Rabbit Holes: What I learned from hours spent researching and discussing black hair care on the early internet.
It was once considered a rite of passage for black girls, that moment sometime during the tween or early teen years when you received your first perm. This “perm” was really a chemical relaxer—one designed to remove the curl from your hair, leaving you with sleek, bone-straight tresses that projected an image of respectability and maturity.
As one of the few students at my Midwestern university who possessed a laptop in 1998, I could retreat to the privacy of my dorm room to begin my quest. Late one night, I pulled up the ol’ AltaVista search engine, typed “black hair” into the search bar, and thanks to a mega-fast 14.4 baud modem, AltaVista responded two minutes later with a list of results.I didn’t know what I was looking for, but the site offered a discussion forum, ushering me into the black hair underground.
These strangers on the internet, however, were starting to denounce the “creamy crack,” as they called the chemical relaxers. And the forums were multiplying in conjunction with the growth of the World Wide Web. Someone on BlackHairCare.com linked to a newer site, NaturallyCurly.com, that had a mostly white audience—yet these women too were sharing their struggles with styling their curly hair without straightening. I was the 98member of the NaturallyCurly.
Yes, we’d absolutely shell out $25 for a 16-ounce jar of purple goop called Curly Pudding because Kurlee1999 said it was her holy grail. Kurlee1999 might have been a bot for all we knew, but darn it, we trusted Kurlee1999 and her beautiful 4B ’fro inherently more than any television ad. We all spent too much on hair products and relished in our status as “product junkies.”
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