We’ve talked about making sure to read product reviews before.
It’s great when you can find a detailed description of pros and cons of any given thing prior to purchase. We’re at a point where the innovation cheetahs among us can pounce on the latest thing and have a YouTube video up and polished before the product sloths have even seen a banner ad for them. I fall somewhere in between myself (let’s say that makes me a bear for fun”>, so I love that.
“The next big thing for naturally curly hair will be algae streaks, you mark my words.”
But all required reading has to be written down first. And unfortunately, fake reviews abound! Tell me you haven’t seen five single sentence ‘I loved it’ s in a row that got you more than a little suspicious. I guarantee you though, at least a few of those have been real people that just weren’t sure how to articulate what was so fantastic about their new buys.
So for all of us with opinions aching to be heard—regardless of animal analogy—this is what we need to be recording online for our curlfriends that are still looking and learning about what’s available.
Your Hair Structure
If you haven’t seen our NaturallyCurly film stars following each other’s wash day routine, check Grace and Evelyn out.
Yep…that happened.
On the offchance you couldn’t watch that hilarity ensuing, I weep for you, but the long and short of it (HA!”> is Grace’s low density, low porosity 2A optimized products did NOT work with Evelyn’s medium density medium porosity 4C hair and vice versa.
Be sure to also include things that aren’t on our typing charts, like the fact that you’re transitioning, dealing with traction alopecia, or going gloriously gray! Leave your curls’ details in your reviews and help stop the madness!
Madness like this:
And this:
It all ends with us, people. Only you can stop cross-type confusion.
Full Style Disclosure
Anything worth saying is worth saying again, right? For a review to be effective in helping others, you have to let your fellow potential buyers know your situation from the scalp up—and the more thorough, you are, the better.
If you heat style often, say so! Color treating? Gotta put that in! Anything you’re doing to your hair IS going to have an effect on which products will or will not work for you, so being up front with your styles, trials, and profiles is going to be best.
Pictures make perfect
I always beg y’all at the end of my articles to send pictures in, right? There’s a reason for that! Not only do I love seeing how the NaturallyCurly community is out here shining, I also like to look at how products are working for you! Sites like Amazon, Torrid, and even us now, hint hint, will allow for pictures to be uploaded, and it’s been especially helpful for checking out fit, coverage, and how colors look on different people and to extrapolate your own potential results. With hair products, it’s great to see how much lift, volume, shine, etc a product can impart—so if you can cam, cam!
Use your descriptive words!
If I were to pen a review saying ‘This new combo hair and body butter smelled great!’, and y’all purchased on that alone, a good 80% of you write back in mad that you had to give the whole jar to the first curly male you could find because it smelled “too earthy”.
They’re not even dating, she just flagged him down in the street.
Had I included a few choice adjectives like “woodsy” or “herbaceous” in my hypothetical review, it would have probably helped a spiraled sista out, right? Right! You don’t need to sit down and write a novel, but specifics help!
Don’t get petty!
I’ll give everyone that knows me a second to get their eye-rolling out of the way, but I really do mean it.
Things happen. Sometimes an order slips through the cracks and doesn’t ship properly. Sometimes people order body butters in August, and don’t take their own climate into consideration. Limited edition shortages, marketing missteps, and underestimating how much bubble-wrap is actually enough are all frustrating things. But there’s usually no call to 1 star-rage at a product for any other reason than ‘The product itself was highly dissatisfactory’.
If you have beef that doesn’t involve getting to use the item in question, make sure to first vent your spleen in think pieces, the seller ratings, or the ‘Contact us’ section instead of on the product pages. But if you’re not heard after that…all bets are off.
Final words
When all’s said and done, be sure you’re writing what you yourself would want to know: the little details that irritate you (for me it’s thick creams in skinny squeeze bottles, AUGH”>, or any little extras that you love (like this nice note from Foxie Cosmetics!“>.
Not only is it better for your curfriends out there, the brands can see what they might need to address in their next reviews of designs and formulas, and either keep true to what customers love or change things for the better!
Remember! This review isn’t just for you.
For private rants and personal records, you want a product diary! But these reviews you’re doing out of the goodness (or saltiness”> of your heart to let others know which products are bomb and which products just…bombed. The goal here is to help others and to bolster the products that you want to see succeed!
Want to keep up with what our editors are reviewing? Look no further than our video teams’ Watch n’ Go series on the NaturallyCurly YouTube channel.
Meanwhile, what would you like to see more of as you’re doing your research? Let us know below!
