For the Love of Hair with Anja and Matilda Tyson
Mother-daughter duo Anja and Matilda Tyson share their evolving relationships with natural hair, touching on identity, acceptance, and generational healing. Their honest reflections reveal how embracing their curls became a powerful journey of self-love and mutual inspiration.
What are a few words that come to mind when you think about hair and your relationship with it?
Anja: Story. Growing. Complicated. Life-time
Matilda: Tiring. Pretty. Hard work. Story.
What's the reason you fell in love with hair?
Anja: I hated my hair for so long when I was a kid. When I was Matilda’s age I started getting it chemically relaxed so that it would just be straight because I was so tired of dealing with curly hair. I'm biracial and grew up with a white mom who has a very different hair texture to mine, and she had a really difficult time managing my hair. It was a very different time because I'm on the older side, I'm of a different generation, and it wasn't as simple as just getting on the internet and looking for the best solutions for your kid.
And it was the 90s, so relaxers were very common. So for the longest time, I chemically straightened my hair, and did everything that I could to just keep it tame and manageable. And there was one brief moment at the end of my 20s when I was like, I should grow my hair out and see what it naturally looks like and stop all of this punishing chemical heat treatment and all of that. And then I got pregnant and had no time to take care of my hair.
So that was another seven or eight years of just trying to keep it as manageable as possible, and the easiest way to do that was to keep it straight. It wasn't until I was 38, that it occurred to me that I could try to stop again. I had just transitioned into a new consulting career, my schedule was very different, I had a different set of rules around my life, and so I stopped straightening. Now, I actually haven't heat treated my hair in almost three years. If only you knew what a big deal that was!
There's still loads of dead straight parts at the ends that drive me insane. But I'm a lot closer to falling in love with it and accepting it. Sometimes you have to just have radical acceptance and know that you're moving in the right direction, even if it's something that makes you uncomfortable or feels a little strange.
Matilda: I don't really have that big of a story, but I guess... It's just like you have to say to yourself, well at this point you can't really change anything because you're already developed and this is how you were built. So guess you just have to like how you were built, you know?
At one point I did really want to straighten my hair. But that was really because I didn't see anyone with my hair texture. But then I just started really liking it because everyone was saying how pretty it was and I started looking at myself in the mirror and liking myself. I’ve loved myself always but I started accepting it more. Embracing it.
And what’s your relationship like with your hair now?
Anja: Like all loving relationships, it is filled with challenges. My relationship with my hair is in transition. I used to feel really bad about not being done growing it out or not being happy with the way that it looks yet. I'm trying to learn to be more patient and not so hard on myself. I think there's something to learn about being in transition in general. As humans we're never really one thing or another. We're always on the way to wherever it is we're going.
Matilda: My relationship with my hair is a love-hate situation because sometimes it will not work and sometimes the hairstyles I want to do, my hair does not want to do. But I really like my hair and I think it's really beautiful.
How did watching Matilda grow up alter your view on natural hair?
Anja: Watching Matilda grow up has been such a healing experience for me. When she was five and she started going to a proper elementary school, there were a lot of kids in her class that had very blonde, very straight hair. And then the Disney industrial complex started happening to her, so she was obsessed with Frozen and princesses, and they all have long, straight, very tameable hair. She started asking to have her hair straightened, and it's really difficult to explain to a five-year-old how unreasonable that is to maintain and how limiting it is. It made me sort of confront this conversation with her, and like most of our conversations, I'm also having them with myself. So I humored her for a little while so that she could find the restraints around that lifestyle without me telling her no all the time.
And then I started this sort of propaganda campaign with posters and movies with people who had really beautiful big curly hair that they were super proud of and excited about. One of them was Tracee Ellis Ross, who had just launched a curly haircare line, and I put up posters of her and her mom all around Matilda's room just to show Matilda how big and beautiful curly hair can be. But I was still straightening my hair so I was waging this positive propaganda campaign, but I wasn't living the message that I was giving her. And watching the way that she embraced it and became such an advocate for curly hair representation, being so proud of her hair and taking such good care of it was a big inspiration for me to move me forward into a place where I could try to grow my hair out. So it was really through her discovering how beautiful her hair was that I got to the place where I was able to start doing the same thing for myself.
Matilda: I feel I've always been really confident, but sometimes it's just hard to see other people with long straight hair. Seeing her grow makes me more confident in everything. She tells me that my hair is beautiful, like a lot of people do. It's been nice to watch her love her hair more because I just don't like to see her really sad and self-conscious and everything.
Do you feel there’s a correlation between your health and your hair?
Anja: Yeah, for sure. Aside from the physiological connection, there's just some very real chemical stuff like hormones and eating that I've noticed plays a huge role. I've been using The Nue Co supplements for about nine months now to encourage growth and I noticed that those really help. Also I think through remembering what it was like to Matilda’s age, and then the unhealthiest period of everyone's life which is their 20s, when they're like pushing their bodies to the max and having a really good time. Then being pregnant and the experience of your hair pattern, texture, thickness and even the amount of hair that you're growing changes so much. Then the postpartum period. Now I’m 40 and I'm even noticing now that my hair pattern and texture and thickness is changing. As I age, my hair changes.All of that is so deeply connected to how I'm nourishing myself. How I feel spiritually, whether or not I'm settled or calm or rested or those sorts of things. It's all so connected.
Do you share any hair rituals?
Anja: Actually one of my proudest facts is that Matilda is super autonomous with her hair. She does a really good job taking care of it, taking care of her scalp, keeping it combed out and clean, which I think, at 11, is pretty impressive. It's an investment of time. We don't do a lot of hair things together. It's quite an undertaking actually to do a wash day for me and then for her - it's quite a lot of work.
Matilda: The only thing I'll really do is just condition and shampoo and then gel it. But I don't think I really have any sacred ritual or anything. Less is more.
Do you feel you connect to your personal identity through hair?
Anja: Yeah, I definitely do. Anything about the way you look is so funny, because you have your own relationship with how you look and then you have your relationship with how the world sees you. We put so much pressure, especially on girls, to not care about the way other people see them, but allllll of the actual social messaging is demanding perfection all the time. One of the difficult things about being a woman is that you're constantly nurturing and nourishing your internal identity and reckoning with the way the world sees you. Whether or not you care, the ways that you care and how you mobilize them to your safety in the world, which I think is probably more specific to women. But yes, I feel great personal identity through my hair. It's so big.
Matilda: I think since I don’t have such a big experience with my hair such as my mom, less than my personal identity reflects on my hair. I do think that I have very unique hair.
Does hair evoke any specific or strong memories for you?
Anja: Honestly, we don't normally bother celebrities in the wild, but we were at lunch one day and we saw Tracee Ellis Ross, Diana Ross's daughter. We went up and told her how meaningful her existence was to Matilda embracing her curly hair and that was nice. She was really sweet.
How does hair spark joy for you?
Anja: Just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with anyone who wants to straighten their textured hair. But for me, the process of growing my hair back out from its damaged state has been very joyful. There is quite a lot of joy in the freedom to grow and change and the privilege of it. Aging and growing and learning about yourself. If you're lucky you got to do that for a long time. And that is joy.
Matilda: I think looking at myself and seeing my hair,it does give me confidence and spark joy for me.
