Today we’re launching something new: minisodes. These are, as the name gives away, mini We Are Spiraling episodes.

Our full episodes are narrative stories on audio and they take a lot of reporting and production TLC to make well. And there’s so much I want to talk to you about that we can cover in less than half the length of a full-length feature.

Each minisode will be under 10 minutes long but much more in depth than a social media clip. To me, this is the sweet spot, and why I felt the show needed a middle ground format as well.

I’ve been hoarding material for an episode on this topic for so long I decided it’s finally time to publish. Since I started reporting We Are Spiraling stories, I’ve reached out to Anne Hathaway’s team multiple times. (I have not gotten a yes, hence sharing the stories you’ll hear now, while there are rumors of a Princess Diaries 3.)

Every young girl remembers her makeover as Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries. The movie is a classic for millennial women. Mia, a normal San Francisco high schooler, discovers she is actually princess of Genovia.

The movie seeks to portray pre-princess Mia as a mess. Glasses, curly hair. Then in a makeover, her eyebrows are plucked, her glasses removed and…you guessed it. Straightened hair.

This is how Hollywood handles curly hair most often. Even Moana’s curls are nowhere near as prevalent in the live action remake set to release this summer, compared to the actual animated version.

READ: How Disney Is Complicit In Suppressing Curly Hair

“It’s technically looked at as more disheveled,” celebrity stylist Matthew Collins, who works on film and TV sets, explained to me in episode 2.

Anne Hathaway recently told People that she regrets the fact that some people interpreted the makeover as a criticism of curly hair. I don’t blame her for the choices someone else made about how to portray her character, but I also don’t buy the explanation at all.

You can hear why in today’s minisode, where you’ll also hear from two millennial women on how the movie shaped their self-image.

This is why so many millennial women are secretly curly.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify.

Leave a comment if there’s a question you’d like me to answer or topic you want explored in our next minisode.

When I first dropped the trailer for We Are Spiraling and announced the MAYURA waitlist, I had less than 350 Instagram followers. The WAS IG was brand new, along with its TikTok. My TikTok existed but didn’t have a rhythm or much going on.

I didn’t know we’d get here. While I often tell my consulting clients is that it takes time and consistency for people to know you for anything, it still feels futile sometimes when you’re in the waiting period — testing and trying different messaging before you can tell what is clicking.

But because I’ve sat in all three seats — founder, reporter and communications strategy adviser — I try to push myself to keep blinders on, treat myself like a client and take my own advice.

I spent more than a decade telling stories — and paying attention to how I framed and reported them to make sure they hit. That exercise is similar to trying to parse through which hooks might land on social media, week after week.

I finally crossed 1,000 followers on my own Instagram account in April. I know regularly writes about how follower metrics don’t mean much anymore, but it still felt like a milestone.

My biggest takeaway is that you really should just be yourself. In a sea of AI slop, the only way to stand out is by being something nobody else is doing. And that is whatever makes you uniquely you. For me, that thing is telling stories.

These are early signs of resonance. I don’t know what’s yet to come. All I know is that I’m producing work I love and it seems like other people enjoy it too.

I cannot tell you how many flop videos I’ve posted. Sometimes it seems like people want to know more about what it’s like to quit your job in a newsroom to start a haircare line, and then I’ll post a video about the process, and it’ll tank. But you have to increase shots on goal to make any.

It’s also a reminder that you need things to have enough time and space to start to compound.

I’ll write soon about why every founder needs tactile hobbies. One of my dance teachers told me a few months back, when I started learning bachata, that while I can keep training as hard as I want, I can’t shortcut the fact that the body needs time to absorb new techniques. Training y tiempo.

I think about this a lot. You can only meet the moment if you’ve prepared to do so up until that point. And you need enough time to become ready.

Almost ready to hit go on MAYURA’s first production batch. Get on the waitlist to save your spot!

We’re almost here. This week MAYURA became more tangible than ever before. I got my first full round of pre-production samples: three boxes with different design formats and layouts, along with labels for the bottles, which are finally in the right color.

I took them to Sephora to see how they’d look on retail shelves. Two shoppers thought I was doing a brand giveaway. Is there any better validation than watching people assume MAYURA is already sold there?

A store associate asked if I needed a basket. Maybe she just saw me holding boxes and didn’t notice the design didn’t match anything on their shelves. But maybe the packaging just looks like it belongs.

