At some point, the algorithm decided I should see many videos in which women with luscious waves discuss how a handy survey from the custom hair care company Prose revealed to them their true hair type. I’m not typically one for online quizzes, but I was intrigued by the notion of a secret hair type—was it possible I, too, lacked this particular form of self-knowledge?

“I see it all the time,” Jae-Manuel Cardenas, a senior stylist at Ollin NYC, says of people thinking their hair is one thing when it’s actually another. Why all the confusion? Sometimes clients are conflating overall thickness with the texture of individual strands. “They might have the density, but the hair is fine. Or vice versa,” he says. Another reason: it’s possible to lose touch with your natural hair type, intentionally or otherwise, through treating and styling, or as Cardenas puts it, “damaging it into submission.”

Then there’s the culprit of—what else?—time. First comes puberty, which can sprout new kinds of locks, and then comes adulthood. Not only do hair follicles shrink with age, but the new hair grow in thinner, shorter, nonuniform strands that might be more or less curly than their predecessors, I’m told by Lars Skjøth, a scalp health expert and the founder of the Danish product line Hårklinikken. Additionally, the shafts become more porous—hence, frizz. During perimenopause and menopause, women experience a relative increase in testosterone, which may contribute to this so-called hair miniaturization process, on account of a decrease in estrogen, a hormone that “extends the hair’s anagen (or growth) phase and supports sebum production,” says endocrinologist Caroline K. Messer, MD. Another thing that dips with the years is keratin, a protein that strengthens and smooths. In other words, you’re simply bound to undergo hair changes—no wonder my own hair, once incontrovertibly straight and silky, has lately seemed wavy and dry—and since these shifts are rarely sudden, there might be a lag before you clock them.

Of course, a hair type-specific approach is nothing new. Think of the Black is Beautiful movement, which emerged in the 1960s and celebrated natural hair in lieu of racist European beauty standards. A few decades later, in 1997, Miko and Titi Branch opened Curve Salon, catering to women with curly, coily, and wavy hair, in their Brooklyn brownstone. Born to a Japanese American mother and a Black American father, they’d been largely on their own when it came to learning how to care for and style their hair, which was multi-texture, and enjoyed sharing what they’d gleaned with others. (The sisters debuted their brand of products, Miss Jessie’s, in 2001.) To determine your hair type, Miko suggests first “looking at your hair and describing it with your own adjectives—what you see, how it feels,” before consulting the internet.

There, you’ll find an updated version of the classification system created by Oprah Winfrey’s stylist Andre Walker in the 1990s, with types spanning from 1A (pin-straight) to 4C (tightly coiled), though many advocate for a broader definition of hair type that considers texture, density, porosity, and other factors. (Cardenas recalls a test meant to measure porosity from his cosmetology school days, when he and his classmates were told to put a strand of their hair into a cup of water. “If it floats, your hair is moisturized. If it sinks, it means it was so thirsty it drank all the water and fell to the bottom,” he says.) The idea being that the better you know your hair, the better equipped you’ll be to make it look amazing. For my part, I’ve started using Kérastase’s Gloss Absolu Glaze Drops to define my waves and lock in moisture. With any luck, I’ll soon embody Skjøth’s view that optimized care can result in “something magical, where you almost can’t believe it’s the same person.”

History notwithstanding, the topic of hair type is coming more and more into focus. In May, Tracee Ellis Ross (who has her own line for curly and natural hair, Pattern Beauty) hosted a celebratory runway show put on by Echelon Noir Productions and The Texture of Change—a L’Oréal Professional Products Division initiative that seeks to improve textured hair education within the industry—that celebrated the artistry of Black hair culture. Last year saw the launch of Being, a company with different collections of products designed for a wide range of hair types, as well as Brooke Shields’s brand, Commence, geared toward people over 40 looking to combat issues like thinning and scalp dryness. As Yaèle Nasso, a senior R&D product manager at Prose, says, we as a culture “are moving away from one-size-fits-all beauty.” She tells me that, in its current iteration, Prose’s quiz has over 85 data points, which allows for a high degree of both personalization and inclusivity. I also like that a person’s answers to the assessment will evolve over time, because as long as you’re changing, self-knowledge can be something you keep acquiring.