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Aeleise OllarviaandAishia Stricklandwant Black women to put down the spray bottle, skip the coconut oil and shea butter, and give co-washing a hard pass. Nix the rice water rinse, forget about spending eight hours in the bathroom cleansing, detangling and styling your tresses.
The women behind the digital hubBlack Girl Curlssay the secret to hydrated coils that pop is very simple and can be broken down into three easy steps — shampoo, condition, and style. To use their words, they’re “taking the stupid out of natural hair.”
“We’re not calling anyone stupid. But you cannot tell me that putting sweet potato conditioner [or] onion juice in your hair makes any sense when we start to think about cleansing, conditioning, styling,” Ollarvia, 38, tells PEOPLE, referring to haircare methods popularized on social media.
Chicago native Aeleise Ollarvia is one half of the digital hub, Black Girl Curls.Chiajunna Holden/Holden Photography
Back in 2015, when Strickland was a natural hair blogger, she tapped her friend for tips for aBlackDoctor.orgarticle that she was writing about 10 things your hairstylist wants you to stop doing. Ollarvia’s advice seemed to defy logic and the tradition that has been ingrained in Black women since childhood; that you need grease, butters, and oils to moisturize natural curls.
“Her comment triggered people the most,” Strickland, 42, remembers before Ollarvia chimes in with, “Oh, they were mad.” But the mom-of-twos' advice was based on real conversations that she was having with her clients, something that Aishia (then an aspiring hairstylist) observed while watching her friend work.
“The client’s telling me, ‘Oh, I’m doing all the right things to my hair and my hair’s still dry…’ And she’s listing all the things the internet is telling her. I’m like, ‘Okay, this is why this is happening, and this is why this is happening.’ I think Aishia had [an] aha moment of, ‘Why doesn’t everybody know this?'”
Aishia Strickland helped to launch the 30-Day Hair Detox.Nabu Pickett/Mondays Are Beautiful
That’s when they launched the first 30-Day Hair Detox and asked women online to join them, to get back to basics, to reeducate Black women on the scientific fundamentals of haircare.
“The detox is about removing all the unnecessary and then filling in the necessary foundational information about… hair,” Ollarvia says. “Basic cosmetology theory in terms of styling. What is shampoo? Why do we use shampoo? What is conditioner? Why do we use conditioner?”
Ollarvia breaks down why using grease, butters, and oil to add moisture to hair defies logic. Take the word “hydration,” for example. “Hydra is water,” she says. “Every word that we use to describe what state we want our hair to be in is related back to water.” If the hair is “not clean,” she notes, if it’s “built up with product, especially occlusive product,” moisture, water can’t penetrate it.
“When we think of petroleum-based products,” she says, “water just beads up on it.” That means that something like the popular L.O.C. method (layering your hair with liquid, oil, and then cream) will repel water, even if you’re spraying your curls with it daily.
“When we think of putting water and oil in a bottle, especially without an emulsifier, it fights each other,” Ollarvia says. “We also think about coconut oil as absorbable to the hair, so if your hair is fully absorbed with coconut oil, it cannot absorb water.”
Ollarvia and Strickland’s partnership has grown since that first challenge. Today they have a plethora of resources to educate the curly hair community. That includes theirWash Your Damn Hairdigital book for consumers and theirCut It Kinkyworkshops for professionals.
The friends acknowledge that the detox is a “mindset shift,” but Strickland says that even women who joined the challenge to prove them wrong have told them, “Seriously, y’all changed my life.” It’s the type of response that they love.
“[We] really do it for the curls and the culture,” Strickland says, happy in the knowledge that this article will run duringBlack History Month. “That is why we show up every single day. It’sfor the culture.”
source: people.com
