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What Hairstyles in Digital Animation Say About Race and Power
I have straight hair. Extremely straight, spiky hair. It’s super rigid. And because of its rigidity, it sticks up on its own when it’s cut short.
This fact never struck me as noteworthy until I moved from Seattle to Boston for college, and I happened to have classmates who wanted to touch my hair. The common reaction was always, “It feels like a brush!” It’s the kind of thing that I, literally, just brushed off. I also had a roommate who begged to know what I put in my hair to make it do that. When I told him it’s genetic, he wasn’t satisfied and often rifled through my toiletries to locate the secret. Poor fella.
If you look back at the history of computer graphics, you’ll notice how the modeling of hair wasn’t really commonplace when modeling characters because wavy hairstyles weren’t renderable in the beginning. Around the same time of my hair discovery, and when I started to write code, I noticed how easy it was to model my kind of hair with straight lines and a little bit of math. By comparison, it was much more difficult to create anything with curves in it — which is what one would expect from a more common array of non-Asian-centric hairwear. But that didn’t matter because my hairstyle wasn’t representative of…
