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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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 …

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I want to lay out the vicious cycle that has turned natural curls into an endangered species on screen.

Read more

Episode 4 is out now:

Why is it that we rarely see lead characters with curly hair in movies and television shows? And when we do, the person is portrayed as some kind of eccentric?

Longtime Hollywood actress and comedian — and, now at 87, TikTok sensation — Annie Korzen explains how being curly affected her career. She was told over and over that she was a character actor versus a lead.

Annie was a recurring character on Seinfeld. She played Doris Klompus, a neighbor in Jerry’s parents’ condo complex.

Annie wrote about how her hair was a factor in what roles she could secure in The Book of Annie: Humor, Heart, and Chutzpah from an Accidental Influencer. If you’re still looking for holiday gifts for loved ones, I recommend it. You could also gift an annual subscription to We Are Spiraling.

Give a gift subscription

We recently dug into how Disney is complicit in suppressing curls. This episode goes even deeper, and we hear more from celebrity hairstylist Matthew Collins about on-screen hair decisions.

Let me know who your favorite film or television character with curly hair is in the comments. I love that some readers and listeners have already sent me voice notes with their experiences and questions around curly hair. Keep them coming.

This newsletter will continue every week, through the holidays. You’ll get our next podcast episode in 2026. We’re crafting a fun lineup of stories.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify, and please do rate the show if you enjoy it. And follow us on Instagram for even more fun.

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

Sarah Needleman, the reporter who covered our story about how Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was advised to straighten her curly hair throughout her career, wanted to let me know the article was the second most popular on their website.

Her email came through at 5:38am pacific. By the time I replied saying “OMG!” during normal-people PST hours, she had a new alert for me: “make that #1!!!!”

I had pitched my interview with Wasserman Schultz to Sarah, who covers leadership and workplace issues, because Congress is, after all, the former DNC head’s workplace. The congresswoman had described to us how once, she went to the House floor for votes after straightening her hair, and her male colleagues “went berserk,” gasping that she looked amazing and should wear her hair that way more often. (FYI that is actually an insult. Smash play to hear more.)

The story held that #1 slot much of the next day as well. For a site like BI, that usually means hundreds of thousands of readers. It went so gangbusters that Sarah told me she and her editors were planning to publish a second story about how curly hair is a much bigger deal than people think, and interviewed me about why I started We Are Spiraling.

That second story ran on Thanksgiving day at 2:26am pacific. I again woke up to a surprise to be grateful for. I made some social media content and closed my laptop for the day, heading off to my best friend’s house with a dutch oven full of gouda mac and cheese. (Casarecce pasta — never elbows — if you were curious.)

On Black Friday, I was on my laptop making a social media reel when I got an email about a new We Are Spiraling subscriber. When I opened it, I immediately got another in the thread. That was my signal to check my personal Gmail.

Subject: Open Thread: Black Friday, Zegna, LVMH, Prada, curly hair.

From: The New York Times

“it’s worth a listen” — Vanessa Friedman, fashion director & chief fashion critic for the New York Times

In just two weeks, I went from 0 to publishing my first episode to having a show that’s been covered by the New York Times and Business Insider (twice).

For the first hour after the NYT newsletter by chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman dropped, I was in so much shock that I couldn’t even make a social media post. I had to take a hot shower to calm my system.

I knew it was coming. I had cold pitched Vanessa a week before that episode’s publication to see if she’d be interested in a preview of the congresswoman’s comments. She replied to my email within seven minutes. (Yes, it was a totally cold pitch. We did not know each other before.)

Vanessa gave me a heads up that she planned to include the interview in her newsletter, but 1) I didn’t know how — my assumption was that it might be as simple as a one-bullet link 2) I don’t count chickens before they hatch. As a former reporter, I know things can always change. Nothing is guaranteed.

To say I’m grateful to see We Are Spiraling already resonating with wide audiences is an understatement. A little over a year ago, I quit my job to start building MAYURA and this newsletter/show.

Since then, so many people have said, “how much is there to say about curly hair?” I can’t even count the number of men who have asked me what percentage of the U.S. population is curly. I’ve always said: that’s besides the point. That’s like assuming only chefs like cooking shows. Our stories are about people more than they are about hair. Who hasn’t felt at some point in their lives that other people are trying to put them in a box?

This journey has been exciting and humbling and exhausting and *so* much fun. I’m not dwelling on these wins for long. (I barely dwelled on them for three hours, to the frustration of friends who suggested we celebrate.) This is probably founder disease; there is so much more to create and even a year in, even after launching, we are at the start.

These are the kinds of stories I’ll continue to bring you: real reporting, real people. Thank you for supporting my transformation from investigative tech reporter to curly hair beat reporter.

Lastly, if you’re a subscriber, thank you for supporting We Are Spiraling in our earliest days. The best is yet to come. Share this newsletter with a friend and follow us on Instagram for show previews, MAYURA updates and curly baby photos.

Curly icon of the week

Fellow Substacker , because Subway Takes + his notes on this platform make me laugh every day.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify.

