Hair; a troubling subject

2024-07-22

Hi again! Recently I've been trying to clean as much of my new home as possible, which if you've ever rented before you can imagine is a pain in the ass. My washing machine in particular has decided it would rather be cleaned than give me the fortune of cleaning, and a metric fuck ton of water and baking soda later, it is in fact still dirty. I suppose all I can do is keep on trying, >.

Today, I wanted to talk a bit about hair, my hair specifically. You may not know this, but Egyptian hair is as varied as it is annoying to work with, and public opinion on it has been polarized for years thanks to western influence. While the massive do's of the 80s were just as popular in Egypt as they were in the UK, by the time I was a child (and certainly to some extent beforehand) straight hair was the epitome of beauty. For those who were born with naturally straight or straighter hair, this was a blessing. But for me? Phew. Let me tell you, it wasn't easy.

It took me up till my late teens to finally learn how to care for my hair with all its curls. and it took up to around the same point in time for me to reflect myself the way I look in my art.

Above; the first documented instances of me drawing myself. Note the ridiculously pale skin, bright blue eyes, and of course, the unrealistically straight hair. For reference, I look(ed) nothing like this, but thus is the magic of internalized racism!

Hair is a very complicated subject to tackle, it's only more complicated if you're like 12 and just beginning to draw things that aren't LPS cats... The fact that it functions both as a solid object and a fabric and individual strands all at once depending on the style and effect you're going for, is incredibly difficult to grasp from just one look. This all of course is specifically for straight anime style hair, and doesn't even begin to describe the ways in which curly and kinky hair are a complete and utter departure from that style of thinking. But I digress, just trust me when I say that drawing straight hair is like climbing a really steep hill. Back then my inspiration for drawing hair was mainly a mix of Shoujo anime and French/Canadian girls cartoons, And I'm a genuine believer that learning how to draw difficult things by using others' art can be really helpful! The reason for this is that it helps to peel back the layers of complexity, and take things one step at a time. Bare in mind, that doesn't mean that learning from life or study isn't useful, just that it can be a useful crutch to learn stuff from!

Since I mostly learned how to draw things by copying stuff I liked, it was difficult for me to find characters with aesthetically pleasing curly hair to draw from. That's not to say they didn't exist, but more that they weren't particularly in my circle of influence. This was particularly true since I didn't feel the need to branch out my influences. I was still soaking stuff up like a sponge, but the stuff around me didn't really fit how I felt in my heart. While I'm sure it'd be easy to attribute all that to just being a skill issue, the fact of the matter was, I just couldn't feel comfortable with my hair, or anything about it. It's only really when I cut the whole damn mess off that I felt like I kind of actually liked how I looked, and my outside began to fit my inside a liiiiittle bit more.

Above; Circa 2016 self portraits.

I'd guess it was around this time I started to realize that I was pretty different from a lot of the shows I'd watch, to be fair I did have more experience around white kids at the time, since I actually got to visit europe more often with the cognitive ability to recognize things like skin color and hair type. Despite that, I feel like there's a kind of shame I associate with these drawings. Like it's half-assed, you know? I didn't feel like these aspects made me particularly beautiful in any way shape or form, just that they were a part of me. Maybe I felt like pretending I was different through my art made me a liar, or some kind of catfish freak. It's hard to say! I was only like 14 around this point, and if there's one thing 14 year olds aren't known for it's having deep well rounded thoughts about much. If I had to pinpoint a specific character or style that inspired these, I'm not actually sure what I'd say? It's likely I was really into Haikyuu and Love Live (SIF) at the time, so it would make sense to give a shoutout to those two. Particularly the way Tsukishima's hair was drawn in early panels, and this very particular character from LLSIF that just had my heart for no reason.

It wasn't long after this that I began to actually try and portray myself in a much more true to life way. This time though, I do know exactly who did it for me...

It was like having a curtain lifted off over my eyes... the idea that even someone like me, who is fat, and curly, and silly could still be breathtakingly beautiful. Loved, and wanted even! Princess jellyfish and Steven Universe, despite all their individual faults, gave me something I never realized I'd ever really wanted. It was also around this time that we slowly but surely began to see more media being produced by, voiced by, sung by, or drawn by, poc for other poc. It empowered me, in a way, to really look at myself, and faithfully recreate what I saw best I could. Curly hair isn't as straight forward as straight hair in some ways, but in others it's kind of more straight forward as well. It's so much easier to think of it as something light like a gas, or formless like a shape, but trying to make it interact with the world with things like shrinkage, frizz, and bounce in mind is absolutely insane. I think it's worth giving a small shout out to Alberto Mielgo who worked on the Spiderman movies as a designer (possibly more than just that but I'm paraphrasing from memory here) for his incredible work in rendering hair and texture. I learned a lot about how my hair works visually by studying his work and I feel it's worth making sure I said so!

Above; Self portraits circa 2017-2020

For me, and I'm sure many other people, everything post 2020 is kind of a rush or a blur. Around that time, I'd begun my first two years studying Illustration at university, and I didn't really feel like I was stuck copying what I saw around me anymore. Studying from life, and drawing how I felt was a massive boost to the way I drew myself. Most importantly to me though, the constant love and affection from my partner definitely made it easier to love me too. I didn't need those crutches I talked about earlier anymore, I hadn't for years by this point! It's kinda funny really, when I look at these drawings, I know that's gotta be 'me'. That may not seem significant to you, dearest reader, but to me that's a pretty cool thing. My hair is, for lack of a better word, kind of a pain!! But still, it's beautiful, in a kind of weird way.

Above; Self portraits post 2020

At the beginning of this post, I pointed out that straight hair was really the goal when I was young. It's been pointed out to me since then, that old women absolutely love my hair. These days I get so many compliments about it from them, and they're always (well, usually) really genuine. My late grandmother had hair a lot like mine too, and so did her sister. When I met her sister not long ago, she'd tell me how similar our hair was, down to the dye and the style too. It felt pretty good, reader, to know that even if it was just for a decade I was the trendiest in town. Nowadays, there's no shortage of inspirational people and characters with hair just like mine. Even in childrends book stores, there's picture books about big hair. My youngest sister once picked one up and proudly beamed at me 'She looks like me!'

I felt really happy then. And kind of old? But mostly happy. In one short decade people were fighting and coming around, and less and less people have to grow up feeling the way I did about my own hair. I hope that, someday in the future, everyone can feel more annoyed about drawing their hair because of how genuinely difficult it is to draw, and not because they feel like it makes them any less than.

Well, that's all from me today. I'll leave you with two things:

1. This fantastic youtube tutorial for kawaii natural afro styles which I totally fell in love with and 2. my most recent self-portrait. It's different than the last ones, but I feel a lot different since those too :)

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