◉≋The Afro ABCs | Bespokecurry

The Afro ABCs are not an alphabet for naming what Afro hair is. They are a field language for navigating Afro hair as terrain — 26 portals into tech (know) logy, ecology, archive, architecture and living Black embodiment.

The Afro ABCs

Front-facing Wata(ring) Homie rendered in neon green, orange and magenta overprinted ink, with long braids radiating outward into a wheel-like circular frame.

Front-facing Wata(ring) Homie rendered in green and violet overprinted ink, wearing a septum ring and round earrings, with pointed braids radiating like a sunburst.

Front-facing Wata(ring) Homie rendered in green, ochre and red overprinted ink, with thick braids curving into a circular crown of interconnected loops.

Afro Hair Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

Olive-green and magenta risograph diagram of Afro hair viewed from behind, divided into a mapped grid with coiled knots, loose textured edges and hair clips positioned across the terrain.

Afro hair is not a problem waiting for the right product, practitioner or rule to solve it. It is an individual terrain—layered, responsive, ecological and alive. It cannot be understood from a distance or ignored until it becomes inconvenient. It has to be entered. Observed. Listened to long enough for its patterns to become legible.

The Afro ABCs begin there:

not with correction, but with relationship.

Hot-pink scientific diasporic blueprint quilt graphic filled with layered green, yellow and blue risograph studies of Afro heads, coils, braids, combs, plants, hands, water droplets, vessels, fungi, orbital diagrams and celestial symbols.

Red and cobalt risograph diagram of Afro hair viewed from behind, divided into a mapped grid with coiled knots at the crown, loose textured edges and hair clips marking sections of the terrain.

Before the License, There Was the Terrain

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My maternal grandmother Mary Francis was a licensed cosmetologist, and my mother would not allow me to relax my hair before I turned eighteen. Growing up in the 1990s, that was a difficult boundary to inhabit. Straightened hair surrounded me as expectation, acceptability and assimilation.

Granny pressed hair into gravity

so my afro could fly free.

Her hands learned the language of assimilation

so mine could learn the language of return.

Everything in this book begins with her.

At the time, I could not fully understand what remaining with my unaltered texture was giving me. Looking back, I recognize that it kept me in relationship with my terrain long enough to begin learning how it moved—before culture and colonialism taught me to step onto the treadmill.

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Deep-blue Afroscape technical blueprint titled “Afro Hair as Living Terrain—Afro Antennae.” A vast Afro becomes a bio-signal tree system with coiled antennae, transmission pathways, scalp networks and roots extending into the earth, surrounded by diagrams of density, movement and environmental exchange.

Cyan-tinted historical group photograph of cosmetology students in white uniforms standing outside Allura G. Stams Beauty School in Memphis, Tennessee. Mary Francis Westbrooks Dickerson is identified by a purple circle in the back row.

Coral-and-deep-purple risograph cutout of Kiing Curry wearing round glasses and long side-swept braids while styling a mannequin head during cosmetology training.

The License Was a Landscape, Not the Cosmos

I received my cosmetology license in 2014 believing I was entering a deeper framework for understanding Afro hair. Instead, I encountered a practice licensed by the state—and the state has never been neutral in its relationship to the Black body.

Cosmetology remains organized around European beauty standards, professional authority and the management of bodies into acceptable forms. It is one landscape I have traveled and a developed craft I still carry. But it is not the whole BespokeCurry Cosmos, and it cannot govern what Afro hair is allowed to know.

Deep-navy Afroscape cosmic field filled with cyan, violet and orange risograph planets, orbital maps, constellations, spirals, droplets and celestial diagrams, with a tree-like Afro form growing at the lower right.

Cyan-tinted cosmetology-school portrait of Kiing Curry wearing glasses and long side-swept braids while holding a mannequin head with an asymmetrical black hairstyle. A translucent violet-and-orange circle frames Kiing against a wall painted with white spirals.

Pink-and-violet risograph cutout of a Black stylist tending a seated Black person’s Afro hair, encircled by looping turquoise and red Wata(rings) that map the exchange between their bodies.

Care Cannot Require Dependence

The Afro ABCs begin there:

not with correction, but with relationship.

Cyan-toned close-up of hands tending dark Afro hair over a salon basin, partially covered by translucent diagonal teal and gold stripes.

Deep-blue scientific diasporic blueprint filled with white, cyan, violet and orange diagrams of Black heads, hands, roots, braids, combs, water droplets, spirals, anatomical maps, circuits and energetic exchange.

Small blue-green risograph figure viewed from behind with an enormous round Afro patterned with red hibiscus flowers, chains across the body, a raised fist and an Afro pick.

Natural Is Not the Same as Free

Returning to my own body made the terrain visible again. The natural-hair marketplace had converted confusion into consumption: more products, more routines, more intervention and more opportunities to believe that someone else possessed the answer.

Afro hair requires deep tending, but deep tending is not constant doing. In the practice I have developed, a roughly monthly wash cycle is a grounding rhythm; some scalp conditions and body needs may call for ten to fourteen days. This is not another universal rule. Every Afro body is a different terrain, and every terrain must reveal what it requires.

Yellow scientific diasporic blueprint filled with magenta, green and blue diagrams of Afro heads, flowing strands, coils, droplets, circular maps, hands, vessels, grids and planetary forms connected across a halftone field.

Blue-green and coral risograph figure viewed from behind with an enormous round Afro patterned with red hibiscus flowers. Chains cross the shoulders and hair, connecting hands gathered at the nape to a raised fist and wide-tooth Afro pick.

There Is No Product List

Small neon vector collage of Blue Magic conditioner, Let’s Jam gel, a pink heart-patterned bonnet and a knotted turquoise durag positioned beneath the section title.

