Wicked Hues

Happy Pride Month from your favorite enby stylist. 🏳️‍🌈✨

This salon has always been built for people who refused to shrink themselves, both in the chair and out of it. Whether you're stepping into a cut that finally feels like *you*, or just need a place where you don't have to explain yourself, you belong here.

Today and every day, your identity is something to celebrate. I'm honored to be a small part of how you show up in the world.

Memorial Day.

Not the sales. Not the barbecues. Not the watered-down way we typically remember it.

The actual origin.

It started in the wreckage of the Civil War.

Over 620,000 people died. And before the war was even officially over, communities, many of them Black Americans in the South, started walking out to graves and decorating them. Showing up. Saying: we see you, we remember you, you mattered.

That's where this day came from. Not a parade. Not a mattress sale. Grief, and community, and the quiet insistence that the people who died deserved to be named out loud.

Somewhere along the way we turned it into a long weekend. And I get it. Life continues. Summer starts. We need joy. But for a family who lost someone in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or any conflict before or after, this day hits completely differently. The least we can do is hold that truth alongside the cookouts.

There are some things that rarely get named, and I want to name them.

Some of these people died for conflicts they didn't fully understand. Sent by systems and ideologies that dressed conquest up as courage, that called empire "freedom," that handed young people a gun and a flag and never told them what was really at stake. Saying that out loud isn't dishonoring their sacrifice. It's the fullest way to honor it, by telling the truth about what it cost and why.

And some of them knew exactly what they were fighting for, and still weren't allowed to be seen while doing it.

And for a long time, "honoring our veterans" had limits. LGBTQ+ service members were discharged, erased, or simply never acknowledged. That's changing. And that's not politicizing the holiday. That's finally telling the full truth about who served.

Today, I'm remembering the fallen. All of them. The ones in the history books, the ones written out of it, and the ones who never knew the real name of what they died for.

If you have someone you're carrying today, I hope you feel seen. I hope this weekend holds both things at once, the joy of summer starting and the weight of what this day was always supposed to mean.

Throwback to that time I finger coiled clients curls. I don't do that anymore.

When I first started specializing in curls, a lot of the inspiration photos people brought me were curling iron curls. They wanted consistency in the curl shapes all over. They wanted their curls to look exactly like the photo.

But I realized that this was doing them a disservice.

By teaching them this method for curls, I was helping enforce the industry standard that their natural texture wasn't good enough. That they had to work to make it fit a mold.

I was teaching them that their curls actually still needed effort.

Meanwhile, those curls are being regularly stretched into a shape that isn't true to the curl.

Sometime over the years, I stopped perfecting every set unless asked, and started teaching them how to take care of their hair simply and let their curls just be.

Now I have clients stretching out their appointments from their hair just being healthier. Between the products and the techniques and the personalized styling tutorial, they cause less split ends, so they need me less.

The question is... are you ready to actually learn your curls?

There's an Alternative, Queer-owned, Curl Specialist Salon Studio in Mid-City New Orleans worth checking out.

🏳️‍🌈

She Hadn’t Been to a Stylist in Almost Two Years. Here’s What We Did About It.

She sat down in my chair and told me it had been a year and a half, maybe closer to two years, since she'd had a real haircut. The Real Reason She Stopped Going It wasn't laziness. It wasn't that she didn't care. It was that she has seriously dense hair, the kind that needs time and real attention, and she couldn't find a single place that would actually…...

She Hadn't Been to a Stylist in Almost Two Years. Here's What We Did About It. - Wicked-Pedia She sat down in my chair and told me it had been a year and a half, maybe closer to two years, since she’d had a real haircut. The Real Reason She Stopped Going It wasn’t laziness. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was that she has seriously dense hair, the kind that needs […]

Mother's Day was yesterday, and I want to be real for a second.

I don't have a mom. And I know I'm not the only one. Whether you've lost yours, were never close, or the day just carries something complicated, I see you.

So this year, our little group found our "mom friend." You know the one. The person who checks in on everyone, remembers the hard anniversaries, shows up with food you didn't ask for, and always knows if you need a hug or just someone to sit with you.

We got her flowers. She had no idea.

The look on her face... she laughed, got a little teary, said "you didn't have to" in the way that really means I feel truly seen. It was perfect.

Mother's Day is beautiful for the people it fits. But for a lot of us, the day asks us to hold something heavy while the whole world celebrates around us. There's something powerful about creating your own version of it — honoring the people who mother you in the ways they actually can.

That's what the chair is like for me too. Some of my clients don't have anyone at home checking in on them, noticing them. When you sit down with me, I take that seriously. You're not just a head of hair. You're a person, and you deserve to feel that way.

If you have a "mom friend," I hope you told them this weekend. And if you're the mom friend, I hope someone showed up for you. You deserve the flowers. 🌸

Plastic-Free Isn’t the Whole Story.

Switching to a shampoo bar in cardboard packaging is an okay choice. The plastic bottle problem is real, the instinct to reduce it is exactly right, and the fact that you're thinking about what your beauty routine does to the planet is something I genuinely respect. However, greenwashing in hair care means sustainability can't be treated as a surface-level, aesthetics-only choice....

Plastic-Free Isn't the Whole Story. - Wicked-Pedia Switching to a shampoo bar in cardboard packaging is an okay choice. The plastic bottle problem is real, the instinct to reduce it is exactly right, and the fact that you’re thinking about what your beauty routine does to the planet is something I genuinely respect. However, greenwashing in hair c...

5,000 Years of Hair Washing

And We Never Fully Solved It Until Now What our ancestors were trying to do, what they got right, what they got catastrophically wrong, and the one company whose formulation finally closes the loop. Egyptian mummies have been recovered with over 400 mummified lice on a single head. A 3,500-year-old papyrus documents treatments for what was almost certainly alopecia areata, patchy hair loss caused by an autoimmune response the Egyptians had no framework to understand....

5,000 Years of Hair Washing - Wicked-Pedia And We Never Fully Solved It Until Now What our ancestors were trying to do, what they got right, what they got catastrophically wrong, and the one company whose formulation finally closes the loop. Egyptian mummies have been recovered with over 400 mummified lice on a single head. A 3,500-year-old....