In Disney’s The Princess Diaries, ugly duckling Mia Thermopolis (played by Anne Hathaway) discovers that she is a real-life princess. In the film’s infamous transformation scene, Mia’s stylist Paolo puts a hand on her shoulder and directs her towards a full-length mirror, where, in a wide shot, the audience sees the schoolgirl awkwardly poised from head to ankle within the gold frame: the “before” image. Paolo grabs a fistful of Mia’s dry, frizzy hair, and his suspicions are confirmed: it not only looks like straw, but it feels like straw, too. He takes a round, cushioned hairbrush to it, the kind which, as any real stylist would know, is designed specifically to de-tangle naturally straight hair. It gets stuck, then snaps in half. A comic beat. The light-hearted electro-pop score propels the audience into a cross-fade. An ethereal melody plays as Mia’s new look is revealed. Her hair has been flat-ironed straight. She flashes a radiant but unsure smile at the camera as if to ask, “Am I beautiful now?”
“Better,” says the Queen. “Much better.”
But what is it about her straight hair that makes Mia “much better?” I suppose it could be argued that her hair looks healthier post-metamorphosis than it did at the beginning. But, if the filmmakers simply wanted Mia’s hair to look “healthier,” why not just have Paolo guide Mia through a curl-enhancing hair routine? In a 2022 Insider article, Talia Lakritz, speaks on behalf of all curly-haired women when she states that “what the Princess of Genovia really needed was sulfate-free conditioner and a stylist who could help her embrace her natural texture.”
The film presents curly hair as dirty, messy, undesirable, in need of fixing. Curly-haired women who watched the film as children have attested that Mia’s makeover scene damaged their self-esteem, writing that “The Princess Diaries portrayed my curly hair as a problem. I’ve since learned to embrace it.” One article cites The Princess Diaries as evidence of “a culture that praises straight hair,” wherein this message is perpetuated by the gross over-representation of straight hair “in media, commercials, books, songs, etc.”
As a child, I did not understand why, when I brushed my hair as other girls did, it morphed into a stringy, frizzy mane. My primary school friends would play with my hair and call it “poofy.” (One girl, Ava, even repeatedly referred to it as “the bush.”) At the salon, I’d hear, “Your hair is so thick. Are you sure you don’t want some weight removed?” Sometimes, they didn’t even ask; one hairdresser gave me layers even after I had explicitly said I didn’t want any.
By age twelve, I’d had enough: I started waking up early every morning so that I could straighten my shoulder-length curly hair before school. Flat-iron in hand, I worked around my head in sections until the smell of burnt popcorn filled the air. I didn’t want the thick, Jewish hair my granddad had passed down to me; I yearned instead for Ava’s flowy, pin-straight blunt cut. I wanted the kind of hair I saw in mystical conditioner commercials: the straightening “MIRACLE” that my mother’s “Smoothing Conditioner for Dull, Tired Hair Begging to Shine” so generously promised on the bottle.
Reading Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth for my A-Level English coursework helped me realize that curly hair erasure in Western society is caused by the inescapable prevalence of Eurocentric beauty standards. The novel, which catapulted Smith into the public eye with its unanticipated success, follows a half-Jamaican, half-English teenager named Irie Jones. Irie hopes to mitigate the racial prejudice that she experiences at her secondary school in London by changing her hair. She makes an appointment at P.K.’s Afro Hair: Design and Management because she is “intent upon transformation.” Specifically, she wants “Straight hair. Straight, straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-through-able wind-blowable hair.” Growing up, like me, Irie saw no girls with curly or kinky hair presented as beautiful on TV or in films; any curly-haired woman that did appear was always a secondary or supporting character (today, examples include Roz from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Rue from The Hunger Games) or a straight-up villain (Chutney Windham from Legally Blonde and Mother Gothel from Tangled). The protagonists, on the other hand, were Mias: white, visually stunning objects of desire with straight, shiny hair.
But Irie, too, had a throne to claim—or rather, a teenage boy to seduce: Millat. As Smith tells the reader, “She had it all planned; she was going to go round to Millat’s [that] very evening with her new mane, all tied up in a bun, and she was going to take off her glasses and shake down her hair and he was going to say “why Miss Jones, I never would have supposed . . . why Miss Jones, you’re—”
Who can blame Irie for wanting to step into the role of the main character? Who can blame her for “fighting her genes,” as Smith calls it, in order to be perceived as beautiful in a racist society? Colonialist attitudes pollute Irie’s secondary school, ever-present in the classroom and in the playground, informing her comprehension of what it means to be desirable. In the UK, in the multicultural North London borough where Irie lives, white girls prevail. To boys like Millat, they are the poster children of beauty. Straight hair is white hair, after all. Irie chooses straight over curly, favors White English over Black Jamaican; this is the only way she can feel seen.
Since completing my English coursework, I have thought a lot about the cultural symbolism of curls in media, particularly in the film industry where my own interests in writing and directing lie. I recently attended a lecture on the history of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in film given by Professor Theodore Kim of Yale’s Computer Science Department. Kim began with a discussion of physics-related developments in animation, so I was surprised when he changed the subject to the current state of racial diversity and equality in animation. At international animation conferences, he said, the most prominent CGI computer scientists (who are almost always white) discuss developing algorithms to capture arbitrary, minute details of daily life—such as adding lifelike scratches to metal kettles—but continually fail to prioritize algorithms that would help portray curls or afros.
Kim attested that the term “hair” in animation journals has become synonymous with straight hair. Most people at the forefront of the animation industry, therefore, believe “hair” is an issue that has been solved. However, Kim pointed out that the “Marschner” model, the standard hair-rendering paradigm in use today, was specifically designed to animate flat, straight hair, with no equivalent model ever developed for textured hair. There has certainly been progress in the industry since the days of The Princess Diaries—something apparent in recent blockbuster films centering POC characters such as Encanto, whose protagonist, Mirabel, has short curly hair. However, this does not mean that the lack of representation in animation has been resolved. Creating Mirabel’s loose ringlets proved a complex challenge for Disney, and the animators had to fall back on models designed for straight hair to form the foundation of their work.
I’m glad that Encanto, the first Disney animated feature film to showcase the entire spectrum of hair types from 1A (straight) to 4C (afro), achieved such success, immediately becoming a family favorite for many. Still, I can’t help but feel bitter that, growing up, I didn’t see gorgeous curly-haired characters like Mirabel on cinema screens and double-decker bus posters. If I had, perhaps my own journey would have played out differently. Perhaps I never would have suffered heat damage from ironing my hair flat each morning.
The way it did happen: I didn’t realize I had curly hair until I was sixteen. A YouTube video gave me the answers that I could never find in films or books. At the start, the girl on the screen had a frizzy mop of “Dull, Tired Hair Begging to Shine” that resembled my own. Instead of brushing it out, though, or picking up the flat-iron, she washed it. Then she flipped her head upside down, wet locks dripping everywhere like a saturated wolf’s mane. She ran cream, gel, and serums through her hair with dexterous hands. Another head flip. She added butterfly clips to her roots to increase volume. Another head flip. She dried her hair upside-down using a diffuser. I watched the half-hour video awestruck.
By the end, her curls were light, soft, unrecognizable, yet also purposefully messy. She had initiated her own metamorphosis—not the kind Mia or Irie underwent, but another kind, borne out of a refusal to regress. A refusal to see textured hair as “a problem,” a perpetual “before” image. A refusal to return to the dry, hot, burnt-popcorn stench of the straighteners.
