Today, more stylists and salons are appearing seemingly out of nowhere, promising their impeccable expertise in caring for and cutting naturally curly, coily, and wavy hair.
Even with the various training, product knowledge, and verifiable curly clientele, it can still be somewhat of a task for us community members trying to sift through the genuine stylists out from the bandwagon-jumping ones looking to profit from an entire community’s list of deeply-seeded insecurities. We look forward to going to the salon–whether it be for a haircut, a style or a treatment–to put our delicate curls into the hands of a trustworthy expert who truly knows how to care for them in the healthiest, most uplifting fashion.
1. Your appointment booking system reads: “I am no longer taking type 4 clients.”
But you claim to stand for everyone embracing their naturally textured hair? Type 4 is part of the curly hair spectrum. Claiming to provide all-inclusive textured hair care services but then exclude perhaps the most neglected of the hair types tells us, the community as a whole, that your discrimination shows a lack of understanding and knowledge in your realm of expertise. In turn, that hurts the potential for growth, unity, and expansion on both of our behalf. This is potentially detrimental if you had any kind of plans to leverage a substantial career with your education and background claims.
2. You and your thinning shears are ready to get to work.
We want to enhance every inch of our beautiful hair, and sometimes that includes our volume. Not everyone seeks to have curls that ‘fall down’ or ‘lie flat.’ Charlie Batch one said, “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” By showing that you are ill-prepared for caring for your curly haired client’s texture by suggesting a thinning haircut or a chemical service that deters from allowing us the most natural appearance of our real hair could prevent us coming back in addition to the mere thought of suggesting your services to anyone else in our community.
3. You have developed a technique and/or product to “fix” curly hair.
As members of the curly community, it is a difficult enough task in itself to go to a salon because traditional salon culture catered to hair that has totally deleted even the slightest hint of texture or coarseness in a strand. We do not want to associate you, the self-proclaimed curly hair expert, with a product that marks us as having a treatable condition known as textured hair. You have an opportunity to become our safe haven, not our doctor; we want to come to you with the hope of learning to embrace our natural hair and not fix it.
4. Your website’s photos don’t reflect real curly clients.
It would be nice for us prospective clients to see a portfolio that represents our curl pattern and hair type. Whether you have one specific expertise or a diversified clientele, we should be able to pick up on that right away before reading the copy on your site and social media. Proper imagery representation is important–this goes for the decor photos in your salon as well.
What’s a curly salon or stylist deal breaker for you?
