Humidity and You

Humidity is not my friend. I have an affinity for thunderstorms not so much because of the noise and the light - although that is fun - but because more often than not, thunderstorms chase away humidity.

I once heard that it's not the temperature that will kill you, it's the humidity. Very true. Perhaps in more ways than one. More precisely, it manages to kill my body as well as my self esteem. So while we're on the second day of Change the Way You See, Not the Way You Look week, I'll keep up my tangent of issues of image and self confidence.

A while back I came across a blog called The Seventeen Magazine Project in which a young lady attempted to live an entire month according to the Gospel of Teen Magazines. While I am no longer of the age (although I don't think I ever enjoyed those things) that subscribes to that sort of publication it brought up some interesting discussions.

This is where humidity comes in. One of the entries in the Project concerned hair, and the categorization that occurs within the realm of hair care products. To summarize, the author expressed frustration at the fact that "Normal" type hair products specified the type of hair found on the majority of Caucasian people (women in this case). All others of the "Abnormal" type, were typical of minorities, ethnic or otherwise. Her frustration was not limited to hair care products as this method of categorization covers everything from skin type to body composition. And this is where I come in.

My hair is technically "normal" when it comes to product selection. But this bothers me. The same way I have to decide whether my skin is oily (gasp) or dry (faints) when it cannot possibly be what they call normal. I also would like to know who made the decision as to what was normal. Come to that, why must we have a normal type of skin, or hair, or fingernail?

When humidity comes along my hair performs what I call The Curl. This is when no matter how much effort I put into styling it, it will shift into a mass of lumps and sticky-out bits. Can't this be normal, I ask you? I'm not the only one with this problem, I'm sure of it.

So here is my conclusion for today. Don't let labels get you down. There is no reason why one consistency of hair should be the norm while the rest are "difficult". Ladies (and gents), cast aside the stigma of "normal" and embrace the wonders that are your features. They make you, you. Since you are in no way inferior, neither are they. That is a good thing.