, from school to my years in banking to careers in fashion and now to the world of beauty. I’ve survived toxic boyfriends and moves to new cities and countries (Paris, Hong Kong, London, Geneva, London again, and counting). I’m now an entrepreneur and business owner. A mother and a wife. And I now live in America, getting to know a new experience of Blackness, one that always makes me think of the child I was staring at the little girl on the box.
Throughout my experiences living in all these places, I’ve learned that the established history lessons we’re taught in our various birthplaces have told us far too little about each other in the diaspora. My time moving from one hairstyle to the next, from my cousin’s lap to salons all over the world, has shown me the importance in letting the stories of ourselves out, showing each other the power in all our many shades and nuances.
I, for one, feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives wrapped into one, and my hair is how I’ve told the story of each one. From childhood I looked at the braids, cornrows, and extensions as a magical toolkit I could use to tell the world what my mark on it would be. And despite the roadblocks—feeling like I wasn’t Black enough here or was too Black there—I am. I’m Black like me.
Chapter 17
The Front Row
It’s “in” to use me and maybe some people do it when they don’t really like me. But even if they are prejudiced, they have to be tactful if they want a good picture.
—NAOMI SIMS, NEW YORK TIMES, 1969
Black women are in fashion,” one editor casually said to me in Paris following a runway show.