The Natural Look

Hold still! . . . Gotta get to that kitchen!”

That would be the entreating voice from the not-so-distant past. A mother, an auntie, a sitter or grandmother--patience fast on the wane. The too-fine-tooth comb tap-tapping on the back of the hand that blocks said “kitchen”--that stubborn spot at the nape of the neck where the coils of hair grab tighter, refuse to be combed free and, thus, like its namesake, prove the hardest place to clean.

Talk to many a black woman, and she will braid an elaborate tale about her hair: The worry over it, the money invested in it. The nightmarish-to-comedic episodes around it.

You could call them: “Tales of the Tender Headed.”

“I got my first relaxer when I was 11,” remembers one survivor, Rose West, 42. “I had this thick, long, coarse hair. Usually they like to wait until puberty before you get it, but before my sixth-grade graduation my mother opted for the perm. She told me: ‘We gotta do something because I’m going to kill you or myself.’ So we went to the hairdresser, and I was crying. And the beautician was fighting with me. All this trauma around hair.”

Now her crown is a sassy, liberating shock of two-toned, temporary two-strand twists with honey highlights. But old impulses are difficult to break with, says West.

“I don’t swim to this day, and part of it is, I don’t want to get my hair wet,” she says. “But that’s going to change.”

Her story isn’t unusual.

“By the time a lot of women get here, they’ve been through 30 years of breakage, bad products, damaged scalps and are sick and tired,” says actress-cum-entrepreneur Bianca Taylor, the whiskey-warm voiced engine powering Bianca’s Botanicals Beauty Center in Altadena. Since opening her doors in 1997 (with the help of high school friend Lola Word), she’s seen women slink in, hat in hand, scalps looking like a field cut for clearing, dubious about the next step. “They’ve been through the hair wars.”

Taylor, who formed her company in 1983, began researching herbs and botanical products that would best enhance her own natural hairstyle.

“I did it all on credit cards,” she says.

A dozen years later, married (to actor Meshach Taylor) and with children, Taylor took up her cause again, now that the natural hair-care business had begun to open up.

Launching her Web site just a few months ago (https://www.biancabotanicals.com) was the crowning glory of what she sees as a three-pronged grass-roots business plan: her beauty center’s classes; hair and body services; and an extensively researched product line of healing botanical sprays, gels, shampoos, conditioners and butters that have been expressly formulated with natural hair--braids, locks and temporary twists--in mind.

This isn’t the black beauty shop of yore--redolent of singed hair and the sharp prick of lye. Taylor hopes to create a refuge, if not an oasis. But more important, she is arming women and men with enough information and confidence to take their self-image back--and take that message back home too.

Granted, there are a lot of old notions to untangle.

For an African American woman--or man for that matter--to move into a look that highlights the natural coil of his or her hair takes more effort and emotional investment than just a stop at the corner convenience-cut mill. And though it might be done unwittingly, the gesture can be viewed as political, confrontational and, consequently, loaded. Particularly because there is so much threaded through natural hair historically and socially.

For many, it’s been a long, varied path leading to the decision. Some, like West, a former bank vice president and now an independent sales director with Mary Kay, are just plain weary of being a slave to their hair, traveling with a tote the size of overnight luggage, over-heavy with shampoos, conditioners, high-wattage blow-dryers--because the hotel courtesy provisions just won’t do.

And for others, quite simply, there’s the chemical factor.

“You are putting something on top of your head that can take the paint off a dresser, and you have to wear gloves to do it,” says Debra Hare-Bey, associate editor of Braids and Beauty magazine and owner of Red Creative Arts Salon in Brooklyn--part of the growing network of natural hair care salons across the country.

In short: It’s taken a whole lot of ugliness to get to “beauty.”

Donna Lynn Leavy, an L.A.-based actress, for example, decided to do “the natural thing,” because, she says with a brassy laugh, “I haven’t seen my hair in 30 years!” Her solution has been a wardrobe of wigs commensurate to the role--pageboys, flips, layered looks and the like. But for a woman who earns her bread and butter in the business of imaging, letting her hair rest and exploring alternatives has created a confounding obstacle course.

“I was on a commercial shoot, and the woman doing my hair hated the fact that I had a wig. So she told the client. And the client said: ‘Well, we can’t have a woman selling with fake hair.’ So they rushed me off the set. It was the most humiliating experience in my life,” Leavy recalls. “I mean 70% of black actresses wear some type of fake hair, as do 40% of white actresses, and oftentimes they wear wigs, falls / pieces to circumvent their hair being ruined even more.”

That’s just the place Taylor found herself in when she decided to forgo the studio beauty chair and have her hair braided. That was in 1979 when she was a regular on the wildly popular soap “General Hospital” in its heady Luke and Laura days.

“I was on that show for eight years, and with the harshness of the lights, the hot rollers, I developed scalp problems. I just needed a rest,” Taylor says.

She says she told the show’s producers that it was the only way she could treat her condition.

“And for the many years that I was contracted, I could not allow them to dictate my hair. They backed off,” Taylor says.

