Blonde Ambitions in Self Isolation.

As I write this Coronavirus (Covid-19) has rendered most of the world in a state of self and government imposed self-isolation. Personally, staying at home has always been one of my favourite past times, second only to adding items I can’t afford into my amazon basket and clicking ‘save for later’. But for some reason staying inside doesn’t hit the same when you’re being told to do it. It feels like a nationally imposed grounding that none of us can bargain our way out of. However, one down side of having so much time alone is that there is no one there to talk you out of possibly terrible ideas. It takes a particular brand of reckless boredom to decide to go blonde when ordinarily I would never entertain the idea. And it takes an acute sense of curiosity to ask myself why the idea of being blonde has always felt so un-me. And it takes 2 days of drinking prosecco for breakfast to discover that the answer is ultimately Google images.

When I was 10, I had the misfortune of googling beautiful hair. It will come as a surprise that almost every picture I saw was of a hair that did not look like mine. This wasn’t a wholly new discovery for me, even at 10 years old I could see that the world viewed hair like mine differently. To most people hair, is just hair. You grow it, brush it, and wash it. Very rarely is your whole personhood and identity intwined with how your hair looks. I still remember wearing my hair in bantu knots and having the entire class laugh at me. Or the look of disgust when I told my peers that I only wash my hair once every two weeks. These small interactions and my ill-timed google search lead to a simple thought; ‘Hair like mine must not be beautiful’.

This thought festered and grew throughout my teenage years. Eventually I spent hours obsessing over ways to iron and straighten out my curls. Weekends spent bent over a bathtub and the unmistakable scent of ammonia and cream relaxer became my staples of my teen years. Why? Because, I wanted to have hair that was worthy of being on the front page of google images. I wanted hair that society already deemed beautiful. Hair I didn’t have to train and fight into obedience. I beat, and fought my hair until it was dry and every possible end were split, but it was straight and therefore acceptable to me.

It wasn’t just me. All of my friends spend their weekends inhaling ammonia and feeling the perm burn. We were all on the quest of google image worthy hair. A quest that always felt so terrifyingly out of reach. It wasn’t until I was 16, sat on the floor of Ghanaian salon, with the cool early night air blowing through the ever-split ends of my hair, that something finally clicked. Maybe it was watching the undeniable beauty of woman after woman with thick coils and curls that radiated from their heads like angelic crowns. Faces so perfect that it did not need google to define it. They didn’t need external judgement to deem them worthy of the moniker of beauty. They were all beautiful not despite of their hair but because of it. And I discovered that my hair was not something that I had to tame and fight into acceptability, but something so much more. Hair could define and redefine a person on a whim. I learnt that how my hair sits atop my head could be more than just the mere aesthetics of fitting in, but could showcase aspects of my personality and beliefs. Black hair has always been significant. Throughout history it’s been marker of blackness. A marker that yes, sometimes you want to shy away from for the fear of standing out in a place where blending in key to survival, like high school. But across the countless cultures that exist on the planet, our hair has always defined us, be that in a wig, weave, or afro. And more importantly than ever, we can let our hair speak for us.

Flash forward to December 2019. I was back in Ghana taking full advantage of a low exchange rate and superb talent to have my hair turned into 24-inch Marley twists for less than £20. The twists were truly the epitome of afro-chic. Was I living my unapologetic African Bad B*tch life? Yes. Was I basking in the glory of my hair adding 4-icnches to my height? Yes. Did I stunt on Instagram so hard that I became unbearable? Oh Absolutely! But in truth I was so enamoured with that hair. It was a signifier of how far I’d come from my ‘Perm burn’ weekends to now happily blocking people’s views in cinemas. So, when it came time to take out those Marley twists tears were shed. Granted most of those tears were from the detangling process but also large part of me knew I would miss that hair. But soon the prospect of a new look dawned. This time I chose to something I’d never done before, again out of sheer curiosity. I ventured into blond-dom with such hope and the knowledge that if I’m going to let my hair speak for me, I’m going to give it a lot to say.