Across corporate America, that’s an unwritten dress code: everywhere you go, there are secret curlies.
You might not realize it but that’s only because they haven’t let you in on the secret. If you start looking, you’ll see that straight hair is dominant, and nearly universal as you climb the ranks.
I spent more than a decade reporting on Silicon Valley before I left to investigate something I’ve been thinking about my whole life: curly hair. That investigation became two ventures: MAYURA, my curly haircare line currently in development with an active waitlist, and We Are Spiraling, a narrative podcast about curly hair, culture and identity, reported with the same rigor as my magazine stories for Bloomberg.
What started as a personal obsession turned into a business thesis: the curly hair market is underserved in part because so many people are conditioned to hide their ringlets. One question followed me through every job – the newsrooms where I worked, and the offices where I went to interview subjects: why are so many people secretly curly?
This phenomenon takes root early. I first became attuned to this pattern in middle school, when other girls around me began straightening their hair regularly. This continued in high school. Other girls told me I should straighten my hair too. I remained impervious to their pressure in large part due to the effort required: holding up a flatiron to your head for more than an hour after every wash, sometimes enduring an accidental forehead burn or the smell of singeing hair.
In college, I watched as other women in dorms would put themselves through the same ritual of panini pressing their hair before parties and job interviews. I went to college in Washington, D.C., where seemingly every woman had smooth, straight strands, save for one politician who we’ll discuss later.
So when I quit my job as a tech reporter to build my haircare line MAYURA, I knew I had to also investigate curly hair, and what the first inquiry would be: why are so many people secretly curly?
In the episode, women – and some men – explain why they have felt compelled to straighten their hair or cut it so short you can’t spot a curl to look “professional.” Women who appear on television. Women who work in healthcare. Men who felt like they stood out for their hair, but not in a way that might help.
Stylists have told me their clients say they need to straighten their hair more regularly because they’ve climbed the ranks at work and need to look a certain way at board meetings and conferences.
To understand how this perception took root – where did the myth even come from? – I interviewed Midge Wilson, a professor emeritus at DePaul University. She studied race, perceived attractiveness, cross-race relationships and women’s issues.
And it turns out the perception that curly hair is “not professional” has roots in colonialism. When the British were taking over the world, they wanted people who looked like them to be installed as leadership in every place. This perpetuated the idea that you were uncivilized or lesser if you had more textured hair. It’s an unsurprising yet also unfortunate origin story that still influences how we see ourselves, and how the world sees us.
It’s another shade of the statistic that a disproportionate number of CEOs are men over 6 feet tall.
That’s why I’m investigating these kinds of stories. Former head of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz revealed on We Are Spiraling that she has been pressured throughout her career to straighten her hair.
Annie Korzen, who was a recurring actor on Seinfeld, told me she always wore a wig with straight hair to auditions for lawyer, judge or professor roles. Never would she ever walk in and try to get one of those parts with curly hair.
One of our TikTok clips featuring an interview about this went viral, with more than 1.7 million views and thousands of comments, including some from people who explained that their managers at Kohl’s and professors in college told them they couldn’t show up at work with their natural hair.
There are secret curlies everywhere, in every industry. It’s a market in plain sight, if you’re in on the secret. That’s how I’ve organically grown the We Are Spiraling audience to thousands of listeners in just a quarter, with no ads and no network backing.
And it’s why I’m building my haircare line MAYURA. MAYURA is Sanskrit for “peacock.” I want people with curly hair to know they are distinctive and iconic.
We don’t need it to be a secret.
Priya Anand is the founder of the haircare line MAYURA and We Are Spiraling, a narrative podcast exploring hair, culture and identity.
