@justchillkaylinDo people not wear their natural hair for weddings anymore?@Haus Labs @YANY Beauty

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Kaylin wore her thick, shorter (with shrinkage), 4C hair in half-up, half-down twists. Some of it was frizzy. It was not slicked into submission. For this “offense,” her video got more than 11 million views and comments such as:

“Friend, you could have tried.”

“Natural hair and bed hair are two different things.”

“You’re dead wrong.”

“Just happy to look a mess.”

“This has to be rage bait.”

People compared her to enslaved Black people. They pejoratively called her Ruby Bridges. Other TikTokers created parody videos where they exaggerated her hairstyle, piling their own hair into very obviously ridiculous shapes to reenact what they considered the moral failure of a woman posting herself while insufficiently groomed.

@neshaijonesDo people not wear their natural hair to weddings anymore? @Too Faced @Fenty Beauty | the dress is zara btw

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@heysaba_ @heysaba_ ♬ original sound - 𝗛𝗦

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@praise2funnyThe “natural hair” conversion is turning into something is shouldn’t be…#fypシ #fyp #viral #xyzbca #naturalhair

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And almost every person I saw participating in this public humiliation was another woman. More specifically, many were other Black women.

Patriarchy may have been constructed to serve men’s sociopolitical and economic power but it survives by teaching women to monitor themselves and then deputizing them to monitor one another. Women learn the rules, internalize the penalties and eventually begin administering those penalties themselves.

“Your hair looks dry. Your eyebrows need to be done. Your wig is lifting. Your edges are not laid. Your body hair is showing. You have gained weight. You have “let yourself go. You smell.”

Beauty standards are most powerful when they begin to feel like basic common sense and personal responsibility. A woman who follows them is “put together.” A woman who does not is “unkempt” and “embarrassing.” Her perceived ugliness becomes a moral failure.

That is what happened to Kaylin. People were treating her as though she had violated a social contract.

A number of people called Kaylin’s video “rage bait.” Rage bait is content intentionally designed to provoke anger and generate engagement. But describing this particular video as rage bait raises a much more important question: Why does a woman’s hair “not being done” make you angry?

Seriously. Unpack that.

Kaylin appeared to reject the idea that a woman must earn the right to be visible by making herself attractive first. She has other videos in which her armpit hair is visible. She does not appear to wear much makeup. She seems willing to show her face and body without apologizing for their natural functions. She also appears happy, confident and she looks to be professionally successful.

@justchillkaylinMy outfit is missing something: @Hume Supernatural @CVS Pharmacy #cvs #humesupernatural #livesupernatural

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According to Kaylin, she works as a model and she has posted videos of herself on runways. That information made some people even angrier.

Commenters asked: “What do you even model for?”

“You can’t possibly be a model.”

They could not reconcile the woman they were seeing with the social hierarchy they had been taught. In their minds, a woman who does not perform conventional femininity correctly should be punished through rejection. She should lose access to visibility and most of all desirability. She certainly should not be walking runways while women who spend hours perfecting themselves remain insecure.

Imagine spending years believing that you cannot leave the house until your hair is finished and every visible “flaw” has been managed. Imagine spending thousands of dollars on your hair, skincare, makeup, nails, shapewear, cosmetic procedures, etc. Imagine losing hours of your life to a routine you have been told is simply the cost of being a respectable woman. Then you encounter a woman who has opted out. Worse, she appears happy. Her existence threatens the story that all of this labor was freely chosen. If another woman can leave the house without completing the ritual then perhaps the ritual was never as mandatory as it felt. Perhaps some portion of that work was extracted through fear.

Fear of ridicule. Fear of being called lazy. Fear of losing romantic attention. Fear of appearing unprofessional. Fear of being photographed. Fear of encountering the same cruelty now being directed at Kaylin.

We really should be directing our anger toward the system that makes us feel afraid, but we choose to punish the person who exposes the system’s coercion. “How dare you be free when I have worked so hard to make myself acceptable?”

We need to stop discussing beauty standards as though they are merely a collection of unfortunate opinions about what looks good. Beauty is labor. Women are expected to perform this labor before work, before dates, before weddings, before photographs and frequently before leaving the house at all. It consumes time and of course lots and lots of money. I’ve spent the time and money on it and there’s certainly a healthy balance that you can have. But the ideal continually moves. We’re always one procedure, one product, one appointment or ten pounds away from becoming “acceptable.”

Patriarchy establishes femininity as a job in which women are never paid and from which they are never allowed to clock out. Women then wanna act as though they’re the quality-control department. Plenty of men may have general preferences about women’s appearances but much of the technical, microscopic policing happens between women because women have been trained to know every rule.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that women are the originators of our oppression. But it does mean that women can become active participants in maintaining it. We cannot dismantle a hierarchy while pretending that only the people at the very top reproduce it.

Many of Kaylin’s critics insisted that the backlash had nothing to do with anti-Blackness or texturism. They claimed they would criticize anyone whose hair looked “messy.” Yet I went to the pages of some of the people saying this and I didn’t find videos dedicated to condemning white women for messy hair. I didn’t see the same outrage directed at white or Latina creators filming in bed with “messy hair” or grown-out roots.