But for many black professionals over the decades, angling to make a mark in the corporate world meant adopting the prevailing uniform--down to the hair. For men, it meant close-cropped, controlled. For women, it was taming and sculpting it into mainstream (read: straight) styles. But after years of pulling the hair through hot combs (whose handiwork lasts only until the first rain or good workout) or going with the more permanent, but exponentially more damaging, chemical relaxers, more and more African American women are making a choice to take charge of, and create space in, their lives. It’s taken a long time, Taylor and others believe, to broaden the concept of what is considered not only professional but also beautiful.

“It’s just as bold as burning the bra,” says Taylor. “And it takes as much courage. Sometimes not just to have your natural hair, but to define yourself from your Afrocentric roots.”

What’s become clear for some African Americans is that being forced to choose between one’s hair and one’s job is a surreptitious form of discrimination. As ABC News reported in a recent segment of “20/20”: One woman was terminated because management saw her hairstyle as “extreme,” and another woman was written up because her braids were deemed “too ethnic.”

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Natural hair care, then, becomes healing for a lot of things, Taylor explains.

“Black people are identified by two things: the melanin in their skin and the coil in their hair. On those levels, we’ve suffered abuse. So a lot of this is about getting in touch with your natural coil,” she says. “It is healing physically [in terms of the] chemical abuse. And when you bring it into your work force, it’s healing culturally.”

If one does a speed-read of pop culture, black women still are seldom fed reinforcing images, says UCLA professor of psychology Gail Elizabeth Wyatt, author of “Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives” (John Wiley, 1997).

“Every message that is conveyed is one that degrades our skin color, our hair, our noses, our lips,” Wyatt says. “Our body images are not supported, not endorsed. So when [black] women launch out to be who they are, it takes a tremendous amount of support.”

What Taylor’s space, as well as others like it around the Southland and country, attempts to do is offer the support and reinforcement that one might not get in a workplace--let alone at home.

“Sometimes black people can be the worst,” says Keenan Fyles, 26, a customer at Taylor’s shop who has fielded his share of negative comments from co-workers and family alike. “My distant relatives are from Trinidad, which is what initially made me interested in dreadlocks. But my immediate family, they’re from the South, and their reaction was, ‘Boy! What you doin’!?’ My ex-fiance and her family . . . my family, all looked at me like I was crazy. They were not used to seeing hair like that. Oh, no!”

That’s why, says Taylor, it’s just as important for her to keep up with industry innovations as it is to spend time counseling clients, who ask, “What am I going to tell my husband? What am I going to tell Mom?”

Before a hand touches a client’s head comes a consultation so the stylist can determine what might be the most appropriate look, depending on career, lifestyle and face shape.

“I let them look through books to get an idea of what we can do,” says manager Mia Corbett, the center’s twist and lock specialist. “We take you through the process: How the hair goes into its own natural, private stage . . . its natural curl, what to expect so that there aren’t any surprises. And we send you home with a free product so that you can maintain it at home. It’s all about learning to work it. You can work beautiful natural hairstyles.”

Salons like Taylor’s, Hare-Bey’s and Bailey’s, also in Brooklyn, are the best articulation of that, but despite their proliferation, there are still hurdles--external as well as internal.

“I think that as African Americans we are sensitive about our own images, sensitive to the messages that we get from each other,” explains Wyatt. “Not teens. They seem to have it together, but older people. People who couldn’t get jobs, homes, based on external criteria. They couldn’t function in mainstream. They don’t accept the nappy hair.”

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It’s a process, says Taylor, and it’s still the first phase. The biggest roadblock--though she’s done spots on QVC and BET--at present: getting space on mainstream store shelves.

“We’re trying to reach a multiracial market,” she says. “You have people who are helping with a foster child [of a different race] or a multiracial grandchild who has coiling, curly hair, which has been a hair care market that has been totally overlooked that I’ve been able to reach.”

Though natural hair care is a thriving, still-evolving segment of the black hair care industry, hard numbers are difficult to compile since “most of the industry is still underground, still grass-roots,” says Diane Bailey, who is actively organizing and educating natural hair care specialists on their way to obtaining the newly instituted braiding, locking and weaving license in New York. “Most of it is still in the home. What we’re trying to do with the trade association is bring those people to a level of professionalism.”

“It’s changing a bit,” notes actress Leavy. “You see more women with twists, thin locks, and I’ve been considering twists, because they are temporary. It would be a fun ‘mommy’ look. But even still, if you’re playing doctors or lawyers or bankers . . . upper-middle class, they still want you in straight conservative styles.”

But culture moves faster than media can code it, and high-profile figures like U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun or actress Angela Bassett or Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison all act as emissaries. Their braids or elegantly accessorized drape of locks become a well-appointed adornment for the most posh and portentous of occasions.

“This time, we’re not waiting for them to affirm us,” says Bailey. “That’s why this is not a fad, it’s not just a hairstyle, it’s a lifestyle. And for the first time ever . . . with the sharing, the network and the education . . . it’s all here. We’ve affirmed one another without diminishing the human being. It’s so paramount to self-esteem.”

Wyatt agrees: “We just have to sit with ourselves. Don’t wear their uniform and don’t wear the black uniform either,” says Wyatt, who cautions black men and women to not jump on a bandwagon just for the sake of fashion, but to really find the style and statement that is right for them--given their hair’s health and their career path--and then wear that style proudly.

“Whatever we choose, we have so many more choices than our ancestors did,” she says. “If we pay more attention to what we think, rather than what others do, we will grow more confident dictating who we are.”