Black Art Student’s Hair Proves that Cosplay Is for Everyone

Natural hair is awesome because in addition to being unique to every person, sophomore Shaquille Dent proves that it’s also awesome because it’s unique to each person’s interests.

Dent, who is a student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has been gaining increasing attention on social media for using his natural hair as cosplay.

Cosplay, which is when people dress up as their favorite fictional characters (such as cartoon, movie, anime, etc) is usually seen as something people of color don’t do.

Dent’s signature style inspiration is Goku from popular children’s show Dragon Ball Z. He’s often referred to as ‘The Black Goku’, although he recently colored parts of his hair loosely after the character Yu-Gi-Oh.

After finding out that he could style his natural hair into this shape when he was a junior in high school, Dent now spends two hours twice a month to keep up this low maintenance style.

He also never goes to a barber.  My biggest question when looking at him is what products does he use? And how does he sleep without flattening the spikes??

Now this animation student has gone viral, and he’s a talking point for people all over social media. He’s gotten a wide array of reactions about his appearance, and although people started off by making fun of him, he’s received a lot of positivity. Even if you’re a fan of cosplay or not, it’s interesting to see how natural hair continues to make waves.

“Its funny — the reason this went viral was because of all of the haters. They wanted to bash me for my hair but ended up promoting it instead.”

What are your thoughts on Shaquille Dent’s innovative hair style?