There have been several attempts to define hair “type”. You may ask “Why should I care?” Well, mostly you shouldn’t. We think typing systems actually complicate what can pretty easily be conveyed in a few words. By the time you sort through what a 4b or 1a really means you might as well just say “I have thick kinky African hair” or “I have straight, thin Caucasian hair”. And, hair typing systems are so subjective as to be almost worthless in our opinion. Who determines whether your hair shafts are thick or thin? And whether the curl pattern is “loose” or “tight”.
There are controversies surrounding hair type methodologies that use works like kinky, nappy and other words that have less than positive connotations for some people. Other systems use numbers. But, they tend to lump all African American hair into one big category with a few variations. So, how useful is that really? Considering everyone’s hair is slightly different and people can even have different types of hair on their head at one time, categorizing hair is a difficult proposition at best. There are two major systems that seem to be the most popular. There is a system called LOIS that uses the hair shape as the defining hair “type”. For more on LOIS, do a Google on “LOIS Hair Type”. Until many people switch over to the LOIS system, the standard seems to be the numbering system developed by Andre Walker.