How we speak about our hair (and how hairstylists talk about their clients’ hair) was a hot topic at The Power of Texture: Culture, Community & the Future, a recent event hosted by The Texture of Change, an initiative powered by the L’Oréal Professional Products Division. Held at the company’s ProLAB Academy of Beauty in El Segundo, CA, the day brought together influential voices in beauty, fashion and culture for an important exchange of ideas, artistry and advocacy.

The panelists, all industry professionals, agreed that we, as a society, need to be far more cognizant about the words we use to describe certain hair types and textures.

“‘Luxurious’ is long, straight hair; certain types of coils as well,” hairstylist Jawara Wauchope said, nodding to the coded ways stylists, clients, beauty brands and the media tend to frame “desirable” versus “non-desirable” hair textures. “I actually think the language part is the most important part, the crucial part,” added creator and Forvr Mood co-founder Jackie Aina. “Sometimes I get a little bit of pushback for this, but I’m really overprotective about my hair. So no, it’s not a group discussion. I’m not interested in what you think my next style should be. Someone may say, ‘You should have slipped your edges back.’ I’m like, ‘No, I didn’t think I needed to today.'”

Aina said she’d like to see a little less “banter,” even between friends and family, about hair — and especially with strangers on social media. “The little girl in me hurts a little bit when I see someone on TikTok clearly struggling with their hair and a bunch of people [get] very mean. It gets very spirited and it doesn’t land the way people think it does. So if you really want to help someone, maybe do it privately, not in a comment section.” She stressed that everyone is on their own hair journey, and maybe we should all just let people learn and grow with the help of professionals. “I adopt that in myself,” she continued. “I don’t take outside advice and I also don’t give it.”

Aina does think about how she talks about her own hair and how that language might affect her viewers. “I want to take away the negative language around our hair and I’m doing that with my content,” she said.

The panelists — Essence Senior Beauty Editor Akili King, actor Julissa Bermudez moderator Blake Newby, in addition to Wauchope and Aina — also brought up the controversy that recently unfolded on TikTok around journalist Cordilia James’ hair. “Unfortunately, the reporter was just getting eviscerated online over the placement of her wig,” Bermudez said. “And instead of, to your point, saying things that would be helpful, or even a professional stepping up and saying, ‘DM me right now, I’ve got you,’ it was just this back-and-forth that was terrible.” While some of the comments seemed like constructive criticism, the panelists agreed it was all too harsh and went way beyond friendly banter or helpful tips.

“People [are making] videos about it,” Bermudez continued. “The language part is one thing, especially when you’re growing up, there [are] so many ways you [could] feel about yourself [in a] day, and then your hair is another thing to be, even at this big age, having to talk about it so much in my own community, things start to get tired.”

The topic also came up in a second panel during the event, featuring celebrity hairstylist Ursula Stephen, hairstylist and educator Tippi Shorter, business coach Crystal Wright, Pressed Roots owner Piersten Gaines and moderator Andrea Lewis. Shorter revealed that when she goes around the country teaching hairstylists how to work with textured hair, she goes way beyond just styling. She emphasized that there’s so much more to treating textured hair than just making sure it looks good. This is an especially important insight for those who don’t have textured hair themselves.

“Learn, do a little history digging, understand where stylists come from, because vocabulary is so important, empathy is important, and words matter,” she tells her students.

As much as vocabulary matters when it comes to how we talk about hair, and negativity can have serious consequences, we also have to “give ourselves a little grace,” Stephen added. “We are coming off the back of, over hundreds of years, people telling us that our hair was ‘ugly,’ ‘kinky,’ ‘hard.’ So, let’s give ourselves a little grace here that we are here now. This is what the future looks like and this is what inclusivity looks like. We are living it now and it can only get better.”

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