Get this Straight: Curls Bounce Back in Cairo

Mariam Ashraf, a teacher and "natural hair influencer", combs her hair during a livestream to her more than 90,000 followers. Khaled DESOUKI AFP
Mariam Ashraf, a teacher and "natural hair influencer", combs her hair during a livestream to her more than 90,000 followers. Khaled DESOUKI AFP
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Get this Straight: Curls Bounce Back in Cairo

Mariam Ashraf, a teacher and "natural hair influencer", combs her hair during a livestream to her more than 90,000 followers. Khaled DESOUKI AFP
Mariam Ashraf, a teacher and "natural hair influencer", combs her hair during a livestream to her more than 90,000 followers. Khaled DESOUKI AFP

"Shaggy," "messy," "unprofessional". Natural curls were once looked down upon in Egypt, where Western beauty standards favored sleek, straight locks. Now, things are changing.

For Rola Amer and Sara Safwat, their curls were once a career-hindering nuisance. Now part of an aesthetic liberation movement sweeping Egypt in recent years, they own a curly hair salon that caters to women and men like them.

Amer used to spend hours straightening her bouncy curls, she told AFP as she began her day at the Curly Studio, which became Egypt's first natural hair salon in 2018.

"Curly hair takes a lot longer to cut than straight hair," Amer said, meticulously snipping her way through a client's curly mane in an affluent suburb of Cairo.

Three hours later, she can finally show the result to her client, and both are delighted as the salon buzzes around them.

It's a far cry from Amer's own experience a few years ago. "If I ever left my hair curly, I'd feel shaggy, like I wasn't taking care of myself," she said.

In this rare type of salon in Cairo, the final product fits each client's curl pattern, and rollers have replaced straightening irons to prevent heat damage.

Safwat, 38, explained the dangers of straightening, adjusting her curly bangs as she spoke.

"One time, a mother brought her three-year-old daughter. She had tried a chemical treatment to straighten her hair, and now it was falling out," she said.

The obsession with straight hair, rooted in what Safwat calls "completely false beauty ideals," compelled generations of women to burn their hair to a crisp using chemical treatments and excessive heat damage.

- A marked change -
With her curls considered "unprofessional" Safwat says that, before she became a hairdresser, she would often be asked in job interviews: "Will you be coming in to work like this?"

In the early 2000s, Lebanese singer Myriam Fares was one of the first curly-haired icons in the Middle East.

Halfway across the world, Black women in the United States were increasingly embracing their curls in a natural hair care movement. Many of the biggest brands built by Black women at the time would eventually find their way onto the shelves of curly salons in Cairo.

In 2012, Egyptian actress Dina el-Sherbiny became one of the first to break the taboo on screen, flaunting her chestnut curls in hit TV series "Hekayat Banat" (Girls' Stories).

Ten years later, curly heads feature in TV shows, movies and the billboards that line Cairo's highways, a marked change in pop culture.

In Hollywood, Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy even shows off her curls in Marvel's latest series, "Moon Knight," helmed by Egyptian director Mohamed Diab.

"There has been a real social movement," Doaa Gawish told AFP. In 2016, Gawish launched a Facebook group called The Hair Addict to help women give their hair a break from harsh chemicals and blow dryers.

Within months, the online forum had grown from 5,000 to more than 80,000 members, as the local cosmetics market grew by 18 percent, according to Euromonitor International.

Two years later, Gawish launched her eponymous haircare company.

"A lot of big cosmetics companies started releasing products for curly hair, because they could see it was an essential customer base," Gawish told AFP.

This base is steadily growing in Egypt's sizable cosmetics market. With a population of 103 million, the country has about 500,000 salons and more than three million employees, as estimated in 2020 by Mahmoud el-Degwy, head of the hairdressers' division at the Cairo Chamber of Commerce.

Teacher and natural hair influencer Mariam Ashraf has seen the market's potential firsthand. Only a hobby at first, her Instagram videos quickly became "a real source of income", she told AFP before filming a new clip for her 90,000-plus followers.

"Brands are contacting me more and more to showcase curly hair products," the 26-year-old explained. "And now modelling agencies are contacting me for advertisements."

- 'Fragile masculinity' -
But the world of natural hair care is not accessible to everyone.

While the average monthly income in Egypt is 6,000 pounds ($325), a haircut at the Curly Studio can cost up to one-tenth of that.

Since he inadvertently discovered his curls during Covid-19 lockdown, cybersecurity expert Omar Rahim has been gladly paying to maintain his style.

Today, he maintains an intricate regimen, despite jeers from his friends in a conservative and patriarchal society.

"We have a problem with fragile masculinity; people think a man shouldn't take care of his hair or buy products," he told AFP.

"I want people to understand that this is normal, but I'm not ready to fight this fight just yet."