While bopping around to different displays to see how MAYURA looked on shelving at different levels, in various types of lighting, I decided to get some feedback. Each time a shopper passed me, I asked: “Do you have a minute? I’m wondering which of these boxes appeals to you most. Or if you don’t really like them that much, you can be honest! It won’t hurt my feelings.”

I did this kind of field trip to Credo Beauty when my bottle samples arrived in my top two color choices. Every detail makes a difference.

Each time pre-production packaging samples arrive, I photograph them in my home. Near my window on the dining table, where there’s natural light. In the bathroom, where there’s none. And in Sephora or Credo.

It’s not for my ego. It’s to make sure the logo is always readable in different types of lighting, that the finishes work and that the colors translate, whether the product is on an eye-level shelf, above or below.

That said, I encourage anyone doing work with long lead times to soak it in when it becomes real.

Because these are pre-production samples, they’re not yet fully finished. I hand-affixed every label option to my glass bottle samples to figure out which one we want to go with — and how much or how little text we want on the front. I tested two layouts and three different formats of text.

I’m looking at everything: the thickness of the paper, whether the box feels flimsy or secure – the product is in a glass bottle, so security is even more important – what the experience is like when you pull it out of the box.

And then there’s another very practical reason to take your packaging to a new environment. At some point, after months of looking at the same thing, you must give your brain new stimulus so your eyes can approach this fresh.

When I was a reporter fact-checking lengthy features and investigations that took months or sometimes even a year, I’d print out a near-final draft. With a pen and highlighter, I’d read out loud and go over every single word. Two rounds: The first purely for fact-checking, word by word. A second round for readability, smoothness, and any typos I may have missed.

You won’t believe how many tiny things you’ll catch if you make your brain read something it is used to in a different way, even just out loud. By that point, I’d already read the story hundreds of times and made so many edits that this new format was critical.

Your eyes start to glaze over things you’re used to. New environments and formats take your brain out of autopilot.

That said…it was pretty sick to see MAYURA come to life in my actual hands and on shelves after 1.5 years.

More on the design process and the incredibly talented team that helped make it happen when it’s time for the packaging reveal. (The waitlist will be first to see and preorder.)

I can’t wait for the next time people say “Are you doing a brand giveaway?” and I can say: “Yes! Would you like a sample?”

Follow on Instagram and TikTok to see all the ways I put MAYURA to the test — including while learning how to surf in Puerto Escondido last week. (Just be nice about my noob wipeouts.)

And share the MAYURA waitlist with a curly/wavy friend who just wants to look good while doing things.

If you missed the last few weeks on the Internet, here’s a refresh. Vogue posted a picture of Tracee Ellis Ross and called her afro a “cloud bob.” (Essence’s piece on it here.) And Coco Gauff had to explain why she wasn’t going to apologize for her hair being…her hair in a Miu Miu campaign.

Episode 11 is out now:

When Hunter and Alyssa each let me know the role their hair played in their own lives, I felt you needed to hear their stories, too. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of why it’s never “just hair.”

In the episode, we reference research and lawsuits regarding harmful chemicals in hair relaxers marketed to Black girls and women. Here is research from Harvard on this topic, and a New York Times Magazine deep dive into the issue.

We also explore the hairstyles that have inspired us. Here is Lupita Nyong’o’s 2021 Met Gala hairstyle that we reference:

In Vogue, her hairstylist noted that her hair was inspired by the work of artist Lorna Simpson. If you haven’t seen her work with Rihanna for Essence, you must.

Subscribe to the show on Apple and Spotify, and follow me on Instagram and TikTok for bonus clips.

This is my favorite question, and it’s one I hear pretty often, five months post public launch. I’m excited to say the answer is: later this year!

I launched the brand and We Are Spiraling in November, just days after receiving the final files in Figma. It took months to get there and I’m obsessed with where we landed. (Stay tuned for more on the talented design team when we unveil our packaging in a few months.)

The reality is it takes far longer than you ever expected for a product to go from idea to a shelf in a store, or a virtual one. I underappreciated this as well before jumping into the process. I initially hoped to launch in a year — and while I did start publishing the show and announce MAYURA for the first time, preorders are not yet open. Join the waitlist for early access.

Here’s why it takes so long to release a beauty brand. I got started 579 days ago and this is my experience so far.

Read more

You might be surprised to hear that this has been an issue for generations. My dad told us in Episode 1 that when he first moved to the U.S., a barber refused to cut his hair because it was too curly. After he told me this story, I called one of my best friends and said “isn’t that crazy?” And he said that it had happened to him too!

