Anthony Payne

A lot of people don’t know that the curl typing chart wasn’t originally created to help consumers understand their hair. It was developed as a communication tool for session stylists working in television, film, fashion, and media. If a director, producer, or stylist needed a quick visual reference, saying “3B” or “4A” instantly created a picture of the hair they were looking for.

Somewhere along the way, people started using that chart as an identity instead of a description.

The problem is that hair doesn’t behave according to a chart. Hair changes based on length, density, grooming habits, styling choices, environmental conditions, and the overall health of the hair’s ecosystem.

That’s why I don’t categorize hair by curl types.

I categorize hair by function.

• Hair that rises
• Hair that spreads wide
• Hair that drops

These categories describe what the hair naturally wants to do.

When we understand how hair functions instead of what box it fits into, we can solve real problems. We can understand why it dries the way it does, why it tangles, why it shrinks, why it loses shape, and how to make it work with less effort.

Your hair isn’t a number or a letter.

It’s a living system with predictable behaviors.

The goal isn’t to identify with a category. The goal is to understand how your hair functions so you can work with it instead of against it.

It took me probably 10 years into having my cosmetology license to fully understand curly hair. Not because curly hair is difficult, but because most of us were taught to manage it before understanding it.

A lot of curly hair isn’t “bad” or “unmanageable.” It’s just responding to years of manipulation, tension, heat, confusion, and routines that disconnect people from their natural texture.

The more I learned, the more I realized healthy hair usually needs less forcing, not more.

My clients usually look like themselves after every haircut — and that’s intentional. We’re not chasing a new identity every appointment. We’re refining what already works for their face, their lifestyle, their vibe, and their natural hair behavior.

I think we should normalize clients becoming familiar with themselves instead of depending on a barber or stylist every 2 weeks to “fix” them.

This client used to get a fade every 6 weeks. Now I see him every 4–6 months because we stopped fighting his hair and started understanding it. At first, he’d come back saying the sides were getting puffy. Whole time, all he needed was a comb technique and better grooming habits.

Now our sessions are less:
“Cut everything off.”

And more:
“What’s actually bothering you?”
Is it not laying right?
Not staying out your face?
One side curling differently?
Not swooping the same?

That’s where the real work is.

I used to think being a hairstylist was just doing hair. But a huge part of my job is teaching clients how to manage their own hair so their life becomes lower maintenance, more efficient, and more connected to what naturally works for them.

While everybody else is trying to get you back in the chair as often as possible, my goal is the opposite. I want to see how far we can stretch your appointment. I want your hair life to become easier, softer, lower maintenance, healthier.

The value of a service isn’t how often you need it. The real value is how long it lasts.

I’m not interested in creating temporary beauty that falls apart in two weeks or styles that slowly damage your hair while keeping you dependent. I want to help heal the hair’s ecosystem. I want your hair to get stronger between every visit, not weaker.

That means our appointments become less about “Which celebrity look are we doing today?” and more about:
When did the hairstyle stop working for you?
What’s causing stress in your routine?
What actually fits your lifestyle?
How can we make your hair easier to manage long term?

As a hair groomer, I know less is more. The goal should be freedom, not endless maintenance. Your hair should work with you, not trap you in a constant cycle of doing, fixing, hiding, and repeating.

Healthy hair should become more effortless over time.

Should we go 4 months between appointments.

Keep your soil protected!

Can we help our sisters find a new name for protective styles?

There’s a part of this conversation that people keep skipping over.

This woman openly acknowledged that the glues, the chemicals, the constant manipulation, the tension, the heat, the hiding, the covering — all of it can cause harm to the hair. And when asked, “Why not just wear what God gave you?” she answered honestly: she just doesn’t want to right now.

That honesty matters.

Because the real issue is not forcing every Black woman to wear her natural hair. People deserve choice. The issue is that we’ve reached a point where BOTH sides of the conversation are rooted in fear of our natural state.

One side believes our natural hair has to constantly be hidden, altered, laid down, glued down, stretched out, or replaced.

The other side believes wearing our Afro naturally will somehow destroy us — that our own hair is too difficult, too unprofessional, too ugly, too dry, too unmanageable, too dangerous to survive in its natural form.

And that’s the contradiction.

How can the hair that naturally grows from Black people’s heads be framed as something incapable of existing on Earth? Every living thing was designed with purpose and adaptation. Yet somehow, Black people are taught that the very thing growing out of our scalp is the one thing that can’t function naturally without “fixing.”

That mindset is the real damage.

Not wigs.
Not braids.
Not extensions.

The belief that our natural form is fundamentally incompatible with beauty, health, professionalism, femininity, softness, luxury, or survival.

You can wear wigs and still love your natural hair.
You can wear braids and still honor your texture.
You can switch styles and still recognize that the Afro itself is not a mistake.

Because if our natural hair truly wasn’t meant to exist as it is… then what are we really saying about ourselves?

I would bag up the hair take it to my braider and request a refund…

Since you guys know so fu***ng much please tell me who told yall they were protective styles?

Hair is the flower of the body, and every human is a living ecosystem. Like plants, we all have different environments, different needs, different ways of thriving. The question is: why do we cultivate anything in this world? We cultivate things to thrive. To perform better. To become more efficient. To stop surviving and start flourishing.

Every head of hair in my practice is treated like a living ecosystem. Like a house plant removed from its natural habitat and placed into a container that now has to be understood, maintained, and cultivated properly. We can nurture it into full bloom, or we can fight against it. We can cultivate it, or like a bonsai tree, keep cutting it down and forcing it into stress cycles for aesthetics.

That’s the power we have over hair.

But over here, the goal is cultivation. Helping humans survive and thrive through understanding the ecosystem growing out of their scalp.

So what is a “protective style” if the hair underneath is becoming harder to detangle, harder to manage, harder to style, and less elastic over time? What are we actually protecting if the person never learns their natural curl pattern, never understands their hair cycles, and never discovers what their ecosystem truly needs to thrive?

Protection without understanding eventually becomes dependency.

Your hair was never meant to be hidden from you. It was meant to be understood.