Movie Review: Good Hair

When I saw the trailer for Good Hair, I thought it was going to be a film making fun at the way black people take care of their hair, especially since comedian Chris Rock was hosting it. So, I was not excited to see it but I watched it in class and I was relieved to see that it was a realistic look at how black women keep treat their hair. The topic of hair in the black community can be surprising to those who are not in the black community. The idea of good vs. bad hair is a topic that seems to never go away. Some black women have many issues with the way they want their hair to look and many of us will go to great lengths to get it the way they want.

The movie went into many different aspects of black women’s hair culture. For instance, many black women pay lots of money to get extensions added to their in order for their hair to have a more European or Asian look. One of things I learned in the movie was that some of the extensions come from a religious ritual in India called Tonsure. Tonsure is a ceremony where Indian people shave their heads as a sacrifice. The hair form the Tonsure ceremony is weaved, packaged and shipped to America, among other places. The film also allowed black women that wear extensions and those that wear their hair in its’ natural style, to express their thoughts of why and how they keep their hair. Many of the women that wore extensions, like Raven Symone, said they wouldn’t think of not wearing one.

The film also displayed other interesting things such as the Bronner Brothers Hair Competition and Expo, where hair dressing in the black community artistically styled hair and competed for the Bronner Brothers title. The expo portion of the event was interesting because the black-owned hair care section was so small, because there are less than five big black owned companies. 

I would recommend this movie to other people, especially other black women because it can open up dialogue about why black women find their hair so important as to spend hundreds of dollars on extensions in order to look like other cultures or to have ‘good hair’.

I personally decided to cut my hair and 'go natural' because it was so damaged by the products I was putting into it and I love my natural hair.