Straight Story

Why Are We So Bent on Straightening Our Curls?
by Diane Simon

Anyone who has been to a drugstore knows that hair color is a choice, not a destiny. Mousy brown is no longer the fate of plain girls from small towns; it's an act of passive resistance, almost brave these days when every head is bright and glossy. Texture, on the other hand, has always been a different matter-especially when we're talking about kinky-curls that long to be straight. These, too, can be managed with a variety of drugstore implements and products, but it takes muscle and determination. That clunky old straightening iron may have been replaced by the pricey salon blowout, but the sum total of time in the chair hasn't decreased a bit. If color is about surface, then texture is about depth. It plays super ego to color's id. When Clinique launched its new line of hair care products this past summer, spotlighting "Perfectly Straight Straightening Balm" and its sister, the "Perfectly Straight Straightening Cream," it was forging an almost messianic optimism: Come ye curly, Leave ye Straight.

Not that we're surprised by cosmetic promise. Kathy Peiss called her history of makeup in America "Hope in a Jar" (Holt, 1999) because that's precisely what purveyors have always offered-distilled aspirations. But hair texture derives from the shape of the follicle, and hence, seems to be biological destiny, a primal fate. Clinique New Concepts Marketing Director Jane Lauder, a curly chick who passes for straight, says she developed the Straightening Balm because, "For years I would start my day armed with my hair products and my blow dryer, and I was never quite sure who was going to win the battle." The bottle assures that the cream "Controls the Frizzies" and "Keeps curls at bay." This is the language of war. If you have curly hair and you want to make it straight, you've got to gather your weapons and secure your borders.

The truth is, we worry about our hair in the same way we worry about race: unconsciously and continuously. Because race is what we are talking about when we talk about biology, and follicular demands are no exception. Why don't we just say it outright? The smoother your hair, the whiter you are. It's no accident that most of our conversations about texture focus on straightening that which is not. Despite the occasional fashion flirtation with ringlets and kewpie curls, or that bad moment when the heroin-chic worked at "bed head," we're a culture obsessed with the straight and smooth. Perfectly Straight Straightening Balm is not just ammunition for the war against frizz, it's a ticket to the majority, a land without potholes, where no one has to fear a humid forecast. As we launch into a new millennium, an era when the term "virtual reality" is not an oxymoron, it should not be surprising that sleek, smooth and straight are such compelling goals. Clarity, lucidity-these are ideals that we remember but can't seem to achieve anymore, the forgotten solution to a puzzle we misplaced. So we try to turn our hair into the shiny flat surface we crave, hoping it mirrors the state of our souls. The promise of the Perfectly Straight Straightening Balm is more than a mere instance of hope in a jar-it's department store eugenics, as confusing and threatening as the assembly of the genome. Imagine truly being immune to follicular handicaps. Well, it's scarier than the idea of waking from the cryogenic freezer to find yourself married to George Jetson, walking your dog on a treadmill over Houston. Suddenly, anything can happen: Today, I'm a homicidal postal clerk; tomorrow, a cheerleader!

[Diane Simon is author of "Hair: Public, Political, Extremely Personal," (St. Martin's Press, 2000). She lives in New York with her greyhound, Tillie, and is currently writing a book about perfume.