Michael Price - Unruly Curls: How to Manage, Style and Love your Curly Hair

Contents

Spirals, corkscrews, twists and waves its time to celebrate your unruly hair.

Unruly: disobedient, unmanageable, uncontrollable, stubborn, disorderly, riotous.

If youve ever thought this about your hair, youre not alone. It was certainly the case with mine growing up, which was one of the reasons why I became a curly hair specialist.

I come from an ethnically diverse family and Im very proud of my roots. My grandfather probably came from Kenya, of East African descent, and its from him that my familys curly hair originates. When I was a kid, this was quite unusual. I was white-skinned, with pretty Afro-like hair, so I both got abuse for my fro, and also heard people being openly racist in front of me, with no idea that my brother and grandfather were black and my mother mixed-race. Not easy.

As I grew up, however, my hair and its appearance became more crucial to my success with girls in particular. My confidence took a hit after an incident when a girl I fancied made a comment to my brother, asking whether I was his little sister. This caused me to have long-lasting insecurities about my appearance that extended throughout my teenage life. I experimented with styles that worked for straight hair and by my mid-teens I had started to try growing it out, and duly suffered much more than my fair share of hair disasters. Overall, I lost faith in hairdressers. I tried my luck with Afro salons and was told they couldnt cut my type of hair. I tried expensive salons and they too seemed unable to cope. Nobody knew how to style hair like mine.

Long before I took to the trade of hairdressing myself, I had already gathered a sense of what worked and what didnt. I was 13 years old when I first talked about hairdressing as a career option. My mother, whose mixed Afro-Euro hair is the true definition of difficult, encouraged it, no doubt so that I might become a live-in helping hand with her own daily hair struggle. The hairdresser that cared for our familys hair at home once said, If you could manage your mothers hair, you could master anyones!

I attribute my curly hair ability to being able to practise on my mothers hair. Her hair was normal to me from birth. She maxed out her hair boldly, in full celebration of its powerful impact on top of her six-foot frame. It morphed in shape through the decades, never failing to act as a beacon of her confidence and personality. Although it was familiar and similar to mine, I never thought Id end up cutting it. Her eagerness to find a solution to manage it led her to enlist my help at the first word of me announcing hairdressing as a career option. I remember sitting and watching her hair being done when I was a child and gradually as I got older I started thinking, I could do that. At the time I started cutting her hair, I was totally unaware that I would one day be able to appreciate how uniquely different and difficult hers is compared to the many thousands of heads of hair I have worked with since.

If you could manage your mothers hair, you could master anyones!

Her hair was so resilient to any kind of styling effort and had a density to it that I have rarely, if ever, seen since. Developing the skills to work with my mothers hair, without becoming overwhelmed by its mass, was essential if anything was to be done with it. Doing her hair played an essential part in how I work now. Not being intimidated when a client with kinky, curly or wavy hair walks in is the first step to earning trust and confidence.

Now, 25 years deep into my hairdressing career, I remain baffled by what I consider to be the widespread lack of training and understanding of curly hairdressing throughout the industry. My salon, Unruly Curls, located in Londons Notting Hill, is vastly oversubscribed, with a lengthy waiting time for an appointment. While I have enjoyed years of being in demand as a curly hair specialist, profiting from my industrys neglect and failure to meet the needs of curly-haired people, this is not all that I feel I can contribute. Helping one person at a time is rewarding, but limited. I want to share my professional knowledge and skill throughout this book, and help those with curly hair enjoy a better relationship with their tresses!

ETHNICITY: ERITREAN AND ITALIAN

My hair has always been an odd and ambivalent companion. In my earliest youth, I covered it in a towel to pretend that the triangular cloud on my head and matching rats tail was actually a straight, long, flowing Disney dream. As I left Brazil for Asia and was met by women whose hair, unlike mine, fully embraced its gravitational potential, the scent of burning hair became part of my aura. By the time I was 16, most people thought I had naturally straight hair and I reveled in my little secret as my curls made their brief cameo once a week, in the mirror, before they were duly squashed into submission.