Mireille Liong-A-Kong could not find a single Dutch book about the care of frizzy hair. But what do you actually need a book for? Hair care simply means: good shampoo, conditioner, occasional visits to the hairdresser and that's it?

Not if you have frizzy hair, the 35-year-old IT specialist assures us. Frizzy hair is the driest and most brittle hair type, she now knows, because she found a lot of American literature on the internet - scientific studies even - about her hair type, called Afro hair in America. Due to Western influence, women, and later men, started treating their frizzy hair with chemical products. To make it straight (relax). Or at least make it suitable for 'Western' hairstyles.

Why do women do that, Liong-A-Kong wondered, and what options do I have if I don't want that mess in my hair anymore? All the information that the Suriname-born Liong-A-Kong gathered together, she has now written in her own book under the title 'Kroeshaar – wat je moet weten en meer' (Froggy Hair - what you need to know and more).

For example, Liong-A-Kong believes that you should know that there are different types of frizzy hair. Those many small curls can have a 'zigzag shape', a 'wavy line with mountains and valleys' or look like 'multiple O's'. And all those chemical products, which are also widely available at black hair salons in the Netherlands, ruin your hair. The author also experienced that.

"I have been 'relaxing' my hair for years. It's a kind of automatism. When you become a teenager, you do that. Then ponytails, buns and braids are over. But when I came to the Netherlands to study at the age of nineteen, my hair broke off regularly. That's when I started looking for alternatives. Isn't it crazy that you have to use chemical crap to look good? My boyfriend at the time accused me of having a complex: you want straight hair, according to Western standards. But relaxing has nothing to do with wanting to be white. In our culture, it has everything to do with growing up: as a woman, you also want to do something different with your hair."

And it can be done differently, Liong-A-Kong shows in her book, without harmful substances. Only women, but also their environment, have to overcome a threshold. Back to 'natural hairstyles', but then we also have to get rid of the image that many braids, twists, cornrows, bantu knots or dreadlocks are 'offensive' or 'non-representative'. She writes: "During slavery, African hairstyles were mainly experienced as offensive and flashy by the Western world. (...) As a result, braids were considered 'non-representative' for a very long time. Until the eighties, Liong-A-Kong knows, there were lawsuits in the United States about whether or not braids were allowed to be worn in certain functions. "People in the hotel industry, for example, who refused to put chemicals in their hair in order to keep their jobs." But also recently in the Netherlands, a stewardess' dreadlocks were the reason for a conflict with her employer. "People often think of dreadlocks: 'how dirty, she doesn't wash or comb her hair'. It is definitely washed, but it is indeed not combed. But combing your hair every morning is not a natural way of caring for your hair for frizzy hair. Combing it too often can break the hair."

Liong-A-Kong wants to get rid of the imposed standards. "We frizzy-haired people ourselves need to set a standard for our hairstyle, show what we find representative and what not." In America, women are already a bit further along in this. There, 'only' sixty percent of women with frizzy hair choose to relax, compared to ninety percent in the Netherlands. Her booklet full of care tips and suggestions for 'natural hairstyles' should change that.

Article from Trouw