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

She’s been in Congress representing Florida for 20 years and has been one of the only people with obviously curly hair — and she’s been attacked for it, with opponents calling her everything from “Medusa” to “frizzilla.” This is the most in-depth interview she’s ever done about what it’s like to be a curly haired woman in politics.

I say “obviously” curly because as We Are Spiraling readers/listeners know, many people are secretly curly. But the congresswoman, formerly chair of the Democratic National Committee, keeps it no secret; her curls are part of who she is.

When I began working on We Are Spiraling and dreaming up a list of guests to interview, Wasserman Schultz was one of the first people I thought of. I went to college in D.C. and got my start in journalism covering politics. At a young age, I noticed her decision to remain curly while in office because it is such a rare sight.

Her communications team told me when they brought my request to the congresswoman, she replied enthusiastically — exclamation marks! I appreciate that she felt seen because I felt that way too when she agreed to the interview.

This is about much more than women and curly hair. Her story is what so many of us go through when we step into a role and others try to put us in a box.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple and Spotify.

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

Disney put out a trailer for its live-action Moana remake this week. And people noticed a change to Moana…

Original Moana vs. New Moana

And, by the way, this is what Catherine Lagaʻaia actually looks like.

I don’t think I need to say it at this point but…they straightened Catherine’s hair! To play a character who had curly hair in the original animated version!

Yes, there will be people who look at these photos and say: but see Catherine’s hair has a light curl at the end. To that I say eyeroll.

Why did Disney straighten Catherine/Moana’s hair for this live-action remake? Let’s unpack the possible reasons.

Hollywood generally almost never portrays curly hair on leading women. “They” (I am going to use that to refer to the industry and its forces writ large) do not like it and curly hair is viewed as unruly.

Celebrity stylist Matthew Collins, who works on film and TV sets, explained this to us in Episode 2. “It’s technically looked at as more disheveled.”

Here’s the other thing Matthew explained to me, which could be part of the reason Disney straightened out Catherine’s curls. When filming, some scenes or segments that are part of one moment in the movie are shot across multiple days or even weeks. So a character’s hair should look exactly the same throughout.

Naturally curly hair can look slightly different day to day, based on the weather, how it dried, how you slept, other reasons you cannot always figure out. Matthew said the straightening is sometimes out of necessity, to make sure there is “continuity” between shots.

Most normal people do not look *exactly* the same over the course of a single day – makeup fades, one starts to look increasingly tired, people rub their eyes, they get sweaty, etc. But I understand continuity as an important value for filmmakers, even though at times it sets unrealistic standards of beauty for the rest of society.

The continuity thing doesn’t quite square here though. Moana sails on a boat. She’s in and around wind, water, waves the whole time. Those circumstances do not necessitate that each strand be exactly the same moment to moment because they’re constantly shifting and turning with environmental factors anyway.

If even Moana cannot be portrayed with natural curly hair and an active decision was made to turn Catherine into a straight-haired Barbie, what does that tell kids?

It tells them to straighten their hair to look “presentable.” That’s what so many secret curlies — a doctor, a dad, a professor — told us for Episode 2.

The global hair straightener market was valued at nearly $7 billion in 2023 and is projected to hit nearly $15 billion by 2033, according to Market Data Forecast. Another report I found pegged the number at almost $3 billion. Either way, we are in the billions.

And these numbers don’t even include the chemical hair straightening industry – keratin and other treatments – that many rely on so they don’t have to re-straighten their hair with a flatiron or blow dryer after every wash.

Before our current Dyson boom times, people turned to more crude methods to smooth their strands.

Madam C.J. Walker, the first Black woman self-made millionaire in the U.S., achieved that wealth by popularizing the hot comb. The hot comb was made of metal and could be heated so it would straighten stands as it ran through.

Hear about how this issue goes back generations from communications powerhouse Jacqui Miller, who is 40. Her mom is 72. Jacqui sent me this voice note about how her mom used to straighten her hair in the pre-Dyson days.

I got an Instagram comment from the sibling of a guy who used to try to *tape his hair to his face* to straighten it. Still trying to get in touch with him because I need to hear firsthand how this turned out for him.

Disney’s decision isn’t just about Moana or Catherine Laga’aia. This is how the cycle repeats, generation after generation.

Free Moana’s curls!

Thank you to the at least three people who texted/DMed me about the Moana news this week. This reporter always loves tips and story ideas. Keep them coming.

*This post was edited to note that I reached out to a representative for Catherine Laga’aia’ to invite her onto the show. I also reached out to Disney’s media relations team to ask if they’d like to comment on Disney’s suppression of curly hair and contribution to a multigenerational stigma against curls.

Next Week On We Are Spiraling:

How Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former head of the Democratic party, resisted career-long pressure to get rid of her curls. Our interview with her is the most in-depth she’s ever done about how she has been vilified for her curls throughout her time in politics.

Subscribe to the pod on Apple, Spotify or wherever else you listen to make sure you don’t miss the episode. And follow us on Instagram to share these stories.

This post was made available to all subscribers this week as a thank you for supporting our launch. Forward this to a friend who should spiral with us.

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