If you’re an adult woman with wavy, curly or coily hair, chances are you’ve spent much — if not most — of your life in a quiet battle against your natural texture, struggling to tame it with toxic chemicals, hours of heat styling and expensive, frequent salon visits.

Beauty entrepreneur Alli Webb understands this well — so well, in fact, that in 2010 she founded Drybar, an entire business built around what was then the go-to solution to the “problem” of textured hair: blowouts. The concept exploded into a nationwide chain, product line and cultural phenomenon. Weekly blowouts became routine for a certain type of professional woman who would happily wake up early and shell out $50 before they’d let their colleagues see what their real hair looked like. Full transparency: Until 2020, no one really knew about my curly hair either; I’d straightened it since middle school with keratin treatments, heat tools and, yes, occasional visits to Drybar.

Webb sold Drybar for $255 million in 2019, and the next year, she and I both went through very similar journeys with our hair. I learned this in early May, when I was invited with a group of editors to Webb’s Los Angeles home to learn about her secret new venture back into beauty: Messy, a line of five hair products launching with Sephora on June 24 (online first, and in-store the 27th), is an entire business built around helping women embrace their natural textured hair, from a woman who had spent years, and made millions, essentially convincing them not to. A solution to a problem, one could say, that she helped create.

“Obviously the irony is not lost on me,” Webb tells me ahead of the launch. “What it isn’t is like, oh, I want to disparage Drybar. It’s not like that at all. I’m proud of Drybar, that will never change.”

What has changed is Webb’s relationship with her own hair, and hair trends in general. “I think of it as more of an evolution for me, personally. Fifteen years ago, starting Drybar felt very timely,” she explains. Since then, she’s come to realize that it had some pitfalls: “I was getting so many blowouts all the time and my hair was pretty damaged and dry and it wouldn’t grow past my shoulders. And I see that a lot with my friends.”

In 2020, amid the pandemic and a difficult divorce from her first husband and Drybar co-founder Cameron Webb (which you can read more about in her 2023 book, aptly titled, “The Messy Truth”), she stopped blow drying her hair and noticed it was healthier and actually growing. So she spent her time in quarantine experimenting with how to embrace its natural waviness. (Relatable.) “I’m 50 years old. I feel like I spent most of my life figuring out how to straighten my hair, and the blowout, I was a slave to it,” she admits. “It’s so freeing to be in this space of, I love my hair.”

Anyone who has it knows that embracing textured hair is not about simply leaving it alone: It can take years for some of us to figure out the right products and routines to address common issues like frizz, inconsistent patterns, tangling, flatness, puffiness, dullness and shrinkage. With Messy, Webb hopes to make the process easier — not just by selling products, but also by providing an accompanying technique for how to style hair post-shower, the result of her own Covid-era research. She calls it the “rough dry method.” Here’s how it goes:

1) Apply “I Am Enough” Rough Dry Style Cream ($32) to damp hair and comb through to distribute evenly. 2) “Rough dry” hair until it’s 30-50% dry. This means using just a blow dryer, held a few inches from the hair and angled downward, and your fingers. 3) Twist your still-slightly-damp hair in 1″ sections around the head. 4) Let it air dry and — this is important — don’t touch it again until it’s completely dry.

“There’s typically been the blowout, which, I mean, my first book was how to get the perfect blowout, and then there’s a big trend in air drying, which I think is tough… Sometimes it works and looks good, but sometimes it doesn’t. It’s too unpredictable,” Webb explains. She believes that women, even those embracing texture, still want to have some control in how it looks. “I don’t think that women just want to do nothing. Maybe sometimes they air dry, but when you feel like you have some say in what your hair looks like, because you have real tools of how to do it as a method, it will empower women to embrace their natural waves,” she argues.

In other words, she’s not against a bit of intervention and manipulation to achieve a desired look. “When my hair dries naturally, it dries a lot curlier than what you’re seeing, and I don’t like it like that. When I rough dry it, it does help me straighten out, tame the waves. And then having this product really makes all the difference too.”

This method isn’t entirely novel — Black women have been elongating their curls with “twist outs” for decades — but I’ll admit that the addition of “rough drying” was new to me, and that I really like how my hair looks when I do the full protocol, with a few tweaks here and there. (My 3a/b curls are slightly tighter and frizzier than Webb’s own specific texture.)

“There’s a learning curve,” she clarifies, particularly regarding “how much you should rough dry it and how dry is too dry.” She encourages women to try it a few times to figure out what works best for them, but in her mind, the brand is really for all textures, from stick-straight to wavy to curly to coarse, which it will communicate through visuals and educational social media content. “There’s different products and a regimen for everybody.”

The intentionality of emphasizing how to use the product just as much as the product itself, right from launch, does feel unique. That was a big part of Webb’s pitch to Sephora, with whom she was fortunate to already have a relationship via Drybar. While she had the method down, she says she only started thinking about creating a product line about a year and a half ago.

“I really feel like there was an opportunity to lean into natural hair. I think we’re seeing such a movement across the board in that Sephora was really on board,” she says. “Of course any good product has to have great marketing and a good story, an authentic story. That’s always the advice I give to other entrepreneurs: It’s got to come from a place of authenticity, and this was very authentic to me. When I started talking to Sephora about it, I think they felt that, too.”

Sephora has been involved from the beginning, before Webb even had a product. “It’s not lost on me, how lucky I am to have that opportunity and to ‘be in the kitchen with them,’ as they say, because they don’t do that for everybody,” she notes. Sephora provided valuable feedback along the way, including pushing back on the initial packaging aesthetic, which was more muted and minimal. Webb also raised $5 million for Messy, led by an investment from Unilever Ventures, alongside friends and family.

The launch savvily dovetails with a post-pandemic trend away from perfect blowouts and towards embracing natural hair, evidence of which can be found in ad campaigns, fashion runways and a massive uptick in product launches for curly hair. While brands like Pattern, Bread and Mielle Organics met the moment early on, Webb still seems to have found a niche. “Obviously I’m proud of the timing for all this. We’re definitely seeing this trend of messier hair, more undone,” she says

Few people probably understand the power of a successful hair brand to fuel a cultural aesthetic movement better than the Drybar founder, and she literally does hope that Messy can effectively dismantle the beauty standards that she herself helped create.

“You could walk in a Drybar and there was every age range there, from a young girl to the mom,” Webb recalls. “Now what I really hope to do is give women and girls, women of all ages, the permission to feel really good about letting their natural hair come through and to give them, again, the tools of how to manage it. I’ve talked to lots of women who have teenage girls and they’re like, ‘I’m so happy that you’re doing this, and showing girls another way to look pretty.'”

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