{"id":74977,"date":"2019-12-06T17:05:53","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T15:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=74977"},"modified":"2019-12-06T16:19:55","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T14:19:55","slug":"13-05-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=74977","title":{"rendered":"The War of the Curls"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The War of the Curls<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

Flora Tsapovsky<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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In Israel, female politicians, models, and celebrities are pressured to straighten their hair. But a curly haired rebellion is taking root.<\/h4>\n

(Illustration: Shutterstock)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Walk down the streets of Tel Aviv or Haifa, and you\u2019ll see many women with naturally curly hair<\/a>. But turn on Israeli TV news, and you\u2019ll be hard pressed to find a female anchor who hasn\u2019t pressed her hair flat. And this isn\u2019t just a trend among news anchors. In Israel, female politicians, entrepreneurs, and celebrities who step into the limelight are soon found featuring straight, shiny locks, no matter their hair\u2019s original texture.<\/span><\/p>\n

Male politicians and celebrities with curly hair exist in Israel, but since they tend to keep their hair short, it\u2019s been less of an issue; women, who more often keep their hair long, are in the eye of this cultural storm. But recently, there\u2019s been a cultural uprising brewing, as curls take center stage in the national conversation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Four years ago, a tech worker named Orian Paz decided to start a conversation about natural hair, and founded the Facebook community Metultalot<\/a> (\u201ccurly women,\u201d in Hebrew). What happened next exceeded all expectations: currently, the group has 77,500 members, and Paz had since added a website<\/a>, YouTube channel<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a> account to the mix. \u201cMany public figures in Israel are asked to straighten their hair when facing the camera,\u201d said Paz. \u201cAnd watching them makes curly women feel out of place.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

With daily discussions on anything from self-acceptance and curl maintenance to raising curly daughters, the Facebook group is challenging Israel\u2019s mainstream perception of beautiful hair. Last spring, on March 3 (3\/3 reminds her of the shape of curls, Paz says) the group celebrated the second National Curls Day, a holiday Paz invented to bring awareness to her cause. The event included women\u2019s empowerment circles, concerts by curly haired performers, workshops by hairdressers, and a marketplace. \u201cWe had amazing feedback\u2014600 women came, and we were entirely booked,\u201d she said, adding that her dream is a large-scale curl festival sometime in the future. Paz points to the fact that the natural hair movement is not unique to Israel. \u201cIn the U.S. I see the movement primarily among women of color<\/a>, who take pride in their heritage and talk about the complex history around hair,\u201d she said. \u201cIn Israel, the problem is that hair types vary significantly, and no one is leading a single discussion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As a curly haired blonde myself, I watched as Stav Shaffir<\/a>, my former colleague at a women\u2019s website, rose to fame as a promising young politician, while her fiery, kinky mane was slowly turned into tamed waves. Shelly Yachimovich, a former colleague of Shaffir\u2019s in the Israeli Labor Party, has been public<\/a> about her transformation from curls to straightened hair, led by TV producers and advisers who pushed her toward a cleaner, more \u201corganized\u201d look. \u201cWhen I first came on screen with curls, it was an unusual sight, since many female broadcasters were already loyal soldiers in the army of the blow-dry,\u201d Yachimovich said on a TV show<\/a> in 2014. Eventually, she decided to straighten her hair, \u201cso at least on this topic I don\u2019t evoke controversy.\u201d A genetically curly nation has come to remove curls from the spotlight, providing a hotbed for Paz\u2019s curly rebellion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instagram, however, has become a battlefield for natural hair positivity. A couple of social media influencers, Eden Fines<\/a> and Yulia Plotkin Oz<\/a>, have emerged on the platform in recent years, sporting voluminous curls. In 2019, two influential models, Daniel Greenberg<\/a> and Shlomit Malka Levi<\/a>, had announced a \u201ccomeback\u201d to their naturally curly hair, after years of invasive treatments. \u201cMy curls aren\u2019t new, what\u2019s new is the fact I started loving them,\u201d Malka Levi wrote in a formative post<\/a> in August, after an Israeli media outlet ran an online survey asking readers to choose between a curly and a straight look for the supermodel (most voted for the latter). Similarly, the goal of Metultalot\u2019s Instagram page, Paz said, is \u201cto bring back the confidence to curly women, by showing there\u2019s a large community around them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But for curly hair to make a comeback, people like Paz have to go beyond social media and get directly into hair salons. \u201cFor many years, the straightener and blow-dry industry in Israel has been booming,\u201d said Paz. \u201cThese are expensive procedures that put a lot of money in hairdressers\u2019 pockets, so they push women to get in line.\u201d Having recently quit her day job to entirely devote herself to the community and its activities, Paz is hard at work on My Curly Way, her own line of products designed for curly hair, with feedback from her group\u2019s members in mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Benyamin (Benon) Toledano, a hairdresser (with curly hair in his pre-shaved-head past) who has years of experience treating curly hair, has always been drawn to the texture. So a few years into his career, he decided to cut back on straightening treatments for curly clients. Instead, for the past 12 years, he\u2019s been running the hair salon Metultalot Shel Benon (Benon\u2019s curly girls) in the suburban town of Ganei Tikva. Clients flock from all over the county. \u201cThe Metultalot group has definitely brought a change, a real revolution,\u201d he said. Being one of the few Israeli hairdressers who strongly identify themselves with curly haired clientele, Toledano had seen plenty of sad stories. \u201cMany clients come scarred by previous experiences, in which their hair was mistreated, cut wrong, or someone persuaded them to straighten it,\u201d he said. \u201cFor them, embracing curls is almost like coming out of the closet.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially hard, added Toledano, given the psychological aspects of having straight or curly hair\u2014so many of them are at play, he\u2019s currently collecting materials to write a book about curls. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of certainty and peace of mind in having straight hair,\u201d he said. \u201cYou know exactly how you\u2019ll look like after a shower, in the rain, in London or Jamaica, waking up or going to bed. You don\u2019t need to worry.\u201d Perhaps, in a country ridden with summertime humidity, social and ethnic divides, and an unpredictable political and social climate, going curly is a braver move than it may seem at first. Or, as Malka Levi put it in an Instagram post: \u201cForgoing curls is just a symptom of something deeper, of our tendency to minimize ourselves, conform, not confront. Set yourself free of all the conditioning that prevents you being your fullest, most wonderful version.\u201d Fittingly, her words were accompanied by a selfie, with a head full of big, rebellious curls.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The War of the Curls Flora Tsapovsky In Israel, female politicians, models, and celebrities are pressured to straighten their hair. But a curly haired rebellion is taking root. (Illustration: Shutterstock) Walk down the streets of Tel Aviv or Haifa, and you\u2019ll see many women with naturally curly hair. But turn on Israeli TV news, and you\u2019ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74977"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74977"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74990,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74977\/revisions\/74990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}