A recent article in Refinery 29 caught my attention, it gave quite a damning report on the experiences of Black women in the hair and makeup trailers, behind the scenes in Hollywood. And Hollywood has long stretchy fingers, it reaches far outside the confines of its Los Angeles zip code. The June 2024 article, headlined ‘White Execs Are Getting Training on Black Hair’ [ KATHLEEN NEWMAN-BREMANG ] cited an earlier piece from the same publication in 2019 with the headline ‘Black Actors Are Getting Huge Roles In Hollywood, But Still Doing Their Own Hair’. [ AIMEE SIMEON ]
Headlines are attention grabbers, I love writing them, catchy concoctions of the alphabet, sometimes they bend reality to catch our eyeballs, but Black Actors Are Getting Huge Roles In Hollywood, But Still Doing Their Own Hair was just a statement of fact for a long, long time. I know because I was there. Black actors were doing their own hair because the dominant behind the scenes artists didn’t always know how to deal, and the majority education in the hair industry has been on European hair. Natural textured hair on screen was fringe.
It’s five years down the track from that 2019 headline and some things have changed but the cogs are slow.
Has the world really come to embrace the breadth, glory and authenticity of all hair cultures or are we still in what I like to call our white and tidy phase?
If the film industry is only just catching up in its diversity then where does that leave the rest of society?
Kamala Harris is a mixed race Black woman - would she be welcomed onto the presidential stage if she was sporting bantu knots or the full glory of an afro? Granted I’ve never woken up with her so I can't profess to know her natural hair texture, her mother is South Indian and her father Jamaican, so either could be dominant, but I guarantee, there would be perceptions if her hair wasn’t smooth.
The appearance and grooming industry since its inception has been skewed towards white and tidy.
Film stars in the early days of Hollywood were painted and smoothed and molded into visions of celluloid perfection. Their mystique was real and hidden behind high studio walls, large cans of lacquer and vaseline lenses. There were curls, but not coils. And the curls - under control.
Today, there’s still bias against ‘not-smooth’ hair whether we’re aware of it or not. Free and untamed hair on screen (and out in the world of the west) is a mark of rebelliousness, freedom and individuality. When designing characters for screen we use it as a mental note for the audience; pay attention here.
The wild ones, the crazy ones, do not iron their hair.
There’s a saying in German wias harrl, sos madel [Austrian dialect] which roughly translates to ‘the hair resembles what the girl will be like, in other words - fair warning!
I can’t even hazard a guess as to what evolutionary tick rounded out our follicles and straightened our coils but along the way we lost sight of all of our flavors.
When I first got to Hollywood in the mid-aughts I was a babe in the woods when it came to understanding diverse hair textures. My hair training had centered on white european hair, which is odd because I grew up in a colonized country that is largely populated with Pacific Islanders. When I was at hair school around the turn of the century there was not one mention of dealing with textured hair. It’s my understanding that this has now changed but to what extent and depth I’m not convinced.
Black women were doing their hair before they came to work and I accepted it as quotidian. I accepted the status quo of women of color with textured hair coming to set with their hair already done, bringing their favorite products and/or bringing a selection of wigs, and not for one second did I think to question this or seek to change it.
There was a chasm so deep that to address it seemed like trying to communicate in a foreign language.
Inside that widening gap, as is the case with most of our human foibles, was fear. Fear from the women in the chairs that they would look ridiculous on screen, fear that their needs were too much, and fear from the artists standing at their back of asking for help, for being inadequate, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.
The gap was frosty and wide and there was no bridge.
And yet when I looked around me, the boredom of hairstyles that I was seeing, on television sets in particular, on predominantly white women, was making me want to faint it was so dull, so formulaic. De rigueur at that time was a center part on shoulder length straight hair and a slight barrel curl to frame the face. For a celebrity to get a short haircut was news. A pixie cut - a headline. Interesting haircuts were considered too edgy for most women on screen, terrified that it might cast them not only in the wrong roles but cast them aside all together (as a personal aside, it took me seven years of living in LA before I found someone who could really master my short haircuts).
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Not long into my time in Hollywood I joined the makeup branch of the Hairstylists and Makeup Guild and my exposure to hair styling was limited. As a makeup artist hooked on color theory, the painting of diverse skin tones seemed like a snatch, it was part of our educational tool kit after all, to understand color mixing, tone and shade but still, for the Black women of screen the stain of Oprah's gray toned face from a well known press shot in the 90’s had never left anyone's heart. And to be fair, a scroll through my online portfolio was like a yearbook of white faces, probably 95% European, because this was a representation of who was working on camera. The skin tones don’t lie.
Still, I longed to be on projects with interesting hair, I longed for period pieces from the seventies and eighties where hair was big and free, unbothered by rules and ruled by flyaways. This was the era of perms and tight crimps, of magnificent shapes and pomps all inspired by the black hair that we weren’t allowed to see on screen in the first place. The tidy white women of the world had just borrowed the hair texture of their black sisters and called it fashion.
It wasn’t until over a decade later when on the set of Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, a 70’s era drama about the history of stand up comedy in LA that I really understood the nuances of the black/white hair divide. The hair department head Carla Farmer was Black and she whipped up the sort of textured hairstyles I’d rarely been witness to and the joy of the women in her chair, having her on their side, was palpable. By this stage I was mostly concerned with weaving tiny coils of hair into fake 70’s facial hair pieces and having different sorts of arguments, like where the afro stopped and the sideburn started. Behind the scenes our ships rarely sailed on smooth seas, and, apologies in advance for the cliche, but it’s the nature of the beast.
Our bias gets locked into secret corners of our minds.
In 2023, on the very last film I headed, I still had to check myself. One of our core cast was a young woman of Tongan/Fijian descent and when looking over her portfolio of headshots and character looks my eyes were immediately drawn to the shot of her with glossy, full and smooth curls. But on a deeper discussion as to the prep it took to create this look, I realized it was far outside of hernatural hair texture, and it was natural hair texture I wanted to have on screen. It took us a couple of rounds to get her haircut right, and when we strayed off course, trying to mold her hair out of it’s traditional roots, she had a voice, she spoke up. For this I am ever grateful because good communication is everything. It is at the heart of our way forward.
Our perceptions will change, be it ever so slowly, when we continue to see the magnificent diversity of hair held up in front of us more and more - on screens, and runways and magazine covers. Yes we are creating art in the media - hopefully deep and wide, with limitless possibilities. That headline that I cited above about white execs getting training on Black hair is thanks to the Black Beauty Roster, an organization founded in New York that is paving the way to better understanding and narrowing the divide. Their mission statement: ‘to bring meaningful beauty diversity into the industry through opportunity, advocacy and education’.
I hope their mission spreads far outside of America.
I applaud and cheer on the black women of film and television not only in their pursuit and embrace of natural hair but in the creativity and deep cultural history that traditional afro centric hair styling brings to the screen. It’s rich and glorious decoration.
So, to borrow the beautiful Hawaiian tradition of Ho’oponopono, ‘I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you’.
And finally, to ALL the women of the world, may you be free and fierce with your lionsess manes.
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