A Quote by Joy Taylor

I've straightened my hair for many years. I've never felt comfortable wearing my hair natural on air. — © Joy Taylor
I've straightened my hair for many years. I've never felt comfortable wearing my hair natural on air.
I know when I used to chemically straighten mine, I did it because I wasn't comfortable with my natural hair. I thought it was too poofy, too kinky. So for me, personally, when I started wearing it natural, it felt like I was blossoming because I was letting go of all the dead hair and all the parts of me that had rejected my natural state.
In high school and college, I always, always straightened my hair. Don't ask why; I was just so into my image. Post-college, I started wearing my hair natural.
I think when I first straightened my hair, I was a teenager. I don't believe that I was consciously doing it to look white or to be on television. It never crossed my mind. All of the girls in my neighborhood got perms and their hair straightened. But I know that historically it was to assimilate and there are some people who do it for that reason.
I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.
I'm a black woman who loves hair. I enjoy changing my hair, having fun with it - just hair! I go from braids, to weaves, to wigs, to natural hair.
When I was younger, I went through a phase when I didn't like my hair. Because the school I went to was primarily Caucasian, there wasn't anyone who had my hair texture. I remember one day I straightened my hair, and that was the first day that people gave me compliments on it.
For many, hair is just hair. It's something you grow, shape, adapt, adorn, and cut. But my hair has always been so much more than what's on my head. It's a marker of how free I felt in my body, how comfortable I was with myself, and how much agency I had to control my body and express myself with it.
When I was in school, I got there on the first day and everyone had long, blonde, straight hair, and I had short, dark, curly hair. I immediately felt I didn't fit in and started growing my hair. But I've learned that I'm only happy when I am truly me and feel comfortable and confident in myself.
When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon.
There was this thing written that I had gone into a candle store, and my hair went up in flames because of all the hair spray. First of all, I never have hair spray in my hair, and I've never even heard of this store, and my hair has never been burned.
I decided to start embracing and wearing my natural hair, but there was only one problem; I didn't know what to do with it or how to style it. Growing up, all I knew was my relaxed, processed hair, so I had to go through this learning phase.
Years ago, when I first started wearing hair extensions, I would get mail from young girls, or young girls would come up to me and they would say, 'Tyra you have the most beautiful hair, like I could never grow hair like that!' And I would say 'Child, this is a weave!'
I wanted it to be back to a state where it felt like it was thriving, so I think that my hair's happiest natural, and there's that hairstyle for everyone where you feel like, 'My hair is agreeing with this,' so I just cut it off recently again, and I'm going back natural.
In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it's not just hair. I mean, I'm interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way: what it says, what it means.
I never really dyed my hair anything significant from my natural hair color.
It was very painful combing my hair. My grand-uncle was a Pentecostal bishop, and he was very strict: our hair couldn't be permed or straightened. So I just cut it all off.
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