Hair Typing Was Never the Whole Story

If you've spent any time in the natural hair world, you've seen the chart: 3B, 4A, 2C and everything in between. It's become the go-to shorthand for curl pattern, and for a lot of us, it's where our natural hair journey (or our kids') started. But where did this system actually come from, and how did it become the standard?

The answer is more complicated than most people realize. The chart was never meant to be the full story, and its history is reason enough not to let it define your kid's hair.

The chart most of us know started as a product pitch

Most people credit the Type 1–4 system to celebrity hairstylist Andre Walker, Oprah Winfrey's longtime stylist. He created it back in the 1990s to market his own line of hair products (99% Invisible). Walker sorted hair into four types: straight, wavy, curly and coily. The A, B and C subcategories got added later to account for strand texture.

But that's only part of the story. People were typing hair by texture as far back as the early 1900s (Byrdie), and it had nothing to do with hair care.

Sorting people by their hair is much older

In 1905, German scientist Eugen Fischer designed a "hair gauge," a small box of synthetic hair samples he used to judge the "whiteness" of mixed-race people in what is now Namibia, then a German colony. His work there went on to inform the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 in Nazi Germany (Emma Dabiri, Twisted, via Literary Hub).

Decades later, apartheid South Africa used the "pencil test." A pencil was pushed into a person's hair; if it stayed put when they shook their head, they could be classified as non-white. The test split families and communities along made-up racial lines (Wikipedia, Mail & Guardian).

These aren't just footnotes. They're part of the real history of sorting hair by texture, long before it ended up as shorthand on the back of a shampoo bottle.

The chart only measures one thing

Curl pattern. That's it. It doesn't tell you anything about porosity, elasticity or density, or the fact that one head of hair can have a few different textures going on. Even climate and environment can change how a curl pattern shows up. That's why we think porosity is the more useful thing to learn about your kid's hair.

When a number starts to sound like a ranking

A lot of people criticize the chart for feeding texturism, the idea that looser curls are somehow "better" than tighter coils. Walker has said he never meant to create a hierarchy; he just wanted products for different kinds of hair (99% Invisible). But put hair on a scale from 1 to 4 and it's not hard for 4C to start sounding like the bottom, especially to a kid who's listening to adults compare. And given where this practice came from (like so much in our history), that criticism makes sense.

Other systems exist, and none tells the whole story

The FIA system builds on Walker's by adding strand thickness, porosity and volume. The LOIS system sorts strands by the shape they make, and texture by how the hair feels and takes in water. Each one gets at a different piece of the picture, but none of them gets the whole thing. We get into how to actually use them in Don't Put Your Child's Hair in a Box.

How we'd talk about it with our kids

• Treat the type as one small piece of information. It's not a label that defines their hair.
• Talk about what their hair does, not what number it is. It shrinks, it drinks up water, it holds a twist-out for days.
• Drop the comparisons. No "good hair," no "at least it's not 4C." Kids hear everything, even when we think they're not listening.

The takeaway

Here's the thing: texture doesn't tell you whether hair is healthy. Technically, texture is just the diameter of each strand, whether it's fine, medium or coarse. It's a measurement, not a grade. Two kids with the exact same "type" can have one head of thriving hair and one that's dry and breaking, and the chart won't tell you which is which. Health shows up in how your kid's hair holds moisture, how it stretches and how much it breaks. So the next time someone asks, "What type is her hair?", it's fine to answer, but I'd encourage you to make sure your child hears what matters more: their hair doesn't need a number to be good hair.

Further reading: The Hair Chart (99% Invisible) · On Liberating the History of Black Hair, from Emma Dabiri's Twisted (Literary Hub) · What Porosity Tells You About Your Child's Hair