After 5-6 years of just growing it out without any intention/shaping I decided to try out bangs/shag. A return to form.

Thank you for this reflection! I too have had a tense relationship between what I have and what I thought I wanted. Being mixed race my hair always felt different from everyone around me. When I was a kid I had platinum blonde hair that darkened over time into a deep brown. It has always been straight, but thick. And my parents really reinforced traditional standards of beauty- long locks (which to me conjures up images of mormon women with their elaborate braids). My hair never felt like mine. And then I went to art school and even more external standards of coolness took their toll on my head. Yes, I had the Miley Cyrus cut. (Before her tho ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) )titkitten wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 6:47 pmive always had a turbulent relationship with my hair -- growing up attending a predominantly white school and consuming media with only white beauty standards, i hated how straight and flat my hair was. i was always trying to get it to "have volume", have "texture" -- hairsprays, heat styling, deep side parts, once a disastrous perm. my parents always told me my hair was beautiful, it was so straight and black, but i hated how "uncooperative" it was, how it refused to do anything but lie pin straight against my head.Spoiler:
all yall may remember i went through a period of blonde/neon hair, when i was diy bleaching it every month. i loved bleaching my hair because when it was all damaged and fried, it had texture and volume; with a deep side part, it was a reasonable approximation of hairstyles i'd seen in seventeen magazine in 2006. looking back it seems poetic that the only way i could get it fit into my perceived white beauty standard was to damage it.
anyway around this time last year, in an intentional effort to Accept The Way I Was, i stopped bleaching and started parting my hair in the middle. i think it's interesting that on tiktok right now there rages a war between gen zers and millenials about the middle vs side part. i can't help but see it through the lense of my own experience, but i wonder how much of the middle part movement is related to the new generation being more tolerant of non-white beauty ideals. the straight black hair parted in the middle is a relatively traditional chinese beauty standard (black and smooth like silk, they say) -- especially these days, it almost feels like an active demonstration of asian solidarity and pride.
sorry to be so deep on hair, but it's incredible how much cultural and emotional baggage is involved. this most recent bachelor season featured the first black bachelor, who spoke with a black contestant on national television about both their struggles with accepting their natural hair. it's slice of life: both so insignificant yet so personally important.
ages ago (if i remember correctly), some tiktok videos told me you should try to do a 3-5ish day process with like "10" or "20 volume developer"