A new California law requires hairstyling, barber and cosmetology courses to train for all types and textures of hair. It also requires licensing exams to ask questions about them.
Brittaney Gandy knows the need professionally and personally.
When she moved to San Diego 10 years ago, she struggled to find a stylist who knew how to work with her tight coils.
She resorted to what she called a temporary solution — wigs — and decided to become the stylist she couldn’t find.
"When you sign up to go to school, they don't give you any information about the curriculum. You just know you're going to be taught how to, like, keep up with sanitation regulations and all that," she said.
She attended a well-known hair school, but said the techniques they taught work best on straight hair.
For one thing, they trained students to cut hair wet.
"The way that curly hair reacts when it's wet is completely different. It doesn't live in a two-dimensional space. It lives more in a 3D world. So you have to take into account the shrinkage," she said.
Instead of teaching students how to work with curly hair, she said, they focused on teaching them how to straighten it.
So instead, she taught herself, spending hours on YouTube pulling techniques from stylists around the world.
She practiced on herself, until she finally felt confident enough to show her natural hair.
"To not have to feel like I have to put on a hat or hide behind something to feel confident and just like wearing what's naturally mine ... it’s liberating,” she said.
She said she’s happy this law passed, but thinks there’s a lot more to do.
Schools providing natural texture training doesn’t mean it’s going to be good training.
"I just hope that the schools hire knowledgeable educators, really invest in people who have experience doing curly hair, so that people aren't leaving these schools saying that, 'Oh, I have experience doing curly hair,' and butchering people's hair," she said.
She said the demand for a curly hair specialist surprised even her.
She launched her salon, CurlCousin, in 2022. She said in the first year, 700 new clients poured in.
"Being a Black woman and going outside in San Diego, I rarely see anybody like me, so I didn't know there were really that many Black people in San Diego. But there are! They're in my chair," she said.
She thinks it’s important that stylists opt in to working with different hair types.
"A hairstylist has their free will to specialize in whatever they want to specialize in. The last thing you want is someone to be doing your hair and they honestly don't want to do it," she said.
But, she says, there are more people with naturally non-straight hair than stylists may realize.
"The majority of the people that are sitting in their chair already have the textured hair. You're just blowing it out," she said.“ And textured hair education is not necessarily just for people with coils and curls, but textured hair is also for people who want to wear their hair wavy."
