Almost 25 years ago, my curls and I moved from California to Texas — low humidity California to off-the-charts muggy Texas. Up to this point, I had fought my curls with a vengeance through every method imaginable — chemicals, appliances, products and otherwise. I endured horrible nicknames like Bozo. But the heat and humidity of Texas were going to change my hair and my life forever.
Bitching to Beginning
In the mid-1990s, I was working at the Austin newspaper when I bonded with a few other curlies. We would have daily bitch sessions about our hair, the frizz, the lack of products, the latest nightmare hair cut (No, “the Rachel” from Friends does not work on 3b curls”>. We were at a party having another of our bitch fests when a friend overheard us.
“Do you always talk about your hair this much?” he asked
“Pretty much. Do you have a problem with that?” we said, after one too many mimosas.
“Have you ever thought of starting a magazine or web site for people like you?” he asked.
We proceeded to get on the computer, do a search and discover that no web site existed for curly hair. Of course, our whole lives we had known there were no resources for people like us, having scoured through the annual hair issues of beauty magazines to discover, yet again, that curly hair didn’t seem to exist for beauty editors. If there was curly hair on a model, the goal was to fix or straighten it.
Over the next few months, we created our vision of what a curly web site could be. My neighbor’s 13-year-old son created our first website, complete with the Frieda logo and her animated curls. NaturallyCurly.com was born.
That was 14 years ago this September. The world today is a much different place than it was when we started the site. Today, there are thousands of products designed especially for curls, coils and waves. There is a growing legion of stylists who have made texture their specialty, with special techniques that help accentuate rather than fight natural texture. Women around the globe are now trading their relaxers for natural styles.
Read More: My Renewed Love Affair with Mousse