It’s such an ongoing problem that New York passed a law requiring cosmetology schools to include substantive training on how to work with wavy and curly hair. It takes effect this year.

By the way — “textured” hair is a bit absurd when 2/3 of the world’s population has wavy or curly hair. Some stats say that percentage is the same when you look at the U.S. alone. You might be surprised to hear that but that’s probably because so many people are secretly curly.

Episode 10 is out now

To hear more about why and how we ended up here, I interviewed Roxy Reaves, who owns Coastal Curl, a salon in Oakland, California that she describes as “a natural texture oasis.” I’ve been following Roxy’s work for years on social media and was delighted when she agreed to an interview.

What I didn’t realize until we began chatting was that we share so many parallels in our lives. We both started our careers in the SF startup scene — her as a recent Stanford graduate, me as a reporter for BuzzFeed News covering companies like Uber when it was rapidly growing.

You’ll hear about the role Roxy played in pushing Cinta Aveda Institute to incorporate basically any textured hair training at all into their curriculum — in 2019! I was shocked by some of the details.

In the episode, I trace some haircutting history so we can understand why cosmetology schools didn’t acknowledge curly hair until…now. (And that law I mentioned is in New York. Not everywhere.)

Because I’m a reporter through and through, here are the sources that helped me with the facts you’ll hear: the National Barber Museum, the Barber Surgeons Guild, the University of New Hampshire’s bio of Martha Mathilda Harper, this master’s thesis for the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and this Loyola University master’s thesis.

I hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please share it on social media and tag @WeAreSpiraling. It helps other people find the show too.

And as always, let me know what you think in the comments.

Subscribe to the show on Apple and Spotify, and follow me on Instagram for bonus clips.

This is a question I have dealt with from three angles: career journalist, communications adviser and founder.

As a reporter, my stories competed with not just every other news story, but any piece of content a reader could consume. As a comms adviser, I craft pitches and narratives for clients to stand out against competitors in a crowded tech news landscape.

And as a founder, I do both: make stories you can’t get anywhere else for We Are Spiraling, and build visibility for the show and MAYURA, from scratch. (Thank you for supporting my work by subscribing to this letter!)

This past week brought two opportunities that reminded me just how connected these roles are. For a second year, I served as a crisis communications coach for Wharton’s executive MBA program. The students – executives and founders with full-time jobs, who fly in for class every other week – presented statements after being given crisis case studies. Then I grilled them as a reporter, and shared live feedback on where they could’ve sharpened their messages.

And ’s hosted a panel discussion with me, The Information’s Cory Weinberg and , who edits , about how founders can get better at storytelling.

One of our biggest messages? Be authentic. And part of that is having something to say.

But you have to figure out how to do that first. This letter is about several practices I find myself repeating each time I am speaking on this topic.

Read more

Early in our interview, Selina shared that she embodies the indigenous philosophy that hair is an extension of your spirit. We pivoted the entire interview to explore this belief and how it influences her work.

Then we connected with John Parker, a hair and makeup artist based in Oklahoma who is Osage himself and worked on Killers of the Flower Moon. His connection to the story, which I’ll let you hear about from him in the episode itself, will make your jaw drop.

This episode is one of my favorites this season. It embodies everything I want this show to be. Stories about people, who we are, how it influences how we move through our lives and the world. Stories that are about so much more than hair while showing how that is a lens through which we can explore everything else.

Here’s where you can find Selina and John’s work. Selina’s salon, Native Studio Salon, is in Oakland, California.

If you enjoy the episode, please share it on Instagram, TikTok or whatever platform is your jam. It helps other people find our work too.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify.

To work together, reach out to partnerships@wearespiraling.com.

When we dropped the trailer and my first Substack post, I had just 300-something Instagram followers. While I spent more than a decade covering tech, unlike a lot of my former colleagues who launched technology-focused independent media platforms, I was going from investigating Silicon Valley to investigating curly hair. So I wasn’t bringing over an audience.

Here’s how we built this community from scratch, drawing on my experience as a reporter, communications strategist and founder.

Read more

Back when we first recorded with Noah nearly a year ago, we were in the earliest stages of developing We Are Spiraling — what each episode would sound like, the themes and stories we wanted to explore.

