By Naomi Foster 

About a week ago, I found myself spiraling over my hair, as I often do. Not a casual decision, but a sustained preoccupation. I was deep in my phone, cycling through styles for a trip that was still months away. Images of extra small knotless braids, Fulani braids, boho knotless with deep wave or body wave hair visited me in my sleep. The options blurred into one another, forming an endless loop. I compared prices, calculated bundles, and scrolled with a strange urgency, as if I were trying to solve something.

In retrospect, what I was experiencing was not simply indecision, but something more patterned I’ve come to think of this pattern as a kind of “hair psychosis.” Not in a clinical sense, but as a persistent anxiety around presentation. The need to have my hair accounted for, resolved, and complete. An awareness that I am always visible, always being perceived and that my hair, therefore, has to be “done” at all times. Eventually, even my algorithm caught up to me. TikTok began recycling the same videos, and I started asking everyone around me what I should do next, as if the decision required consensus

Around the same time, my algorithm began surfacing a series by a creator named Sharon, known online as @sshozxox. In her TikTok series, “You versus the hair in your scalp,” she articulates a dynamic I had never quite named. Her critique extends beyond wigs and weaves to the broader culture of protective styling, particularly the tendency to move directly from one style to the next without pause.

The question she poses is deceptively simple. What are we really protecting our hair from?

It would be incomplete to have this conversation without mentioning Lipglossss, a young Black creator who was engaging this question at a time when audiences were far less receptive. She appeared online in 2023 wearing her natural hair in its shrunken, unmanipulated state, encouraging other Black women to do the same. The response was often harsh.

What made her intervention significant was not just the style itself, but the challenge it posed. For perhaps the first time in this particular digital space, Black women were being asked,  by one of our own, to examine the underlying motivations behind their styling choices.

Initially, I engaged with her critique at a distance. I have never been particularly invested in wigs or lace installs, and so it felt possible to position myself as adjacent to the behavior she was describing. In my own framing, braids represented a more practical, less labor-intensive alternative. But that distinction began to unravel under closer consideration.

Because the question is not, ultimately, about the specific style one chooses. It is about the conditions under which that choice feels necessary. Why does it feel more intuitive to learn how to braid, install, or otherwise transform one’s hair than it does to sit with it in its natural state and develop a relationship to it? 

Why is transformation experienced as ease, while familiarity is experienced as labor? It’s a question I’ve asked myself many years and never had the courage to think about the answer.

For me, that question is inseparable from childhood. My mother has not seen her natural hair texture since she was eight years old. She maintained a consistent relationship to relaxers, and while this was never explicitly framed as ideology, it carried a clear implication. Natural hair was not something to be explored or understood. It was something to be corrected.

When she relaxed my hair for the first time, it was presented as a reward. There was no accompanying framework of care. No emphasis on maintenance, moisture, or long-term health. The result was immediate damage. My hair became dry, brittle, as it was stripped of protein, moisture, and the very coil pattern I was born with, thus becoming increasingly difficult to manage, but at least it was straight. 

By the end of high school, the responsibility shifted to me. I began to engage my hair with intention for the first time, experimenting with treatments, learning through trial and error, and watching it gradually regain strength. There was a period during which my hair was, by most standards, healthy. And yet, I continued to hide it.

I defaulted to braids, like I always do. I framed this as convenience, and to some extent, it is. But I’ve never dared to interrogate why convenience consistently required a form of distance from my own hair. Why is it that the easiest option is always the one that minimizes direct engagement?

There is a particular kind of dissonance embedded in that pattern. I recall a moment in college when a friend asked me, why I consistently wore my hair in braids. The question itself was simple. My inability to answer was not. I removed myself from the conversation, continued taking down my braids in silence, and left for my next appointment. In retrospect, what that moment revealed was not ignorance, but habituation. I was participating in a routine so normalized that it no longer required articulation.

This is precisely the dynamic Sharon’s critique brings into focus. She is not arguing against protective styling as a practice. Braids and weaves function as sites of creativity, cultural expression, and, at times, necessity. The issue is not their existence, but their continuous deployment. The “back to backness” as Sharon puts it. The absence of interruption. The lack of a sustained period in which one’s natural hair is neither concealed nor in transition.

The “break” between styles is, in practice, highly compressed. Hair is taken down, washed quickly, lightly conditioned, blow-dried, and immediately prepared for the next installation. There is no extended moment of co-presence. No opportunity for the hair to simply exist without being oriented toward its next transformation.  

What emerges, then, is not protection in the traditional sense, but a form of avoidance. And what is being avoided is not only labor, though the labor of natural hair care is real and unevenly distributed. What is being avoided is intimacy.

To be intimate with one’s hair requires time, patience, and a tolerance for imperfection. It requires the willingness to encounter one’s hair outside of its most aesthetically controlled state. For many Black women, this is not a neutral experience. It is shaped by years of messaging, both explicit and implicit, that position natural hair as undesirable, unprofessional, or even unmanageable.

