Not everyone has straight hair. And not all curly hair is created equal. Yet, the vast majority of book characters (in books that I’ve read) have straight hair. If they have curls, they are often ” perfectly windblown” or some such nonsense.

Sigh.

Confession time. I have curly hair. More specifically, I have 2c/3a low porosity hair. For the majority of my life (**cough cough** three decades **cough cough**) I only let my hair be curly on days when I couldn’t bear to heat style it or couldn’t, for whatever reason, tame it into a ponytail. Even on my wedding day, my hair was carefully blown out straight and then curled with hot rollers.

Recently, thanks to some encouragement from my curly headed sister, I have embraced my curls. That means that I have had to start “unlearning” all of my bad hair habits. It also means I have to figure out how to care for my curls. It’s not as simple as it might seem. My hair actually gets curlier every week that I don’t try to straighten it, so I have to figure out how to handle it at each new stage of curliness too.

And so it hit me, almost every fictional depiction of characters with curls is complete nonsense.

First, there are a lot of different kinds of curls. From wavy all the way to coils and everything in between. And a person can have more than one type of curls at the same time.

Second, just because someone has hair that is naturally curly doesn’t mean they don’t have to work to style it. If you have a curly headed character on a long camping trip with no styling creams or gels, no satin pillowcases or head scarves, and no access to any kind of conditioner, those curls aren’t going to look the same anymore.

Third, if you have a character with curly hair and they go through some kind of makeover to become more attractive to a love interest, don’t straighten their hair. Curly hair is beautiful too.

I could go on, but at this point, I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t make a 10 Things post about curly hair at some point. I want to see more curly headed characters in fiction. And I want to see them depicted realistically.

If you are unsure, there is a wealth of videos on YouTube specifically dedicated to the care and styling of curly hair. Curly Penny. India Batson. Real life + Curly Girl. Hair Romance (her microphone is a hairbrush, which is just glorious). Joy Before Her. Bianca Renee Today. And those are just a few. Go down the rabbit hole.

Let your characters live their best life. The curly life.