The Hair Issue

Septembre Anderson has the type of hair that is most feared: Black hair. Her hair is a revolutionary that refuses to be colonized.

Bhairavi Thanki thought being hairy was awful, until she found out it was lucky. “My parents once told me that they were fortunate to have a hairy daughter. It brings good luck they said. Excuse me, what?! I thought they were trying to make me feel better after one particularly gruesome waxing session.”

Scaachi Koul worries that her arm hair makes her unfeminine. “Leg hair removal felt unavoidable, and socially required, but I figured arm hair was okay to take to the mall. I was wrong. ‘Why do you have that?’ a male classmate asked, pointing to my arms. ‘You’re hairier than I am.'”

Caroline Shaheed is no longer going to try and “tame” her Egyptian tresses.

Jef Catapang’s hair isn’t just thick, it’s thick enough to pierce skin. “Tools high school homies needed for cutting my hair: tweezers, baby powder, and poor rock-paper-scissors skills.”

Navi Lamba had her first haircut at age 15, only to learn that she didn’t have white girl hair. “I didn’t have the Princess Diaries moment I had hoped for and was left with something a bit shorter and much puffier, with the odd curl protruding from of my head.”

Kelli Korducki longed to be blonde so that she could star in her own telenovela. “Blondeness wasn’t exactly required. It was more like the silver bullet that could make even the most marginally negotiable amount of onscreen charisma sufficient for stardom.”

Canice Leung has got pin-straight hair, the kind Chinese girls are born with, and the kind they pay lots of money to get. “It always seemed to me a bit like Hudson’s Bay traders selling beaver pelts back to the natives.”

Denise Balkissoon tries not to laugh as her hilarious Brazilian esthetician Perla Porto waxes on about Canadian shyness while waxing off her errant eyebrow hairs. 

Jaime Woo is a Chinese guy, yet he can grow a beard. Weird. “In gay culture, men have decided to flee from the swishy, polished look of the late-90s and early naughts towards beards and tatts. I’m lucky, I guess, that my laziness happened to time in with the trend towards a more traditionally masculine look.”

Navneet Alang has learned to love his totally awesome chest hair: “In the time I was busy developing complexes about how I was an impossibly unattractive yeti, Bollywood had hopped on the “ripped, hairless chests” bandwagon.”