Last year I was speaking with a White hairstylist at Ulta, and she told me that they are not allowed to use the word kinky as in kinky curly. She said that they were told that it is considered derogatory. At first, I was thinking that maybe she had it mixed up with nappy. However, looking at the direction of what most companies are calling the prototypical curl structure of Black people, she might be right.
I'm only thinking of this because I'm signed up with the Cut It Kinky newsletter. They recently talked about how using the term super curly is just as bad as excessively curly, overly curly and ethnic hair. They encountered this "issue" when dealing with a live class made up of roughly 90% Caucasian stylists.
I don't know how I feel about any of these terms. Most companies are now using words like coily and tight curls. To be honest, saying coily gives the impression that coils are not apart of the curly spectrum. This is similar to how waves are treated. Tight curly means the same thing as super curly to me. Then there is kinky curly. Truthfully, not every tight curl has kink to it. So it doesn't really make sense to lump all smaller curls under kinky curly. I wonder how some stylist think of the term Afro Textured hair when any textured hair can look like an afro based on how it is styled or lack there of.
Among the Natural Hair Community, we all know what these words mean. We use them interchangeably. Outside of the Natural Hair Community and even the Curly Hair Community, I see a lot of people who don't have "coily" hair use the same verbiage to describe their hair. If you look at reviews that come with pictures, you see many women who think their 3A hair is tightly, excessively and kinky curly. This reminds me that we as a society have to not come to an agreement on what words to use to describe curl diameter and surface texture. These aren't necessarily real definitive terms being used in general cosmetology books. Then we have to look at what is relative to the environment in which someone lives. In all honesty, a person with 3A curls might live in a community with mainly straight hair or ones that have permanently heat straightened their hair into loose waves or straight fluff. To be fair, that 3A curled person technically has tightly curled hair in comparison to his or her community. No one has really jumped on board with the LOIS hair typing system, and even then it is still subjective.
This is not an issue like the hair color blonde. Levels 5, 6, and 7 colloquially are labeled incorrectly. 5 is light brown, 6 is dark blonde and 7 is medium blonde. Most people think 7 is a light brown and level 5 is dark brown. The cosmetology world has agreed on how to call these natural hair color levels regardless of what the general public believes. Even though I would like a more concrete term and definition to describe hair similar to mine, do I want to leave this in the hands of others? I wonder if people with Dwarfism feel this way? Over the past decade they have changed their acceptable terms on several occasions. I know several people around 4'10" who are structurally proportional and do not consider themselves dwarfs. They do not suffer from typical dwarfism abnormalities nor fall under the categories like proportionate dwarfism which includes conditions like primordial dwarfism and Seckel syndrome.
I know I'm ranting, but what do you all think? What do you want our hair to be called? Do you want organizations like Cut It Kinky, who are earnestly trying to educate the cosmetology world, to be representatives of our hair terms?
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