Tradition Meets AI in Nishijinori Weaving Style from Japan’s Ancient Capital 

Hironori Fukuoka, the fourth-generation successor to his Nishijinori business, looks at the fabric that is a collaboration with AI in Kyoto, western Japan on July 3, 2025. (AP)
Hironori Fukuoka, the fourth-generation successor to his Nishijinori business, looks at the fabric that is a collaboration with AI in Kyoto, western Japan on July 3, 2025. (AP)
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Tradition Meets AI in Nishijinori Weaving Style from Japan’s Ancient Capital 

Hironori Fukuoka, the fourth-generation successor to his Nishijinori business, looks at the fabric that is a collaboration with AI in Kyoto, western Japan on July 3, 2025. (AP)
Hironori Fukuoka, the fourth-generation successor to his Nishijinori business, looks at the fabric that is a collaboration with AI in Kyoto, western Japan on July 3, 2025. (AP)

Nishijinori, the intricate weaving technique for kimonos that dates back more than a thousand years in Japan’s ancient capital of Kyoto, is getting a high-tech collaborator: artificial intelligence.

The revered colorful weaving style associated with “The Tale of Genji” of the 11th-century Heian era, has gone through its share of ups and downs. But its survival is more perilous than ever today, as demand for kimonos nose-dives among Japanese grappling with modernization.

Hironori Fukuoka, the fourth-generation successor to his Nishijinori business, is determined to keep alive the art he’s inherited, even if that means turning to AI.

“I want to leave to legacy what my father has left for me,” he said in his rickety shop in the Nishijin district of Kyoto, a city with statue-filled temples and sculpted gardens that never seems to change.

“I’ve been pondering how the art of Nishijinori can stay relevant to the needs of today,” said Fukuoka.

Besides the AI project, Fukuoka is also working on using his weaving technique to make super-durable materials for fishing rods and aircraft.

Where tradition and technology meet

Giant looms clatter at his shop, called Fukuoka Weaving. The patterns on the gorgeous fabric, slowly turning out from the loom, are repetitive and geometric, which makes it conducive to translating into digital data. Deciding which hand-dyed color thread goes where to make the patterns is much like the on-or-off digital signals of a computer.

Such similarity is what Fukuoka focuses on in exploring how AI might work for Nishijinori, with the help of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, an independent research arm of electronics and entertainment company Sony Corp.

AI only makes suggestions for the designs and doesn’t do any of the actual production work. But that doesn’t bother Fukuoka or the researchers.

“Our research stems from the idea that human life gets truly enriched only if it has both what’s newly innovated and what never changes,” said Jun Rekimoto, chief science officer at Sony CSL, which is also studying how AI can be used to document and relay the moves of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

“We don’t believe AI can do everything. Nishijinori is a massive, complicated industry and so it starts with figuring out where AI can help out,” said Rekimoto, also a professor at the University of Tokyo.

What has come of it is a startling but logical turn in thinking, fitting of the art adorning kimonos worn by Japan's imperial family.

The AI was fed various Nishijinori patterns that already existed and instructed to come up with its own suggestions. One was a bold pattern of black and orange that seemed to evoke a tropical motif.

Striking a balance

To Fukuoka, some of AI’s ideas are interesting but simply off. The difference between AI and the human effort is that the former can come up with multiple suggestions in a matter of seconds.

Fukuoka immediately gravitates toward the one that uses a motif of a leaf to define the angular lines of a traditional pattern, something he says a human wouldn’t have thought of. He finds that ingenious.

The kimono the AI collaboration has produced is a luscious soft green, although it doesn’t have a price tag and isn’t in production yet.

The weaving is carried out by the old-style machine under the guidance of the human artist in the traditional way.

Nishijinori kimonos sell for as much as a million yen ($6,700). Many Japanese these days don’t bother buying a kimono and may rent it for special occasions like weddings, if at all.

Putting one on is an arduous, complicated affair, often requiring professional help, making kimonos even less accessible.

A creative partnership

Dr. Lana Sinapayen, associate researcher at Sony CSL, believes AI often gets assigned the creative, fun work, leaving tedious tasks to people, when it should be the other way around.

“That was my goal,” she said in an interview at Fukuoka Weaving, of her intent to use AI in assistant roles, not leadership positions.

Digital technology can’t automatically represent all the color gradations of Nishijinori. But AI can figure out how to best do that digitally, and it can also learn how the human artist fixes the patterns it has produced.

Once that’s all done, AI can tackle arduous tasks in a matter of seconds, doing a pretty good job, according to the researchers.

Artificial intelligence is being used widely in factories, offices, schools and homes, because it can do tasks faster and in greater volume, and is usually quite accurate and unbiased, compared to human efforts.

Its spread has been faster in the US and other Western nations than in Japan, which tends to be cautious about change and prefers carefully made, consensus-based decisions.

But the use of AI in arts and crafts is promising, such as text-to-image generative AI for the creation of visual images from text prompts, according to a study by Henriikka Vartiainen and Matti Tedre, who looked at the use of AI by craft educators in Finland.

“As computers have taken over many routine-like and boring tasks that were previously performed by people, the computer revolution has also been said to liberate time and offer new opportunities for human imagination and creativity,” they said.