Wellbeing

For this installment I took to the streets (metaphorically speaking) to interview a few friends about their hair and the intrinsic and imposed identities those little bundles of keratin confer. Settle in and hear their stories.

Amanda Diamond, Fourth-Year

How does your hair play into your personal identity, both tangible and intangible?

Bleached and dyed and tugged and straightened and curled and dried and oiled and trimmed and chopped. It’s a cumulative result, a regenerative but at the very least temporally affected font of keratin that can be a vehicle for self-expression, a curtain of self-defense, or somewhere in between. It’s a woman’s hair.

A word from the photographer, Kendall Siewert

Story by Sammy Scheman

Story by Kendall Siewert

These photos together comprise a portion of the exhibit Every Body, taken and curated by Iris Magazine intern Kendall Siewert. Each U.Va woman who volunteered for the project was accepted, and the photos you see below represent her vision to the best of the photographer's ability. Every woman wrote their story to accompany their photograph. A note from the photographer: I do not consider myself a photographer or an artist. I am a storyteller.

 Kimia Nikseresht

Kimia Nikseresht

Olivia Knott

Best part of studying in Italy? I can finally add more to my Italian repertoire than simply “ciao” and “la dolce vita.”

I get it – women don’t like to talk about their vaginas. I’m hardly the first person to realize this silence. Eve Ensler lamented it when she compiled The Vagina Monologues almost 20 years ago, and I’m lamenting it today. So let’s talk about it now. Here are five reasons why all college women should absolutely see a gynecologist based on U.Va.’s Student Health website, and I promise I will not use the term “sexually active” once in this article.