Afro hair does not need another shopping list. It needs moisture architecture.

You will not find recommended brands here. Brands change, reformulate and disappear. Long-term observation has brought me to an elemental architecture: water, glycerin, gel, curl mousse and curl cream. I am sticking to that. This excludes blow-dry styling, a separate terrain requiring its own preparation.

Glycerin is the moisture anchor.

Professional backbar systems prove that the industry can formulate specifically for Afro hair, yet that depth of care is rarely available over the counter. Instead, generalized products are stretched across every curl.

That exclusion is a choice.

Safety matters, but clean-girl purity is not liberation if removing functional ingredients leaves Afro hair unable to retain moisture.

Product is only part of the architecture. Afro hair must also be allowed to remain clumped and low-manipulation. Protective styling is not synonymous with adding external hair; it is the condition that protects healthy coils from one monthly cycle to the next.

The brand is not the knowing.

The relationship is.

Dusty-pink Afroscape cosmic field filled with distressed red, blue and green planets, orbital maps, constellations, spirals, droplets and celestial diagrams, with a tree-like Afro form at the lower right.

Neon vector still life of a purple jar of Blue Magic conditioner, a small jar of Let’s Jam gel, a pink bonnet patterned with green hearts and a knotted turquoise durag.

Cyan-toned photograph of a Black person with long textured hair pouring golden glycerin from a bottle into their open palm, overlaid with a dark green circle and yellow-green geometric forms.

Afro Hair Has No Gender

Small coral-and-red vector illustration of two hands using purple scissors to cut two dense Afro-hair silhouettes arranged in a flowing formation.

The service may be divided by the binary. The terrain is not.

Afro hair is Afro hair.

It does not become masculine when it enters a barbershop or feminine when it enters a salon. Binary gender does not change the terrain. It changes who is permitted to touch it, what service is offered, how much time is considered reasonable, what price is demanded and what the finished body is expected to communicate.

Barbering has been compressed into a colonial timeframe: move faster, serve more bodies, charge more money and call speed expertise—even when the hair has not received the tending it requires. Salon culture can reproduce a different form of harm, turning overexposure, intrusion and dysregulated group energy into part of the price a person is expected to pay for care.

Meanwhile, everybody’s hair is being undertended.

Afro hair is energy work.

Touching someone’s scalp, entering their hair, moving around their head and being given access to their body is an exchange between people. It requires consent, attention, regulation, boundaries and reciprocity. If that exchange is out of balance, the style may be technically complete, but the care cannot be sustainable.

The problem is not simply where Afro hair is being done. It is the social architecture surrounding the doing. No amount of technical skill can compensate for a relationship that teaches the body to brace itself.

The Afro ABCs refuse the idea that hair belongs to a binary before it belongs to the body. The terrain leads. The person living within it remains the primary knower.

Teal, pink and blue Afroscape terrain filled with waterways, pouring vessels, plants, giant Afro-shaped trees, braided structures, hair picks, distant dwellings, clouds, planets and falling droplets.

Coral, red and purple vector illustration of two dark-skinned hands using scissors to cut two dense Afro profiles arranged in an S-shaped flow.

Magenta salon poster arranged as nine black oval portals: three Wata(ring) Homie portraits, three mapped Afro-hair structures and three scenes of people tending Afro hair, connected by blue rings, spirals and geometric linework.

The Coil Is Not a Grade

Green spiral coils traveling across a warped blue grid, representing Afro hair as recursive geometry rather than a fixed grade.

Curl Typing Is Not Hair Science

Curl typing is not a biological truth. It is a classification system born from celebrity hairstyling and repeated by marketing and state-authorized cosmetology until it began to feel anatomical.

The grid is not neutral. It is a hierarchy: straight hair first, Afro hair last. Proximity to Whiteness is coded as softness and desirability, while tighter spiraling, contraction and hair that refuses market-approved visibility are placed at the bottom.

I understand why 4C became a site of belonging. People denied affirming language for their coils found one another there.

That community is real.

The category is not.

The inability to see a pattern does not mean the pattern is absent. Afro hair is circular, spiral, recursive and fractal. It holds pattern inside pattern—contracting, expanding, repeating, returning and connecting. Water, glycerin, clumping, movement, weather and touch may change what becomes visible, but its geometry does not need a grade to exist.

The question is not, “What curl type am I?”

How does this terrain receive water and hold moisture? How does it gather? How does it respond to touch, time, atmosphere and weight? What relationship allows it to remain whole?

Afro hair does not need a type.
It needs to be known.

Coral scientific diasporic blueprint quilt filled with Afro profiles, hair and scalp structures, spirals, braided bands, droplets, hair picks, circular diagrams and interconnected geometric systems.

Green circular coils expanding and contracting across a curved blue grid over the scientific diasporic blueprint quilt.

Green spiral structures crossing a flexible blue grid, visualizing pattern, movement and dimensional variation within Afro hair.

Green recursive coils moving across a warped blue field, representing Afro hair’s repeating geometry and response to changing terrain.

A Field Guide, Not Another Rulebook

Small Afroscape Bespokecurry homeie with an oversized orange Afro, dark cap, blue denim overalls and colorful sandals and socks.

The Afro ABCs are part of my decolonizing from cosmetology—not a rejection of craft, but a refusal to let cosmetology remain the authority over Afro knowing.

These letters are not commandments.

They are 26 portals into Afroscape: coordinates for reading Afro hair as technology, ecology, archive, architecture and living Black embodiment.

The terrain rotates through Mycelial Sankofa and ecological attunement. We return, observe, listen and adjust as the body changes.

The field guide does not replace your knowing. It helps you find your way back to it.