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As someone with thick, 4C hair, I’ve struggled greatly with dryness all my life. Whether relaxed or natural, I could wash my hair and throw all sorts of hot oil treatments in it, only for the oil to end up building up on my scalp and failing to penetrate my strands. A day or two after having a greasy head of hair, my mane would be as dry as a Brillo pad again, rough to the touch. I believed that with the right moisturizing products, my hair could feel like satin. I just had to find them. To me, no one’s hair was meant to feel so parched. There were literally were so many commercials and stories that said so. Therefore, if your hair still felt like hay, then you just weren’t moisturizing it right. Right?

Maybe not. It wasn’t until I interviewed celebrity stylist Felicia Leatherwood, known for her work with Issa Rae, that I realized I may have had it all wrong.

“A lot of people don’t know what their hair is supposed to feel like. Some people’s hair is supposed to feel dry,” she told MadameNoire in 2015. “That’s what it is. You can soften it when it’s wet, but once it’s dry — you have to understand our lineage. Who we are as a people, African people, the region in which we originated is hot. If you have straight hair in heat that’s like 105, 108, 109-degree weather, your hair would burn off. They had to have this hair in order to protect themselves. We’re not used to that because things have changed a lot for us. We think we need to have everybody else’s hair. You need to have your own hair and make sure you’re treating that the best possible way.”

I never thought that my desire for soft hair could be based on a desire for it to be what I saw from other people’s hair. I just assumed I wasn’t nourishing it well enough and needed to keep trying to learn how. But perhaps my hair was meant to feel dry. And maybe, the same is true for your own.

I decided to ask a dermatologist about this. Were some of us just meant to have hair that feels dry to the touch? Dr. Yolanda Lenzy affirmed Leatherwood’s stance.

“What determines the way the hair feels to the touch is really the cuticle layer,” she says. “So some people’s cuticle layers are rough, sitting up sometimes. You lay the cuticle down with heat. You break the hydrogen bonds within the hair, so it changes the shape from the natural, maybe coily, kinky shape to this broken-down shape. The cuticle is laying down, so you’re going to get that silkier feel.”

While you can lay down the hair and change the way it feels with heat, she believes that some people’s desire to have silky hair is because they’ve been conditioned to think that’s better. That’s why we try to make our hair do things it just won’t naturally do.

For the record though, Dr. Lenzy says very coarse hair can be made to feel softer to the touch without altering it.

“It can do that. There are things that can make the hair silkier like doing steam treatments, which open the cuticle. Then you apply a deep-conditioning treatment, which can help to smooth the rough cuticle,” she says.

Steaming can be done in a hot shower. Or, if you’re interested in investing, there are plenty of affordable tools on the market now, from handheld to hooded options, to get a salon steam treatment at home.

“Steaming is great because it really opens the cuticle and allows the shaft to absorb the products more readily,” she says. “So whether it’s a deep conditioner or processing some color, do it after steaming and it absorbs better.”

But Dr. Lenzy, like Leatherwood, encourages women to try and embrace their hair the way that it is. Treatments done to make your hair healthier are great, but looking to make it feel, look like and act another way, she doesn’t recommend.

“I agree with [Felicia Leatherwood]. Some people, that’s what their hair does and that’s what their hair is,” Dr. Lenzy says. “A part of me is about embracing what our hair is, but some people don’t want that. They want tips to help it to be something different. So these are things that can help do that.”

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