I’m honored to be partnering with Dove as part of their Love Your Hair Campaign – their mission is to create a conversation with mothers on how & why they should share hair positivity with their daughters. A Dove Hair study showed that 8 in 10 women feel pressure to wear their hair a certain way & another study showed that 82% of girls learn to care about themselves from their mothers. So I’m encouraging all of you who are mothers, aunts or mentors to girls to tell them why you love their hair & encourage them to embrace it by creating and sharing a custom #LoveYourHair animated message with Dove at LoveYourHair.Dove.com.
Having struggled with my own self-confidence issues as a teenager makes me all the more eager to help her avoid the battles that I fought for so many years. Earlier this year, I shared my personal hair story (here) and the way my self-esteem was impacted by the messages of what was deemed to be beautiful by society’s standards. My daughter has the exact same hair that I had as a young girl & I’ve already heard her make statements about how she wishes her strands were thin, straight and more easy to manage. Each time, I respond by encouraging her that there is absolutely no flaw in the way she was made, that she is uniquely beautiful and that someday she will be thankful for her voluminous mane.
After 13 years of watching my little girl grow up into the mature young woman I see before me today, I have learned a few things & the conclusion I’ve come to is two-fold: