Why Many Hair Stylists Never Learned How To Work With Curly Hair
Episode 10 traces the history of haircutting and why laws are now being passed to push stylists to learn about so-called "textured" hair -- the hair of the majority.
At the end of every episode, I ask listeners to send me questions we can answer on the show. The question I’ve gotten the most: why don’t most stylists learn how to work with curly, wavy and so-called “textured” hair?
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.
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