Dove’s ‘Love Your Curls’ Film Perfect For Black Girls With Natural Hair

Dove Hair’s new Love Your Curls film encouraging women to celebrate, love and take pride in their curly hair for the sake of their daughters has me feeling all the feels. All of them.

Take a look for yourselves: the film opens with all these pretty little curly-haired girls lamenting how much they can’t stand their locks and how much happier they’d be if they had straight, sleek hair. This, of course, is understandable: in this pop culture-, Pocahontas weave-down-the-the-booty-obsessed society we live in, there hardly seems to be room for little girls with curly, natural hair to love every strand exactly the way they grow out of their heads. In fact, in a recent global study, Dove Hair found that one in three women in the US have wavy to curly hair, yet the traditional standard of beauty is often considered straight and sleek. In fact…

• Only 10% of women in the US with curly hair feel proud of their hair
• Only 4 in 10 girls with curly hair think their hair is beautiful and
• Little girls are 7X more likely to love their curls if people around them do

Clearly, pictures of Lupita Nyongo on the runway and that “I Love My Hair” video on Sesame Street are not enough.

What I love most about the Love Your Curls film is the message that it truly takes a village to get our daughters to embrace their natural hair and beauty. It’s a message I fully support: when my first girlpie waged a war against her natural hair at the tender age of three, I went natural so that she could see her own mother embracing, rocking and loving my own natural hair. My goal was to encourage her, and later, my youngest daughter, Totally Lila, to be cool with their own curls and rock their afro puffs, cornrows, twists and locs with confidence and a great big ol’ smile.

Our natural hair journey hasn’t been easy: despite the constant affirmations, my girls have their moments when they simply wish their hair was easier to manage and longer. I get that. Lord knows I have those days, too. But they come few and far between for the girlpies and me because we do the work. It’s a constant conversation, filled with compliments (“My God, you’re so lucky to have such gorgeous curls!” I often say to Lila), lots of experimentation (we’ve come across some amazing products and hairstyles for Mari’s locs) and consistent evaluation of pop culture, the messages it sends to girls and women, and all the ways we must fight against it.

Thank God, my daughters are listening, learning and on firm footing toward total self-acceptance. But there are many more little girls who could stand the lesson. I can’t think of a better way to inspire their journey than showing them Dove’s “Love Your Curls” film. Get your tissues ready, then press play. And show the video to your girlpies so that they, too, will know curly hair rocks.