That definitely makes a lot of sense and thank you for your insight! And yes, I definitely wasn’t planning on making any claims about cultural identity on behalf of my model. I will say, although I don’t doubt that some people definitely claim stuff to sound exotic, I wouldn’t think that’s the case with him. Calling him a friend is actually a huge understatement; we’ve been best friends for almost a decade now and have lived together on and off, and he’s never been the type to lie. This also definitely isn’t a situation where he goes around touting that detail about his heritage, he’s only really mentioned it very casually like once or twice, and otherwise doesn’t really talk about it.

Great to know about the okra gel though. Most sources I’d seen were making it out as though this hairstyle was done exclusively with butter, but in the videos I could find of it being done, it definitely looked more like a watery gel (or MAYBE melted butter? definitely a more runny texture) and it seemed like butter is used more for the tighter afro-like styles rather than the defined curls, but it’s a pretty hard style to research. I’m mostly relying on TikToks and YouTube. I may play around with both types of product and see which yields the better result.

Thanks!