If you've watched Dutch television any time in the last two decades, you already know my hair almost as well as you know my face. The volume. The shape. The curls that catch the studio lights and somehow look both effortless and impossible at the same time.
What you probably don't know is how much of my career I spent quietly at war with them.
Born in Utrecht to a Dutch father and a Surinamese mother, I grew up with the kind of curls that mainstream hair products were never designed for. From my earliest auditions through Flikken Maastricht, Painkillers and Meisje van plezier, my hair was the product of an army: stylists, irons, sprays, serums, and a rotating cast of "miracle" creams that worked exactly once. On days off I usually tied it back. Wash day at home was the chore I pushed to the very end of the weekend, hoping it might somehow not arrive.
Any woman with curly hair knows that feeling instantly. The dread. The drawer full of half-finished bottles. The slow, expensive realisation that every new launch promises the same things and almost none of them deliver.
