Until recently, the perfect vision of beauty in the media has usually been portrayed as someone who is white, or at least someone who has white hair, with nothing curlier than a bit of a beach wave. In television, movies, magazines, and even the mall (think Victoria’s Secret), there is hardly any representation of hair on the more textured, kinky, or natural side of the scale for mixed and African American women. There seems to have previously been an emphasis in the media on how natural hair for African American women was something that needed to be calmed down, to apply heat to and straighten, and even photoshop — all to match the whiter, more European beauty standards. In a study done by Andrews University, it was shown that this largely negative representation of ethnic women’s natural hair, had largely negative effects on the women’s self-esteem and increased their own feelings on internalized racism and oppression for their natural beauty.