Is Taylor Swift's Hair Naturally Curly? An Investigation

Hello friends, I have not been blogging as much as I would have liked, but I am now making my triumphant return to blogging.

Today's topic: Is Taylor Swift's hair naturally curly or nah??

I want to preface the bulk of this investigation by saying that I have foofy and frizzy hair. My hair is curly. It is so curly, that sometimes when I straighten it, I can't straighten out all of the curls. I don't know if this is because I am bad at using a hair straightener, or if my curls are just very resilient.

When I was a teen in the aughts, especially the mid to late aughts, pin straight hair was trendy. All of the pretty, cool girls in media and also real life had straight hair. Straight hair was so cool that even some boys were straightening their hair (see Joe Jonas in the aughts). I tried really hard to fit into that look by straightening my hair. A lot. I tried several different heated flat irons, I tried a bunch of different hair products, I tried the InStyler (hands up if you remember the InStyler commercials! I couldn't find the link on youtube to imbed into this blog, but I see yall!). Thankfully my mom and my hair stylist convinced me to never do the chemical straightening, but I'm pretty sure a lot of girls in the aughts did do this. If you were a teen girl in the aughts who did not have naturally pin straight hair, then I would bet actual American dollars that you owned a mammoth flat iron that you used almost every day.

This pic is from my high school yearbook, my family did one of those senior ad things, so this is me as a wee lass and also as a teen. Please note the curls in both pics, which can only be described as "very".

So there was not a lot of representation for people that had hair like me in the aughts. Except for Taylor Swift.

I know that this is my second blog post centered on Taylor Swift, and I will concede that that kind of is excessive. I grew up in a small, rural-ish town in the very end tip of the Bible Belt.  In the mid aughts, Taylor Swift released her self-titled debut album, and she was ubiquitous in small towns like mine. And then in the late aughts, when I left that small town behind, she released Fearless, which made her big and ubiquitous everywhere.

So T Swift releases her first few albums with hair like this:

The curl pattern in each of those photos can only be described as "very". It's not even like I cherry picked these pictures, this is what she looked like all the time.

At the 2009 VMAs, notice the curls

You know what, I'm counting this as a cultural reset. Her hair was so curly. And even though she could have straightened her hair like most everyone else, T Swift didn't. Even for her music videos, where she probably had professional stylists of some sort, she had her hair foofy and curly and proud!

Now here's where things kinda start to get weird. Around like 2012-2013, Taylor Swift's hair gets a lot straighter and a lot less voluminous. I mean it goes from a very tight curl pattern to a very loose curl pattern, which is perhaps more accurately described as wavy.

And then during the 1989 era, it goes mostly pretty straight.

I mean lots of things could be happening here. Maybe she's decided to let her stylists straighten her hair every day, or....maybe...the the curls were a lie....and this is what her hair naturally looks like...

I understand that with a hair straightener and stylists, basically anything can happen to hair...but I'm pretty sure this was the point in time when I started to question what Taylor Swift's real hair looked like. I mean if you have a naturally tight curl pattern as demonstrated in her early career, then you would have to straighten your hair like basically every day to get it straight straight, even if you have the long bob going on. The 1989 era was a fever pitch for Swift, she was photographed all the time. So she was straightening her hair, like every day? Idk, for curly haired people, this is suspicious....

I've combed through loads of pictures of Taylor Swift this evening, in addition to revisiting some of the music videos. It seems like ever since 1989, she's alternated between straight and wavy hair, and on her twitter page, she's recently tweeted both looks.

So again, a lot of different things could be happening here. Maybe the tight curl pattern wasn't her natural curl pattern. Maybe she's just been straightening her hair a lot more. Maybe as she's aged, and cut her hair a lot shorter than she used to have it, it's led to the curls just manifesting themselves differently. Everyone with curly hair knows that your curls look different day to day, and basically your hair is gonna do what it wants ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So I decided to do a deep investigation and I google image searched "Taylor Swift at the beach". The reason is two fold. 

1) I remember there being a lot of pictures of T Swift at the beach with the Haim sisters and Tom Hiddleston and that Kennedy kid she briefly dated. 

2) And also because NO CURLY HAIRED PERSON WOULD DARE GO TO THE BEACH WITH THEIR HAIR STRAIGHTENED. It is a losing battle that you will lose!!! Your hair will get wet and it will revert to its natural state! Even if your hair doesn't get wet, after awhile the humidity and sea salt just from being on the beach will make your hair get curly and fluffy!! If you have doubts, please message me and I will show you some photographic evidence of my hair at a beach. You know how bumble and bumble surf spray gives most people beach waves....for curly haired people, the beach is like that but times 100.

 

Conclusion: Inconclusive.

The truth is out there somewhere, but will we ever find it?

* Cue X-Files Theme Song*