Somehow this Black woman’s hair produced enough disgust for people to leave nasty comments and make response videos. People say that natural Black hair is acceptable as long as it is “neat” and we need to ask what neatness actually means.

Lots of people were saying Kaylin’s hair looked bad because it “wasn’t parted” but straight hair is frequently allowed to exist without a precise part. A white woman can wear a fluffy blowout with hair falling in several directions and people simply say that her hair is down. Nobody demands visible scalp lines as proof that she groomed herself.

Black women’s hair is given conditions. It has be parted and stretched to perfection. God forbid it moves unpredictably in the weather. Natural hair is permitted as long as it has been manipulated enough to show that the woman has tried to control it.

The word “unkempt” has done a lottttt of racist work while pretending to describe an objective condition. It’s supposed to make discomfort with Black hair textures into a supposedly neutral concern about effort. People can then say, “I love natural hair, but hers is not done” without having to examine why “done” requires tightly coiled hair to be stretched and laid... 4C hair has often been accepted only if it’s the perfect twist-out, the perfect wash-and-go or the perfect geometrical Afro, thick, long, etc.

The Wedding Was Not Yours

People repeatedly defended the bullying by saying Kaylin had attended a wedding and “a wedding is formal” so she should have tried harder.

But we really don’t know what kind of wedding she attended.

It could have been outdoors. It could have been a beach wedding or a casual ceremony. She could have been somewhere hot and humid. Her hair could have changed throughout the day because hair reacts to the environment. The dress code could have been formal, semi-formal, casual or “come as you are.” We weren’t there.

More importantly, it was not the comment section’s wedding.

Some women announced that they would have sent Kaylin home because they would not allow her to “ruin” their wedding pictures. What does that say about how we understand community?

Are wedding guests people you love or are they decorative objects hired to complete your visual concept? Do you invite your friends because their presence matters to you or because they match the color palette?

Under consumer capitalism weddings are increasingly treated like branded media productions. Every human being in the room becomes part of the content. The bride is encouraged to imagine herself as a creative director protecting the aesthetic integrity of the event. Guests can become persona non grata if they do not photograph correctly.

A person you supposedly love can be reduced to a potential defect in an image.

When someone says Kaylin’s hair would have ruined their wedding pictures they are admitting that a photograph matters more to them than the person standing in it.

“Look at My Natural Hair. I Did It Correctly.”

Some of the most embarrassing responses came from women posting pictures of themselves in Kaylin’s comments saying the following:

“This was me at my sister’s wedding.”

“I have natural hair and mine was done.”

“See, natural hair can look presentable.”

Why are you competing with a stranger over who can perform femininity more correctly? These women were presenting themselves as evidence for the prosecution.

“Look at me. I have a similar texture but I controlled mine.” This is how oppressive standards fracture solidarity. Instead of questioning why women must meet an exhausting aesthetic threshold to receive basic respect, people wanna compete for proximity to the standard.

Beauty becomes a ranking system. A woman’s perceived failure creates an opportunity for another woman to raise her own position. And every time a woman humiliates another woman for failing to perform beauty labor she strengthens the machinery that will eventually be used against her.

Maybe today your twist-out is perfect. Tomorrow it might dry out and become tangled. Maybe today your body conforms. Tomorrow you just may gain weight, become disabled, grow older, lose hair, develop acne or simply become exhausted. There is no permanent victory under a beauty system that requires constant maintenance. Nobody gets to finish. You can only remain temporarily compliant.

The Reporter Whose Hair Became the News

A similar pile-on happened in 2024 when Bloomberg reporter Avalon Pernell appeared in a news segment wearing her natural hair.

Black women called her hair unprofessional and said she looked like she had slept on an unsuccessful twist-out. She was a young journalist doing her job. Field reporters can work extremely early hours and travel to unfamiliar locations. They often have to stand outside in excessive wind as well as rain and humidity. Black journalists are also frequently expected to manage their own hair in an industry where stylists may have little or no training in Black textures.

Journalist Brittany Noble wrote that a supervisor called her crown braid unprofessional and said viewers needed to see “a beauty queen.” Other Black journalists have described not wearing natural hairstyles until legal protections were enacted or being told that their curls looked as if they had encountered an electrical socket. These are material consequences. Hair policing can affect employment and income and whether you ever advance in the company. The comment section is connected to the workplace supervisor who believes the same thing.

When women publicly participate in these pile-ons, they help reproduce the attitudes that employers later call “professional standards.”

You may think you are making a joke about a wig or a twist-out. But you are strengthening the cultural logic used to deny Black women opportunities.

We saw this same dynamic last year when Cordilia James, a young Black journalist then working in The Wall Street Journal’s personal technology bureau, went viral because people decided she was wearing a “bad wig.”

@bestlifewithkateWall Street journal why y’all do sis wig like this during black history month. #wiginstall #wigstyling #itsanoforme #why #blackgirlwigs #wallstreetjournal #eggprices #journalist #wallstreetnews

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James had reported and hosted coverage for the publication, including its Tech News Briefing podcast. Yet none of that mattered once TikTok discovered that her wigs were allegedly insufficiently laid.

