Virginia-based cosmetologist, educator, and author Tishawna Pritchett says she’s never relied on hair typing for that reason. It wasn’t taught in cosmetology school when she studied over 30 years ago, and even after learning about the plethora of hair textures represented by the chart, she never adopted it. “It makes no sense to my clients when their focus is simply healthy hair,” she says.
Many of Pritchett’s clients come in convinced they have 4C hair because of something they saw on the chart, but when she examines their strands, what they’re identifying is often just damaged hair, or curls that haven’t been properly cared for, not their true texture.
When it comes to figuring out how to care for your hair day-to-day, Dr. Asempa says, a better starting point is hair condition, including the damage level, and its porosity—or, in other words, how absorptive it is. Porosity is determined by two things: the natural lipids and cuticle structure you’re born with, and the external choices you make.
Dyes, relaxers, perms, and heat styling all contribute to the breaking of chemical bonds in the hair, which permanently change the structure. Because of that, Dr. Asempa explains, product marketing based on curl patterns alone can be misleading. Someone who is Caucasian with straight, bleached hair, for example, may actually benefit from the same products as someone who is Black with high-porosity coils. What matters most is the hair’s structure and health.
The texture of hair is also tied to general health. When the body goes through shifts, whether from stress, hormonal changes, medication, or simply aging, hair follicles can weaken or shrink. That can cause curl patterns to loosen or lose density. The hair-typing system wasn’t designed to address these kinds of changes either.
Today’s hair-typing chart reinforces age-old biases
Many people in the natural hair community have long pointed out that the modern curl-pattern chart indirectly favors looser, more Eurocentric textures, which can reinforce harmful and prejudiced ideas about beauty. By putting straight hair first, literally as type 1, and coily textures last at type 4, it subtly reinforces the idea that the tighter the texture, the further it is from what has been historically labeled as “ideal” or the “default.” That hierarchy didn’t begin with Walker—again, the very concept of creating hair classifications began with eugenics—but I believe his chart has unintentionally carried some of that thinking forward.