I love this headcanon, anon, and it would be an awesome, and better, use of Sleakeazy's.
In GoF, JKR writes (the full hair quote) that: "she didn't look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head." (p. 414, US Hardback) So if we're talking about authorial intent, it could have been something like this:
or this:
which would've kept her curls (though where she would've found someone to braid her hair at Hogwarts is another question. Is there a spell for that? Who would have taught her? Are salons and barber shops a gathering space for black wizards? Or are there charms passed down through families? How do Muggle-borns figure that out?)
But I suspect - and this is based on my own cultural baggage and how I'm reading the text, so it's no more right or valid than anyone else's suspicion - that JKR was describing something more like this:
or this:
which would've required either straightening or a wig or a weave. And since we know it was sleakeazy's, of those three, probably straightening.
And we could have had glamour with natural hair!
But the way it was written still feels to me like it was going for eurocentric beauty norms, that it was about "taming" Hermione's hair, explicitly making it small and pulling it back. Though I like your reading of the text better!!!
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Date: 2015-12-22 06:56 pm (UTC)In GoF, JKR writes (the full hair quote) that: "she didn't look like Hermione at all. She had done something with her hair; it was no longer bushy but sleek and shiny, and twisted up into an elegant knot at the back of her head." (p. 414, US Hardback) So if we're talking about authorial intent, it could have been something like this:
or this:
which would've kept her curls (though where she would've found someone to braid her hair at Hogwarts is another question. Is there a spell for that? Who would have taught her? Are salons and barber shops a gathering space for black wizards? Or are there charms passed down through families? How do Muggle-borns figure that out?)
But I suspect - and this is based on my own cultural baggage and how I'm reading the text, so it's no more right or valid than anyone else's suspicion - that JKR was describing something more like this:
or this:
which would've required either straightening or a wig or a weave. And since we know it was sleakeazy's, of those three, probably straightening.
And we could have had glamour with natural hair!
But the way it was written still feels to me like it was going for eurocentric beauty norms, that it was about "taming" Hermione's hair, explicitly making it small and pulling it back. Though I like your reading of the text better!!!