Sometimes we love to complain about completely ordinary things, complain instead of appreciating. In the mornings, we can be dissatisfied with our appearance or hairstyle, not liking that our hair is not lying the way we want or that our curls don’t hold for very long. But 10-year-old Shilah Calvert-Yin, who lives in Melbourne, has uncombable hair syndrome, and there’s absolutely no point in complaining about it because it’s her unique feature.
There are approximately one hundred people on our planet who have this syndrome, and Shilah happens to be one of them. It is a rare anomaly in which hair has a structure that makes it nearly impossible to comb.
Usually, this feature appears in early childhood, and hair becomes silver or straw-colored.
Shilah has light hair that is very fine and curly, severely tangled and unruly, and always sticks out in different directions.
It is simply impossible to style them. Doctors say that they should “lie down” by the time of puberty, but no one knows if that will actually happen.
Shilah’s mother, Celeste, says that the little girl was born with ordinary dark hair, and at three months old, light “needles” started to poke through them. The birth hair fell out, and in its place, “needles” grew, and the most interesting thing is that they grew at a right angle to the head, becoming lighter and lighter.
The length of Shila’s hair stopped growing when she was two years old and hasn’t grown since. Doctors call it “uncombable hair syndrome,” which is often inherited, but no one in the Calvert-Jin family has such hair, and they only learned about it after Shila was born.
When Shila was about four years old, she noticed that her hairstyle was different from other people’s. Children and adults started paying a lot of attention to her because of it, making her feel uncomfortable.
However, with the support of her family and friends, Shila was able to love her hair and now feels unique.
“She often told us that she was like a unicorn because they are also special, unique creatures, just like her,” says Celeste. “Shila is an incredibly confident individual, and her hair suits her character very well.”
Of course, people on the streets still pay attention to the girl with the unusual hairstyle, sometimes commenting on it or touching her hair without permission, which Shila doesn’t like.
As her mother says, “In these cases, we try not to get angry but to talk about ‘uncombable hair syndrome’ so that more people learn about this anomaly. At first, everyone thinks we’re joking, but we say, ‘Google it, and you’ll see it’s true.'”
Taking care of such hair is also not an easy task. Shila hates the morning routine of combing her hair, which takes at least 20 minutes. To make her hair somewhat manageable, Celeste applies various sprays and uses a comb with sparse teeth. However, Shila enjoys the hair-drying process, especially when her dad does it, and her hair becomes fluffy like a dandelion.
To prevent Shila from feeling ashamed, her parents created a social media account for her, where she has several thousand followers.
“Thanks to social media, Shila no longer feels isolated; she knows that there are other people in the world with hair like hers,” says Celeste.