London-based hair and beauty journalist Sue Omar is hell-bent on celebrating the black woman's crowning glory: her hair.

She will be exploring the mystique of Afro hair in a special six-part series for stylist.co.uk, kicking off here with a dedicated look at the politics of black hair.

French existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote in her feminist manifesto, The Second Sex, that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman”. If we decipher this ideology, it can be deduced that feminine beauty is a social construct as oppose to a direct result of one’s biological nature.

Living in a selfie-obsessed society that is laden with the pressures of filtered beauty, de Beauvoir’s existential notion of self-creation surprisingly doesn’t seem that far-fetched. It’s undeniable that we are more self-conscious about the way we look physically, now more than ever before.

As a Black-British woman with a Somali heritage, my naturally curly Afro hair has always played a major role in defining my own feminine beauty, and perhaps even my womanhood (if I side with de Beauvoir’s argument, that is). From as far back as I can remember, I have always struggled to understand the strands that shoot out from my hair follicles. After 25 years spent on this planet, the struggle is still very real.

All About Afro: untangling the politics of black hair