But I knew I wanted to talk about why movies and TV shows often portray eccentrics as curly and how hair shapes personality. Huge thanks to Noah for sharing his time with us even though we had nothing but ideas yet.

We paired his interview with conversations with Nemma Adeni and Molly Brenner, comics based in LA and New York, respectively, about my hot take: are curly people funnier?

Hollywood often uses curly hair as a trope to indicate someone is eccentric in some way — whether that means they’re a jokester, weirdo or psycho. But reality is always more interesting than fiction.

And I do think there’s something to what Michelle Wolf once said — that her hair reflects her personality. It’s also why I named my haircare line MAYURA. Curly hair is often a core part of who someone is. This whole show revolves around the premise that this piece of our identity is worth exploring.

Three comedians, three perspectives on how the way you look can be both a professional tool and something deeply personal.

In the episode, we reference Nemma’s viral video about how some people aren’t born into the right language for their personality, so we wanted to share it with you here:

@nemmaadeniUnlock new characters in this video game called life 😎 #language #fyp #funny

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Follow the pod on Apple, Spotify and Instagram.

If you ever want me to expand on a piece of a letter, leave a comment and I’ll try to address it. And, as always: let me know your questions about all things curly hair.

Keep Reminders Of The Long Game

There’s the adage that most overnight successes take 10 years, and it exists because it is true. Even companies that became wildly successful earlier in their lifespan took a few years of pain to get there.

Never think anyone else had it easy. You probably just don’t know what it actually took. Brian Chesky and his Airbnb cofounders sold boxes of cereal they “origami”ed together with a hot glue gun and filled by hand in the company’s early days because they needed more money before they got into Y Combinator.

Read more

Read more

People talk about how teen boys and young men are getting perms. We investigated this shift, from K-Pop to TikTok and the fact that these days more people are swiping right on curly guys.

Episode 7 is out now:

Perms were invented by the German hairdresser Charles Nessler in the early 1900s, around the same time William Kellogg began selling cornflakes.

Here’s what the machine looked like, per a LIFE Magazine article posted about Nessler’s death:

Later, Marjorie Stewart Joyner patented a new version. Joyner worked for Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman to become a self-made millionaire in the U.S. One evening, Joyner was cooking a pot roast and noticed how the metal rods would heat the meat from within. So she affixed pot roast rods to a hair dryer hood and began experimenting.

Beyond the history, you’ll hear an honest reflection from a man who got a perm in his 30s about how it changed how other people see him — people literally tell him that — and also how he sees himself.

Leave a comment if you have someone with this perm or haircut in your life — and which of the nicknames for it they identify most with:

• alpaca teen gym bro

• broccoli perm

• bussin cut

• bird’s nest

• Tiktok fboy

• tell me if there’s one I missed that we should add to the list!

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify, and find us on Instagram to follow along as we test MAYURA products.

I worked in newsrooms of all sizes. Bloomberg, one of the largest in the world. The Information, a startup that delivers exclusives about the tech industry to subscribers. And BuzzFeed before its demise (rest in peace), among others. Different newsrooms but the lessons were the same.

And they are just as indispensable now.

Write like a human

I’m a former reporter who now advises startups and other founders on media strategy, while building my own haircare brand, podcast and this newsletter. So I can tell you from each of those perches: Most people struggle to articulate what they’re doing and why it matters.

This skill is invaluable no matter what you are selling: shampoo, software or your value as an investor.

B2B companies have a lot to learn from how people sell protein bars and cereal. Your message will stick with your audience if it is clear and memorable. Don’t be boring!

Read more

I received dozens — if not hundreds — of pitches per day as a reporter for places including Bloomberg, BuzzFeed and The Information. And I ignored most of them.

That is the life of a reporter. Most pitches get deleted without reading, if they even get the attention or credence to be marked off for the trash bin vs perishing into an inbox black hole.

So how did my cold pitch to the New York Times, about a brand new podcast and to a reporter I’d never spoken with before, not only get answered within 7 minutes but also land We Are Spiraling coverage just two weeks after launch?

In this post, I’ll outline how I did it, and how you can pitch like a journalist too.

Read more

Not to be hyperbolic, but if you’ve ever searched for a recipe on the Internet, you’ve come across ’s work. Her videos in Bon Appétit’s test kitchen while she was food director racked up millions of views apiece, and she later ran her own channel. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller That Sounds So Good, and Where Cooking Begins, which won a James Beard Award.

