Are you the curly type?

Women with curly hair have had a special place in our fantasies. And it may have something to do with the way the Italians describe them: Ogni riccio un capriccio. The literal translation is “each curl a whim”.

As a culture, we never really cared about curls. For the longest time, shampoo makers and Manish Malhotra have convinced us that the transition from unsophisticated and undesirable to beautiful and Shah Rukh Khan-worthy is a headful of straight, silky, lustrous hair and slim eye brows. It didn’t help to have the veterans such as Parveen Babi toss their straight Sunsilked hair into the collective imagination of another generation. Heck, even vamps wore straight wigs in a vomit shade of straw.

The poster girl of curly hair, Kangana Ranaut, is the perfect embodiment of all the cliches that one associates with curls. Whimsical. Eccentric. Wild. Untamable. In most of her recent films, she wears her natural curls with pride, unlike some of her earlier outings where she struggled to keep her hair a more acceptable kind of straight. Remember her ‘corporate’ look in Life in a Metro?

When Anushka Sharma in Rajkumar Hirani’s latest film, portraying a high-flying biographer who time travels at the blink of an eye to convince sources and sinners for her ‘Sanju’ story, had to choose wig, she went for a curly one. A bobbed Afro, it was meant to put her in the league of women who have too much of an opinion and too much of money and too much passion for whatever it is they do. 

And so Tapsee Pannu, a fiery North Indian, sports her curls in her latest film, just the way men would want to sport their facial fuzz. And I have a sneaking suspicion, that Abishek Bachchan’s ‘Ramji type’ character, was drawn to those impossible curls more than anything else. 

If you have women who are drawn to the bad boys, women who feel an overwhelming urge to run their fingers through their messy hair and take them to bed, the reverse is also true. 

Good guys are often drawn to badass women. Especially, badass women with curls. But here’s the thing. Curly haired women may hold a curious hold over the imagination of the straightest men, but they may not always be the woman they want to marry. 

In a certain episode of Sex and the City, we find the curl theory being played out to the fullest. When Carrie finds out that Mr Big is engaged to a younger woman, the girls talk about how she is a sophisticated woman with less curls than Carrie herself. The conversation moves to the classic film The Way We Were in which Robert Redford’s character is married to a woman who is outspoken, and…curly haired. He eventually leaves her for a woman with less curls and ‘less complications’.

So here’s the mixed bag of men-luck for curly haired women. There will be the ‘Ramji type’ who would be curious about her curls and her complications. There would also be the men who would be intimidated her the curls. Either way, the association of curls with character is culture agnostic. The primitive brain loves the comfort of the familiar. Of what is known. Curls have a way of drawing you in and keeping you in there. Like the memory of your last, great romance.

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