Letters from Bali

Making Hair-story: Hair Care for Busy Lives, Inspired by Tradition

The best hair routine is the one you can actually keep. Scalp, moisture, night protection, and low manipulation, drawn from habits old enough to have already proven themselves.

Making Hair-story: Natural Texture, Pride, and Reclamation

Reclamation rarely looks dramatic. It looks like a woman deciding her hair does not need fixing before she leaves the house. On plurality, grey coming in, and letting many things be true at once.

Making Hair-story: When Hair Became a Site of Control

Colonial rule did not only change laws and language. It changed whose hair was considered proper. On beauty hierarchies, self-monitoring, and the quiet resistance of continuing anyway.

Making Hair-story: The Meaning of Braids in Mexico

In many Indigenous communities braids are never neutral. Regional traditions, Oaxacan ribbons, and why a braid is also the most practical thing a woman over forty can do for her hair.

Making Hair-story: Before Mexico, There Were Indigenous Hair Traditions

Long before Mexico was a nation, Nahua, Maya, Zapotec and dozens of other peoples each held their own relationship to hair. Not one tradition. Many. And what survived in families like Mayra's.

Making Hair-story: A Mexican Family's Ancestry, Carried in Hair

Mayra Penaloza on her grandmother's hair that reached the ground, a birth in a forest, and what Mexican hair carries: inheritance, memory, and quiet daily devotion.