Happy Monday, curly girls! I hope everyone had a relaxing Easter!
I have been doing a lot of working and thinking and planning over the last month or so. I've spent a lot of time on YouTube, researching blogs and websites, and quite frankly ... I am not too happy with a lot of what I have found.
I am not going to call this pandemic a blessing, because it is far from that, but I think one of the positives I have personally found is being able to really look at what is out there now in Curly Hair World these days.
I am usually in the salon, too busy DOING hair to actually read about hair, but I've had a lot more time to do that recently. And that has been good from the perspective that I can see what is out there and what women are learning.
A lot of it ain't good. There is just SO much to slog through and--I really don't want to sound mean--but I want something with a bit more substance than some girl who wants to be a YouTube star, has no licensed hair training whatsoever, and is there just because she looks cute and wants to demonstrate what she has found works for her hair personally.
I asked my curly posse this week: How in the world do you even find any curly hair information that is worthwhile? How do you unearth the real gems that are in this sea of just STUFF?
It sounds like it takes a lot of trial-and-error, a lot of education and following breadcrumbs and depending on the recommendations of friends, but ... that's okay.
I had started my own YouTube channel last fall, but I had to put it on pause fairly early on because of personal reasons. That's okay, too: It's gave me a reason to rethink my approach and priorities, make some new decisions and I realize I couldn't be happier.
My posse had to listen to me throw a temper tantrum for a little bit because there is so much crap out there on YouTube, but I finally settled down and realized this is probably the best platform for me to use to move forward for now. I actually thought about a podcast, and we will see if that happens eventually, but I think we're going to have that on hold for a bit.
One thing I noticed is that there is definitely a lack of channels out there for curly hair that TEACH. There are some really good tutorials and teaching channels in the makeup world, but not so much for curly hair.
So, girls, that is what we are going to do. We are going to start our own YouTube channel where we can teach, simply and easily, everything that we need to know to take care of our hair without being slammed with a bunch of marketing BS and product manufacturer games and plain old junk science.
I have my own Facebook group, called Curly Girls in Florida (because that is where I am located), where we do a lot of the same type of teaching in there. It's not a huge group, maybe about 2,200 Florida curly girls, but we have learned so much from each other without trying to wade through the junk science and the product manufacturer marketing games and just pure untrue information on so many other sites.
We are going to extend that to the new YouTube channel.
In addition to the new remote hair analysis service I just launched, I am going to have some work ahead of me getting the new channel set up, but I am so grateful for this opportunity. I think this is going to be something that will be helpful to us all
I will definitely keep you posted!