The Cut - The Real Cost of Straight Hair

Deanna Denham Hughes still remembers the jingle that ruined her life. “Just for meeeee,” she sings, drawing out the last syllable before she breaks into a self-conscious laugh. “It’s like this little hip-hop beat.” In the ad, for Just for Me hair relaxer, Black girls wearing big earrings rap about “body and shine” and flip their silky hair in slow motion. Denham Hughes wanted to be just like them when she was a ’90s kid, and that meant she had to tame her thick, immovable Afro.

From the time Denham Hughes was 5, several times a year she would sit at the kitchen table with a towel around her neck while her mom worked Just for Me cream into her hair. Her mother, a Jamaican immigrant, was sensitive to judgment and wanted her children to be presentable. Denham Hughes didn’t want to stand out either. Once, as her relaxed hair was growing out in the third grade, she wore it in two-strand twists and a classmate called her Medusa. She went back to Just for Me. The relaxer smelled like gasoline and gave her scalp a burning sensation; Denham Hughes would leave it on until the pain became unbearable. That way, she knew it was working. After her hair was rinsed and dried, she’d stare in the mirror, unable to keep her hands off her head. “I just wanted to wake up and pop out of bed like, ‘Oooooh, here I aaaaam,’” she belts out in an operatic voice, throwing her arms to either side.

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