The controversy began spreading after a creator stitched a Wall Street Journal video featuring James discussing the bird-flu epidemic and remarked, “Now y’all know y’all wrong,” referring to her hair. That video received millions of views. Soon, people were compiling montages of James’s wigs to dissect her installations and making parody videos. And yes, the wigs were not “perfectly installed.” Who gives a fuck?

Why does a woman wearing a bad wig require a mass public response?

People wear ugly clothes every day. Men go on television with patchy beards, poorly fitted suits, uneven hairlines and faces that have clearly never encountered moisturizer. Male journalists are allowed to age and slowly lose their hair while continuing to be understood primarily as journalists. Nobody pauses a discussion about inflation to ask why a male reporter’s toupee is not giving scalp.

But when a Black woman appears on camera, her competence is immediately forced to compete with her appearance. She can be professionally accomplished but if her wig is not “melted” the hair becomes the story. That is how women uphold patriarchal beauty standards. The system does not need a man to personally tell every woman that she looks unacceptable. It can rely on women who have internalized the standard to humiliate anyone who fails to meet it.

Plus-size influencers such as Samyra and Lizzo have faced intense backlash for appearing joyful and confident without first becoming thin.

@samyraSo go ahead and put that belly in a bikini🫵🏽🤨

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A woman who has spent years starving herself feels personally insulted by a plus-sized woman who refuses to be miserable. A woman who spends hours performing beauty labor may feel mocked by someone who appears publicly with frizzy hair and unshaved armpits. Their freedom exposes the punishment as socially manufactured.

Recently there was also a Black woman on TikTok who complained that women needed to start wearing more makeup again because she was tired of seeing “just a lash and lip gloss.” She wanted “a beat face.” The woman making this demand was plus-size and therefore did not fully conform to dominant beauty standards herself. That is sadly not unusual or contradictory.

@thenotoriousn.i.a@Fee said put on those heels and I'm saying put that makeup on too! The people never have to ask if beating my face for the occasion 🤷🏾‍♀️ #makeuptok #baddies #heels

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Marginalized people can enforce hierarchies because conformity in one area may offer protection from punishment in another. A woman who cannot become thin may invest more heavily in makeup. A dark-skinned woman has to have a snatched body. A working-class woman may purchase luxury purses to overcompensate for her poverty. A plus-sized woman may distance herself from women she considers sloppy.

Proximity to the standard becomes a kind of social currency. Black women also face the combined force of racism and misogyny. We learn that we must be more attractive to receive a fraction of the grace afforded to others. Beauty labor can become a survival strategy.

But a survival strategy can still reproduce the structure that made survival so difficult.

Our ancestors did not wake up with perfectly straight parts and sculpted edges. If many of the people bullying Kaylin were shown photographs of ordinary Black women in Africa or throughout the diaspora before the modern beauty industry, they would probably call those women unkempt too.

Refusal To Comply Is Different From Choice Feminism

Supporting Kaylin does not require embracing choice feminism. Individual agency does not automatically produce collective liberation.

Kaylin’s choice is politically meaningful for a different reason. Her refusal subverts a dominant expectation. She is declining to perform compulsory beauty labor and showing that a woman can remain visible without first renovating herself.

That does not mean every woman must stop wearing makeup or styling her hair. The political demand is that women should be able to participate or opt out without losing their dignity or right to exist publicly. The reaction to Kaylin proves that this freedom does not currently exist.

Maybe you genuinely dislike Kaylin’s hairstyle. Fine. You are allowed to think someone’s hair looks bad. You are allowed to decide that you would never wear your own hair that way. Taste does not disappear because we oppose bullying. But why must every private aesthetic judgment become public discipline?

There is a difference between criticizing a system that pressures women to harm themselves and attacking a woman for refusing to perform that system correctly. We should criticize beauty standards because they reduce women to objects and permanent renovation projects. They teach us to experience our bodies from the outside, as though we have to be constantly imagining how we appear to someone else. They enrich corporations by ensuring that women never feel finished.

A woman existing in her natural skin does not create the same harm. Kaylin’s hair does not injure other women. Her armpit hair does not lower our wages. Her bare face does not reinforce a standard that requires the rest of us to spend more money. Her refusal actually widens the range of ways women are permitted to exist.

The bullying narrows that range again. Women help uphold patriarchy whenever we teach another woman that she deserves contempt for failing to make herself decorative. We uphold capitalism when we treat purchasing and performing beauty as evidence of morality. We hurt every woman when we transform another woman’s appearance into a public referendum on her worth.

Today the target is Kaylin. Tomorrow it will be a woman with a bad wig, visible body hair, acne, weight gain, wrinkles, a disability, an unconventional face or simply too little time and money to manufacture perfection.

The standard survives because women are encouraged to believe that humiliating the woman beneath them will protect them from the people above. It won’t. The only protection worth building is solidarity. That begins with refusing to treat another woman’s failure to be beautiful as a crime.

Kaylin wore her own hair the way she wanted and we all should be able to do the same without punishment.