My sisters always wanted curly hair, but they were cursed with fine, straight blond hair from the Scandinavian part of our ancestry.
But I’ve known lots of people with curly hair who wished their hair was straight. Overall, I assumed it was just one of those things where the grass is always greener on the other side.
Well it seems I was wrong. Apparently the grass is truly greener — on the curly side of the fence (no matter what you curly-haired folks say).
According to research published in the August 2007 American Journal of Physics, curly hair is less likely to get tangled than straight hair.
Jean-Baptiste Masson of the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences at the Ecole Polytechnique in France developed a theory to describe hair tangling and confirmed his results by asking French hairdressers to count tangles in different types of hair that they encountered at work. (I wonder how he managed to track down enough hairdressers in Paris . . . oh, wait a minute, never mind.)
Masson hopes his hair research will help him as he develops hairy products related to velcro. I’m just glad, after all these years of complaining about their hair, my sisters have finally been proven right (speaking as a big brother now, I believe it may be the first time they’ve been right about anything). As they always claimed — Curly hair is better, at least as far as tangles are concerned.