MINNEAPOLIS — With a head full of blond corkscrews, Kristy Wilson, 34, was “a complete anomaly” in her hometown of Menomonie, Wis. “Everyone had long, Scandinavian, blowing-in-the-wind hair.”
Trips to the salon were a trial. “All the stylists would swarm around me and talk about my hair,” she said. “It was like I wasn’t even there.”
Wilson inherited her curls from her father, who managed his mane with a close crop. Her mother had zero experience with textured hair. That led Wilson to an early adolescence of crying over wide-bristled brushes and desperate rinsing in the kitchen sink.
Like some other women with curls, Wilson stopped going to salons altogether; they only left her hair looking worse. Instead she determined that she would master her own hair, hunting for how-to tips on www.naturallycurly.com, loading up on Dep gel and L.A. Looks mousse. Eventually, she took to containing her gravity-defying locks with elaborate braids.
Wilson grew up to become a hairstylist with a mission: helping other women with curls care for, accept and even love the natural state of their hair.
“Traditional styling methods have failed curly people,” she said with a hint of religious zeal.
In August, Wilson took her crusade one step further: She and another local stylist, Rosie Jablonsky, opened a specialty salon in Minneapolis called Uptown Curl.
The world has known a few pioneering hair stylists. Vidal Sasson mastered the geometric wedge cut. Here in Minnesota, Horst Rechelbacher forever will be associated with Earth-friendly hair care. And Lorraine Massey, author of the 2001 book “Curly Girl,” is well on her way to achieving guru status for women with natural curls.
Massey founded the curly-oriented Devachan Salon in New York City in 1996, where she counseled clients to stop shampooing (it dehydrates thirsty curls) and stopped cutting curly hair while wet, clipping only when the hair is dry and fully shaped.
A dry cut “is more like hedging a bush,” explained Wilson, a Massey follower in the Twin Cities area.
Hair is left in its natural state and shaped curl by curl with scissors. Thinning shears are a big no-no for stylists in the Massey tradition — even for women with pillowy thick hair. Thinning shears cause fraying along the edges of a hedgelike mass of hair.
Massey went on to launch the Deva Curl line of curly hair products and started offering educational workshops for stylists.
“There was no salon in Minneapolis that catered to curly hair,” said Teresa Johnson, owner of East 42nd Street, who went to New York City to train with Massey. “Now 90 percent of our clientele is curly.”
And of course, many salons have a stylist or two catering to the curly set. For example, Ebony Davis at Intelligent Nutrients in Minneapolis is well-regarded among black women who wear their hair naturally curly.
At Uptown Curl, the stylists are loath to do blowouts, even when specifically requested. They even keep a jar of curls on hand to showcase various textures.
“The different kinds of curls are so beautiful,” said Wilson, plucking a delicate coil from the jar and proffering it in her open palm.
