Recent appointments of prominent Black and mixed race hair professionals to key roles at brands have signaled some change at more of a visible topline level. The fashion industry’s favorite hairstylist, Jawara, who was previously global ambassador for Dyson Beauty (which has continued to release new attachments for its cult Airwrap, making it compatible with 19 hair types, plus a dedicated Airwrap Coanda 2X for curls and coils), is now global creative director at L’Oréal Professionnel (which, in addition to launching more curl-focused products, has initiatives focused on equipping stylists at L’Oréal partner salons with specialized technical training for working with hair of all curl types), a role also held at the brand by hairstylist Cyndia Harvey. On the formulation side, Amika appointed chemist Cicely Shillingford, PhD, as assistant vice president of product development, innovation, and regulatory, 18 months after she joined the brand as director of product development in 2023. There’s also LaFond, who was the national education manager and global artistic director at Amika from 2013 to 2023 before becoming the global brand ambassador for both Olaplex and Shark Beauty.
“Amika was a young, ambitious brand willing to be challenged, and I’m proud to have helped write that into its DNA,” LaFond tells Allure (Amika launched in 2007, six years before LaFond joined). “We were practicing inclusion years before it became an industry talking point, and that wasn’t an accident or a rebrand; it was structural.” She recalls having “real decision-making power,” including the ability to push back on marketing or a casting choice before products hit shelves.
She feels her role at Olaplex is similarly impactful. “At Olaplex, I’m being pulled into formulation conversations directly with scientists, not consulted after the fact but present while the science is still being decided,” LaFond says. “It’s the kind of access most brands don’t extend to artists at all. It’s a model the rest of the industry should be paying attention to, and what both experiences taught me is that inclusion is a chain, not a single decision. It starts in the lab, but it has to survive contact with marketing, with casting, with the words on the packaging. Break that chain anywhere, and the whole promise collapses.”
Many of the brands that Black customers are flocking back to seem to be actively working on representation within the cogs of education, marketing, product development, and research, rather than relying on model diversity and celebrity spokespeople to merely signal diversity—a common practice at the beginning of the natural hair movement. K18 conducts research programs to study the biology of curls and coils, analyzing factors like fragility and moisture retention. L’Oréal, the parent company of Redken and Kérastase, developed a curl classification system from a study across 22 countries, studying curl radius, shrinkage ratio, and the number of twists on a hair fiber. The company used this to develop Redken’s Acidic Bonding Curls line in 2024. The original Acidic Bonding Concentrate line, which included a mask and leave-in and pre-shampoo treatments, went viral several times over for repairing heat and chemical damage in textured hair. However, the All Soft range, which has been around since 2003, is arguably the collection that switched many Black women over to experimenting with salon-grade products. The brand launched an All Soft Curls range in 2023, and both lines appear to be about equal in popularity among this demographic.