Her Substack, , is among the top food & drink pubs here. I first met Carla on this lovely platform, in ’s chat. We were both intrigued by the same little news nugget in and began DMing. I told her about We Are Spiraling and invited her on the show — and she said yes!!

We recorded the day before New Year’s Eve. Six minutes before we were supposed to get on Riverside (like Zoom for audio and video recording), my Internet went out, so I hotspotted from my phone.

After a few more snafus — my hotspot wasn’t strong enough for Riverside but Zoom came to the rescue — we got going.

Our conversation touched on everything. How does being around fryers all day as Shake Shack’s first general manager affect your body? What it’s like when you wake up one day with different hair and don’t recognize yourself? Why do people say weird things to curly people at work? And a fun lightning round about what Carla is spiraling about.

Carla also dropped a preview about one of the recipes that will appear in her new cookbook that comes out later this year, title not yet announced. If you’ve been following the show since Episode 1, it’ll make you smile.

Follow the pod on Apple and Spotify, and please do rate the show if you enjoy it. And follow us on Instagram for clips that didn’t make it into the episode.

To work together, reach out to partnerships@wearespiraling.com.

If you’re in San Francisco, have you seen these signs?

I guarantee you know at least a few people who are secretly curly. And if you think you don’t, it’s because you’ve never been let in on the secret.

Consider the discourse around whether Odessa A’zion’s curls at the 2026 Critics Choice Awards. Her true coils were hidden under wigs in previous appearances so people thought the real deal was actually a wig!

We explored this phenomenon on the show, in one of our earliest episodes.

Throughout my life — in high school and college, in every workplace, at events from weddings to conferences to everyday parties — I’ve been highly attuned to the grip the flatiron has on American women spanning heritages. And the instinct to hide curly hair extends across genders. Some men get close cuts to avoid the whole matter altogether.

So we investigated why so many people are secretly curly. We interviewed a range of secret curlies to get to the bottom of the myths around curly hair, including why so many believe straight hair is more professional, that perpetuate the flatiron’s chokehold. You’ll also hear why some secret curlies are shifting their ideology.

I receive notes multiple times a week from listeners and readers who either went to great lengths themselves, or saw loved ones do so, to hide their curls. Consider this:

New pod episode coming later this week with a very special guest. I’ve been following her work for more than a decade. Stay tuned.

To work together, reach out to partnerships@wearespiraling.com.

People talk a lot about starting fresh at the beginning of every new year. But I have long been less than enthusiastic about new year’s resolutions.

I believe for many — dare I say most — resolutions turn the act of moving toward what you want or need into something with more weight. To some, that’s a feature. To me, it’s a bug because it can lead to an all-or-nothing mentality. You don’t need the calendar to move toward what calls you. What you need is movement. Even the babiest of steps. You don’t have to do it all in one motion. That’s not how most things actually become Things.

Today’s letter is about how and why five founders decided to translate their ideas to movement.

Read more

Episode 5 is out now:

Every time I step into an art museum, I notice one thing: in almost all the Greek and Roman art — from ancient works to Renaissance pieces inspired by them — everyone has curly hair.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, like readers and listeners of We Are Spiraling, knew that curly hair is worth obsessing over.

In today’s episode, we spoke with Janet Stephens, a former hairdresser turned hairstyle archaeologist. Janet studies ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and artworks. She extensively researches and recreates their hairstyles, and posts tutorials on her Youtube channel.

It’s safe to say she’s the world’s premier expert on the ins and outs of ancient Greek and Roman hairdos. We talked about everything from why curly hair was so prized in those societies to how a hairstylist obsessed with ancient curls handled clients who wanted to straighten their strands.

You’ll hear us jump between ancient Greece, Rome, and different time periods, because curly hair continued to show up in artworks over the eras. (I know the Renaissance art is not ancient!)

We reference some artworks and specific hairstyles in the conversation. Here they are.

For the best view of Empress Plotina’s braids, check out Janet’s tutorial.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify, and please do rate the show if you enjoy it. It helps us a lot.

Follow us on Instagram for more over the next week on how to look like a Greek god.

To work together, reach out to partnerships@wearespiraling.com.

One year and one week after shaking my lead chemist’s hand for the first time, I hand-packed my first formula into little vials and walked door-to-door to distribute sample bags to salons and stylists in Manhattan. It was surreal.

Here’s how I got there and how it went…

About a week ago, I flew to New Jersey. I went straight to my family’s …

Read more