natural hair
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Beautifully Flawed: The Ageless Beauty of Angelique Miles
Angelique Miles is a stunning, ageless beauty who knows how to survive and thrive. In conversation with The Glow Up’s Veronica Webb, she shares how her biggest losses made her stronger and more beautiful than ever—like being downsized out of her decadeslong career as a record-label vice president who signed Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Lil’ Kim…
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Get Twisted and Braided in Harlem
The numbers don’t lie: 71 percent of black Americans wore a natural hairstyle at least once in 2016. To find out more about protective styles and the amazing practitioners behind them, I took a journey up to 125th Street in Harlem, the international mecca for the natural-hair movement that’s taking black Americans of all ages…
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Celebrating Ourselves: A Toast to #TeamNatural
The year 2017 was a good year for black hair. Solange did the absolute most, impressing us with African-inspired avant-garde hairstyles. Then there was Erykah Badu—aka “Sara Bellum,” aka “Fat Belly Bella,” aka “Medulla Oblongata,” aka “Low Down Loretta Brown,” aka “Analogue Girl in a Digital World”—who pushed all the way through in what she…
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Let’s Get Something Straight: The Real Talk of the Curl Talk Project
Put 100 curly-haired women in one place, and you’ll get at least 100 different stories about their curls. That’s why Johanna Yaovi created the Curl Talk Project; a “portfolio of experiences” about the curly-hair experience. While beauty tips for curly hair abound, Yaovi was seeking a more meaningful dialogue with deeper answers, interviewing 100 curly-haired…
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Surviving a Breakup: What I’ve Missed Since Going Natural
Sometimes I look at my Afro and still can’t believe that less than two years ago, I underwent “the big chop,” after which my hair basically looked like a fuzzy tennis ball. Now my hair is a few inches past my shoulders and longer and thicker than it ever was when it was relaxed. I…
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Unnatural: The Beauty Industry’s Natural-Hair Bias
Black folks have always had a list of unwritten rules for navigating life. A quick Google search of “unwritten black rules” will yield you hours’ worth of pure comedy—there are more than 1 million hits. You’ll find pearls such as “If you drink the last of the Kool-Aid, make some more,” and “Kids, don’t ask…
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She’s Your Queen-to-Be: @Krissychula Stays Saying What We’re All Thinking
Fun fact—or, in this case, funny fact, for a beauty vertical: I first fell for YouTuber @krissychula on a bad hair day in 2012. It was a really bad hair day, to hear her tell it: Since being “pissed off” at her hair (and who here can’t relate?), @krissychula, also known as Krystal, has elevated…
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Is #TeamNatural Ready to Go Coed? 9 Natural-Hair ‘Guy-rus’ Who Might Teach You a Few Things
While I was talking wash-day routines with some of my natural friends, we found ourselves scrolling through a seemingly endless list of natural-hair gurus giving all types of product suggestions, protective-style techniques and hacks for maintaining healthy hair. After clicking on about the 12th video geared toward women and our natural-hair needs, our guy friend…
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#NappyGirlMagic: She Left the Corporate Grind and Became America’s Natural-Hair Whisperer
You can see the precision of corporate influence in every crevice. The customers don’t wait a second. Appointments are tightly regimented. All scheduling is online. Kinky Curly Beauty’s Hair Studio in Birmingham, Ala., is like the love child of a Fortune 500 engineer and your favorite girlfriend’s beauty salon, but with more melanin and fewer…
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AfroArt: Immortalizing a New Generation
A few weeks ago, the fashion world swooned upon learning that Rihanna would be a host of the 2018 Met Gala, themed to coincide with the Costume Institute’s upcoming exhibit, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Imagining how “Bad Gal RiRi”—first of her name, currently ruler of three simultaneous covers of Vogue Paris (and…