Jheri Curl Juice Was My Aphrodisiac

Yeah I said it.

Even though the jheri curl is a laughable part of our history, it is undoubtedly part of it. I always chuckle to myself whenever I happen to ask a black female who’s in her late twenties and older if she ever had a jheri curl. I get one of two responses: 1) A proud “NO! My momma did NOT let me get that stuff in my hair!” or 2) with a slight grin, a sheepish, shameful “Yeah, I had a curl for a minute” or some variation of that.

My mother had a curl, and I thought it was beautiful on her. I thought she looked fresh driving her mercury cougar, huge sunglasses, and her shiny jheri curl.

I remember when my sister would take me with her to band practice at her high school. I was about 8 and there was this majorette that I had a crush on. She was as dark as a new moon midnight, had the whitest teeth ever with a gap between her front two, beautiful velvety dark legs, and a long jheri curl that went past her shoulders. I would always sneak a peek at her practice while acting like I was studying the paths of the ants on the ground.

My first kiss was with a girl that had a curl. her name was Anquenette. I was in the 5th grade and before lunch, the teacher would appoint someone to hand out paper towels so we could dry our hands after going to the bathroom. After we lined up to walk to the bathroom, Anquenette and I faked like we left our paper towels in the classroom and went back. There we were, alone, and we kissed. It was pretty slimy, and when I think about it, pretty unpleasant. But I felt in my gut that there has to be something good about this whole kissing thing, and apparently she thought the same thing, so after that, we would kiss as much as we could, whenever we could. It never did get good, but oh well, there was always sixth grade.

When I got to sixth grade I had a girlfriend with braces and no jheri curl, and we kissed incessantly. I don’t recall her breath being too fresh, and the funk was probably enhanced by the oral stainless steel, but that didn’t stop me. We kissed and kissed and kissed. I don’t think it was too pleasant either, but I was comforted by the fact that I was getting the experience I would need for my seventh grade girlfriend.

In the seventh grade, my girlfriend did have a jheri curl, and I can honestly say that every kiss from the first to the last was super duper. There may have been power in the style of her curl. Because even though Anquenette had a curl, her curl was just a little bushy curl with no form. My seventh grade girlfriend had hers cut jazzy and asymmetrical like salt n pepa.

Her hair was like Salt's

She kept that curl a bit longer than most had (all the way through 9th grade), but by then the curl had evolved to its less drippy version.

In high school that’s when I noticed that girls and women weren’t getting curls, but started getting “short texturizers”, when in effect, weren’t they just Jheri curl 2.0?

jheri curl 2.0

Whatever the case, I liked it. I had a girlfriend my sophomore year that had one of those. She was definitely one of the more memorable girlfriends. Gotta love that curl.

Now I never had a curl, but I did get a Duke texturizer in the summer of 1989. I of course wanted my hair

to look like the dude on the box, but it never quite got right. I was also in an outdoor basketball day camp, so the sun combining with the chemicals turned the top of my hair a tinge of orange, so it made me look like a dark version of the Redhead Kingpin.

Imagine his hair, but 70% wacker.

So when will the curl come back? Isn’t everything old coming back in some way or another? I don’t know why a lot of us act as if we are ashamed of the curl. Fashion and hair is relative, so for the time, it was some cool shit to have. Who knows, if and when I do get married, the jheri curl may be the secret to a happy marriage for me.