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This article is based on field research carried out in La Habana on the beauty practices of women who self-define as mulatas. The analysis focuses on the maintenance of frizzy hair disparagingly called “ pasa” (raisin). It explores the habit of straightening it and the obligation to “look right” through constant care from the age of fifteen, the entry into womanhood. If hair care reveals a history of violence and the social duty to conform to normative ideals of beauty, this act also signifies the reappropriation of this history and of one’s Afro-descendant lineage. The article aims to explain the creative aspects, the dimension of pleasure, generational transmission, sensory intimacy and sharing that emerge from the accounts of the women encountered.