00:01People getting out of beauty school may never have had to work with a head of
00:05curly hair where they didn't chemically relax it or straighten it. There's a
00:09reason we all have PTSD, all of us curly girls. I'm Michelle Breyer and I am
00:14co-founder of NaturallyCurly.com. This was before YouTube, this was before blogs.
00:20We became a place where people could get education, inspiration, and more than
00:25anything a sense of empowerment. Walk down the streets of New York and you see
00:28confident women with curly hair and that wasn't something that I saw 20 years ago.
00:33When you think about the fact that 65% of the population has curly hair, wavy hair,
00:37or coily hair, it's kind of crazy that we didn't accept curly hair before now.
00:42The NaturallyCurly website is everything that you can find subject matter-wise, so it
00:47helps a lot. Our community is very, very inclusive. We have women of all ages,
00:53ethnicities, texture types. I see other curlies and I have to go up and
00:58talk to them. It's, you know, I want to let them know, like, how beautiful their hair is.
01:03Everybody was telling me, well, you can have curly hair if you, like, cut your hair off.
01:07Let it grow out, so that's what I did. Well, there definitely is a personality of a curly,
01:11you know, like, our hair has defined us. I think when I used to have straight hair,
01:15I feel like I used to attract maybe, like, a different type of men, but now I feel like I
01:20attract people who are a lot more fun and outgoing because it just goes with the personalities.
01:26I think every curly girl was called some name that they didn't like. My nickname in seventh grade was Bozo.
01:34I don't think I loved it until someone with really straight hair said to me,
01:39well, my hair does nothing. Your hair does something. You know, how much of my life I spent
01:43fighting my hair that I didn't need to be. Curly hair should just be something that is,
01:48not something that you have to take into consideration depending on certain situations
01:53and just hoping, hoping, hoping that there was no humidity.
01:59You know, in the fashion industry, you know, natural hair is definitely considered beautiful and
02:04acceptable, but at a runway show, you're still going to see, you know, 75 percent of the people
02:09are going to have, like, the straight hair, the European standard of beauty. Texture on the runway
02:14kind of grew out of a bitch session at Naturally Curly, like a lot of good things, was just
02:21frustrated that there were so few models that had textured hair on the runway. Now it's an industry.
02:29You know, having curly hair is not something that people fight anymore.
02:32I think we're, we're beginning to understand as a society that people want to see themselves.
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