Even styles historically associated with low maintenance, such as locs, have not remained untouched by these societal pressures. Increasingly, they are subject to their own regimes of upkeep. Sharon makes the point about the maintenance practices observed in recent years. How frequent retwists, and this emphasis on clean parting, a consistent expectation of neatness, defeats the purpose and essentially upholds the same ideals as any other braided style. What was once understood as a style that resisted constant manipulation now often reflects it.

This shift speaks to the persistence of respectability politics, not only in relation to white perception, but within Black communities themselves. There exists a shared, though often unspoken, standard of presentation. To appear “done” is to signal discipline and self-respect. Hair operates as one of the most visible indicators through which value and self-worth are perceived.

Contemporary braiding trends reveal an additional layer of this dynamic. The increasing popularity of styles such as boho knotless braids, which incorporate significant amounts of loose, often human hair, reflects what creator Kayla Ryanne has described as the “bussdownification” of braids. The braid, as a form, becomes partially obscured, moving closer to the visual language of a sew-in. What was once distinct begins to approximate something else entirely. My own engagement with this shift followed a familiar trajectory. I moved from traditional braids to knotless styles, and eventually to boho variations. What began as a few loose pieces evolved into a preference for fuller, softer, more textured results. With that shift came greater financial and temporal investment, as well as a heightened sense of attachment.

After wearing boho braids continuously for months, I found myself anxious about scheduling my next appointment. The urgency felt disproportionate, even to me. It wasn’t just about cost, but about choosing the “right” style, something that would align with my clothes, my plans, my presentation. All of this, while knowing good and well that I already had hair on my head.

When I later attempted to return to standard knotless braids without the added hair, the dissatisfaction was immediate. The style itself had not changed. My perception of it had. 

This pattern is common enough that many Black women now maintain “hair calendars,” pre-planning styles months in advance to avoid the stress of last-minute decisions, aka hair psychosis. While practical, it raises a broader question: why does managing our hair require this level of anticipation and control?

And further, why do braids, a style that has existed within Black culture for centuries, increasingly require augmentation to feel complete? Why does the presence of looser textures, additional volume, and movement register as an improvement rather than simply a variation? Part of the answer lies in aesthetics and innovation. But it would be negligent to ignore the cultural framework in which these preferences are formed. Softness and fluidity are consistently associated with looser hair textures, in contrast to tightly coiled patterns. These associations do not operate in isolation, felt only be a select few. These ideas are constantly reinforced across social media, film, daily interactions, and broader systems of valuation.

The discussion also intersects with the dynamics of desirability, particularly in relation to the Black male gaze. In one widely circulated video, men were asked to choose between women with natural hair and those with more stylized, straightened hair. Even when natural hair was selected, the response was met with skepticism, most likely from lived experience and observation. TikTok Creator BrownSuga insists that the excessive manipulation may stem from a woman’s need to feel desired by men of her own phenotype. Whether or not that skepticism is warranted is less important than what it reveals. There exists a prevailing assumption that desirability is contingent and that certain presentations of Black femininity are more likely to be affirmed than others. 

In this context, hair becomes strategic. It is not only an expression of self, but a negotiation with perception. A negotiation with our own self-esteem. A way of anticipating and, to some extent, managing how one will be read. These dynamics are not solely developed in isolation during adulthood. They are cultivated early. I remember being teased extensively as a child by the boys in my class for the way my hair looked. My braids, often done by a mother who lacked experience with natural hair, were visibly different from those of my peers. They were less neat, less full, less polished. That difference was noticed and articulated.

Experiences like this do not simply pass. They accumulate and permeate for years to come. They inform how one understands visibility, vulnerability, and self-presentation. For many, the desire to ensure that one’s hair is always “done” is not superficial. It is protective in a psychological sense. So when Sharon asks who we are protecting our hair from, the answer cannot be singular.

We are, at times, protecting ourselves from ourselves. But we are also responding to memory, to social conditioning, to the anticipation of judgment. We are navigating a set of expectations that extend beyond individual preference. At the same time, it is worth considering what is lost in this process. When engagement with one’s natural hair is consistently deferred, intimacy becomes increasingly difficult to access. The hair remains unfamiliar, even as it continues to grow. It becomes something to manage rather than something to understand. 

The issue, then, is not the use of protective styles but the absence of a relationship that exists outside of them. It is the question of why being with our natural hair feels like an obligation, while altering it feels like a resolution. For many Black women, hair is never simply hair. It is a site where history, identity, memory, and perception converge. To engage with it directly is to encounter all of these layers at once. Perhaps that is why avoidance feels so compelling. But over time, that avoidance produces a quiet distance. The hair remains unfamiliar, even as it continues to grow. And what begins as maintenance becomes something else entirely, a way of never quite having to meet it at all.