Messy Side Braids & Other Teen Magazine Things

"Let 'em know everything big. Nail done, hair done, everything big." 

One of the things I want to do more of this year is to take special care to have my outward appearance include things I love and reflect my love for myself. That doesn’t mean I’m trying to look a certain way, it just means that putting on a pair of cute earrings or a fun lipstick are things that make me feel happy. But I don’t ever do it.

I didn’t grow up with a mom that cared much about hair, clothes and make-up. Part of that was good in that it meant that I felt totally good about doing as little self-adorning as possible. But it also meant that I was judgmental about girls who cared “too much” about how they looked and I thought any amount of primping that took over 10 minutes was a waste of time. When I hit my teen years I did what kids did before the Internet and YouTube make-up tutorials were a thing, I subscribed to Seventeen Magazine.

Omigod, you guys, when my mom said I could have a subscription to Seventeen I was in heaven. I was like, think of all the embarrassing moments I can laugh at, all the great beauty tips, and may we never forget the most coveted…the quizzes! Every month I cracked open that puppy popped in “Songs from Dawson’s Creek: Volume 2” and laid back in my purple blow up chair using the glow of my yellow lava lamp as a reading aid. Wow, how can one sentence make you feel like such a dinosaur?

For all of the boy advice, amazing quizzes, cute outfits and articles about girls doing good in the country there were a lot of other things I needed that were missing. Every month I flipped to the make-up pages and then immediately skipped the next few pages in the beauty section: hair. I’d gotten wise to the fact that there was nothing in there for me. All the hair styles were for less “textured” hair than mine and if they threw a few Black girls in there (because---diversity), it was usually a photo of someone with an amazing weave (which I didn’t even realize until waaaay later) or some celebrity that had a personal relaxing and hair quaffing team but we were supposed to be able to recreate that somehow with a $20 flat iron and some bobby pins.

NBD, just wearing a side braid on a red carpet, effortlessly. 

This whole thing came rushing back to me this morning as I stared at my reflection, in the mirror trying to figure out what to do with this VERY tangled mess of unwashed hair to make it semi-presentable for work. My hair is now the longest it’s ever been which is super fun but also comes with a new set of mixed girl hair challenges that I wasn’t privy to when it didn’t grow past my earlobes. An image of an easy-messy-but-still-glamorous side braid popped into my head. A style my (white) wife rocked a lot when she had long hair. After I braided I took it all in to see how it looked. As I moved my head my whole braid kinda lifted off of my shoulder and maintained it’s semi curled shape. Oh yeah, I thought. The image I had in my head was a side braid with white girl hair. My braid wouldn’t move and stretch, it would stay exactly the way I set it and if  I moved would form a bend to create a kind of Pippi Longstocking effect. It was good enough, but not what I was going for.

Teens now have a whole host of resources for adorning or not adorning themselves as they see fit. There’s no shortage of make-up tutorials and natural hair videos on YouTube. I think even teen girl and women’s magazines have made some strides. But there’s still so much missing and that omission from the mainstream leaves folks feeling so wrong. I often wonder if there had been articles in Seventeen about queer identity or bisexuality that was normalized if I’d started dating women sooner. Instead there was only the assumption of the heterosexuality of their readers, so when I rented Coyote Ugly at 15 and watched it 3 times in 24 hours I rationalized that I was simply interested in the dance moves.

Girl Power IRL.

I guess I’ll take solace in the progress of Teen Vogue going IN on Trump and the existence of odd-ball artsy feminist Rookie Mag. 

For now I’ll try to remember that primping and adorning myself isn’t silly, it’s armoring up to exist in a world that continues to tell me I’m not enough and entirely too much at the same time.