TBH: Frizz is a curl just waiting to happen when you’re a member of the Curly Girl cult

There’s a thing that curlies (self-identified) say to each other, like the response to a psalm: frizz is just a curl waiting to happen. This is a fundamental tenet of the Curly Girl (CG) philosophy, which thousands of white women have flocked to in the privacy and ennui of lockdown, and it characterises the magical thinking woven through CG — that with enough time, effort and silicone-free products, anyone can have curly hair. “I feel so stupid,’ writes a shoulder-length blonde in a CG forum. “For 40 years I thought I had straight hair.” The forum is a Greek hell, where cycle after cycle of women submit to the all-consuming, Sisyphean task of Botticelli curls, pushing conditioner-slicked boulders up hills.

I understand it. I understand the desperation and hunger, I understand the anger. I am these women, these architects of a precarious horizontal identity, with the specific shared experience of being the white, wavy-haired daughters of white, straight-haired mothers; an experience which breeds niche neuroses.

We are defensive, naive, and insecure after a childhood of fluffy, triangular heads. It builds a certain kind of character, being poofy of hair and red of eye in every school portrait after losing an argument about hair brushing. We became women in the Noughties with its poker-straight ideal — oh, Avril Lavigne — and we are its festering wounds, the chip on our shoulders deeper for its fundamental insignificance and privilege.

The forums often descend into mud-slinging. The follicles keep the score, the memory of the daily sizzle of ghds on wet hair, the singe and smoke and sin. Curly Girl is penance and therapy, our commitment to over-correction.

Like all cults, there’s a secret language (‘squish to condish’, ‘plopping’,) strange rituals (‘scrunching out the crunch’, ‘Medusa clipping’) and strict rules (dye, shampoos and blow-drying can get one excommunicated) as well as, obviously, clear diktats on women’s head coverings; there are outcasts, whistleblowers.

It exists entirely online, in Facebook groups with their own peculiar ecologies and rhythms. Though its knowledge is lifted practically wholesale from Black people, the CG ‘inventor’ is a white woman, and so are most of her disciples.

Every day, a steady trickle of newcomers: ‘Hi, I’m just wondering if someone can tell me what my curl pattern is???’ They apologise for their ignorance, prostrate themselves in front of the group asking for mercy and for product recommendations. Each postulant is greeted with a compliment and a link to a quiz, which will ask them to pull a strand and roll it in between their fingers; they won’t be sure they’re doing it right, or whether what they can feel is their imagination playing tricks on them — but that’s the point.

The only certainty in CG is that you’re doing it wrong (an ingredient, a pillowcase, a hairbrush), but you can find it, fix it, achieve nirvana (nobody does). Each woman hopes she will receive The Answer from a stranger, a sister. Too much protein, too little, over-moisturised? No one is sure. Pick one and commit. There’s something almost astrological about it.

Some complain of headaches from the weight of all the product. A woman on the regime for a year casts around for encouragement and readily finds it: she just needs to do ‘more’. Somebody suggests her hair looks basically straight, and is set upon for gatekeeping. Frizz is just a curl waiting to happen. Curly Girl is the slippery triumph of hope over experience; our penance, our therapy.