HAVING curly hair makes me taller, more literary and better in bed. Perhaps not everyone agrees with me, like, say, my husband and the 500 men I dated before him who dumped me. But forget that. I know it’s true. Or at least it’s the story I tell myself every time I have a bout of Straight Hair Envy, when I ponder the possibilities of the Brazilian Blowout (surely formaldehyde seeping into the scalp can’t be that bad?) or wistfully cruise the aisles of Ricky’s jonesing for Fekkai Silky Straight Ironless, Redken Align 12 Ultra-Straight Balm and John Frieda Frizz-Ease Straight Fixation Smoothing Crème.

What curly head hasn’t had the Pantene Fantasy, where she shakes her head, and a glossy curtain of light-reflecting hair swooshes behind her? Let me reiterate the sound effect: That’s swoosh, not boing.

But. If I had straight hair (so my internal monologue goes), I would be going against my true nature. I would be trying to tame the untamable creature within. And those of us who are big curly heads are hard-put to remember a time when our hair wasn’t a striking part of our identity, from the very moment we heard that rhyme about that girl with the curl in middle of her forehead. Milton’s Eve in “Paradise Lost” has long golden hair that falls in ringlets. Botticellis and Titian nudes have wild flowing manes that cover the naughty bits. When the Sirens in the Odyssey lure men to their deaths, they don’t do it with a Jean Seberg do.

Not to say I always felt so adamant about what is, in truth, the defining aspect of my appearance. I must have been having a Moment in high school, judging from my yearbook photo, where my badly ironed hair made me look like Nigel Tufnel in “This Is Spinal Tap.” (That is, Nigel with a pretentious yearbook quote from James Joyce.) And then, more recently, when I allowed myself to be talked into a two-hour blowout for a magazine photo shoot (“Straight hair takes off 10 pounds!” the stylist said cheerily) — prompting my son with Asperger’s and poor facial-recognition skills not to know who I was, and my husband to note that, “if the look they were going for was Bored Suburban Housewife, they succeeded.”