In a recent post on CurlTalk, SicilyCurl offered these insightful observations:
In terms of the curly hair topic, this is what I’ve been thinking lately –
Without mentioning names specifically, I think that certain organizations, businesses, and people need to do more than just profit off of the confusion and desperation of many curly-haired people and actually do something to lobby on our behalf. Curly hair is extremely complex and you really need hands on, on-site help with it, instead of spending hundreds of dollars on products, playing guessing games, and communicating with people hundreds of miles away who can’t even see you. Do you know what would be truly helpful?
- Lobby the heck out of the beauty schools and persuade them to churn out more curly hair experts.
- Help set up curly hair institutes in all major cities that carry an array of products for an array of curly hair types. People cannot guide you on your hair from afar because they can’t see and feel your texture and know the climate that you live in. You need hands on, on-site assistance from someone who can guide you every step of the way. I don’t mean to sound patronizing because I know some curly heads figure their hair out on their own, but many do not and they spend loads of cash and shed tears trying to figure it out.
- Work with consumer rights and environmental organizations to get hair care companies to stop putting industrial chemicals in their products that are damaging to our environment, our bodies and to the health of our hair.
- Monitor reviews (on all Web sites”> that seem to be covertly placed by hair care companies. I’m sure some companies pay people to say positive things about their products, and place negative comments about competitors’ products. When someone raves “I combined FKG with some EETK, raked and scrunched, plopped, and spread some NUJKL on the canopy, and dolloped some TNMIL over the fortress. Voila! My curls where rockin’!,” how do you know that person isn’t actually some 70 year-old bald guy who was paid by the companies to plant that on a site? I’m a smart and educated person, but when I get extremely frustrated with my curly hair, even I buy into the propaganda.
I do not think we curly heads are gullible and that we need someone to hold our hand, but curly hair can be extremely complex and majorly frustrating and I think there can be a better way to figure it out. We shouldn’t be bankrupted into blindly figuring out what our hair likes or needs. We need more trained hairstylists who can help us get it right the first or second time with the right products. We need certain organizations, businesses and people to lobby to make that happen.
Yes, I do care about far more serious problems in the world, but this is a site about curly hair and I just wanted to express my opinion on the topic. Feel free to respond or not.
We like your comments, SicilyCurl, and couldn’t agree more. We at NaturallyCurly commit to do all that we can to facilitate many of your thoughts. Our recent launch of CurlStylist was very much an attempt to educate stylists about curlies’ real-life needs and to provide them with training and education to help us rock our curls.
Additionally, we are in contact with various beauty schools, and in fact helped bring in an Austin curl expert to a local school to give the students some curl-specific knowledge. You can read about it here!
We encourage other curly-friendly organizations and businesses to join NaturallyCurly in this endeavor to spread the curly word!
