Tell Us Your Curl Story! My Curl Story - Winnie

We put out a call on Instagram in December 2020 and asked you for your personal curl story. We want to share those with you here on our blog. Here's Winnie's story.

"I grew up with my white mother in Germany. For as long as I can remember, she always cut my hair really short, because she didn't know how to handle it.

As a kid, I so often wished I had long straight hair - I would sometimes wrap a towel or something similar around my head in front of the mirror to see what long hair would look like on me.

Until I was 16, my hair was always short, cut every few months by white hairdressers down to 9mm. Everything changed when I did a ten-month student exchange in the US at 16. Walking into a drugstore there was a whole new world for me. I must have spent hours in front of those shelves carefully checking out all the different hair products for natural hair. Suddenly there were way more Black people around me too, and I had more than enough inspiration for everything I could do with my hair. So during those transformative ten months, I let my hair grow. First into a teeny-weeny Afro, but quickly into a beautiful big Afro.

So I came back to Germany with a suitcase full of hair products.

While I got tons of compliments for my long, kinky hair in the US, in Germany people made fun of it a lot and often touched it without me wanting them to. But the love for my hair couldn't be shaken so easily anymore.

I watched tons of YouTube videos for natural Afro hair and learned that my local Afro shop also had tons of products, or that you can make products yourself. Since then I've also tried lots of different styles: I regularly do twist outs, different protective styles in winter, and sometimes braids.

I'm not saying the journey to accepting my natural hair has always been easy and smooth since then. Even today I still struggle sometimes. All in all, I feel a lot better since I started embracing my hair and loving it as it is. By now it's a huge part of my identity as a Black woman in Germany. That's why I wish and hope more Black people will dare to wear their hair naturally and feel just as good with it as I do today."

Winnie