Going to the salon to get your hair braided, relaxed, or slicked right into a sky-scraping updo is a communal expertise for a lot of Black ladies. It is a house filled with energetic, loud storytelling that might produce laughter and tears — ideally each on the similar time. As you admire the opposite hairstyles within the room, you’re feeling related to the opposite Black ladies and women there with you.

Black hair salons can operate as a mini vendor’s market, nail spot, and group heart unexpectedly. Naturally, they’ve developed over time to cater to particular textures and methods. You will discover salons focusing on wig set up, extensions, pure hair, and extra. 

Whilst choices have elevated, there are nonetheless Black ladies who’ve points discovering a stylist for one purpose or one other. Typically, they’re dwelling in a hair desert, the place entry to a certified stylist is proscribed or nonexistent. And even when there is somebody round, it’s possible you’ll run into an entire different host of points. Securing appointments, the rising prices of companies, the charges or insurance policies stylists could arbitrarily add on, the lengthy waits — it is lots. 

In lots of circumstances, you may wind up volunteering your total day while you ebook an appointment. “If I am not in New York, I’ve to get a [hair] appointment, and I’ll be there all day,” Dana White, founding father of Detroit-based salon Paralee Boyd, shares. “And I haven’t got time for that.” White’s salon makes a speciality of blowouts for textured hair, promising a far much less aggravating expertise. 

Simply as mainstream salons like Drybar do, these Black-owned salons provide a single service: a blowout or a silk press. White is certain to emphasise that Paralee Boyd is a silk-press particular establishment. “As Black ladies, we have invented a course of that is uniquely for us, however there is not any field for it but,” White says. 

A silk press sometimes includes utilizing a sizzling comb or flatiron after blow-drying to “press” textured hair right into a silky straight model. A blowout is finished with a blow-dryer and spherical brush. “You’ll be able to name it a blowout bar in case you like, however we’re a silk press salon,” Bronx native Ebony Knight, proprietor of Textured Press shares. “There is a distinction between [the two]. That is what I would like ladies to know — it is not the identical and that is intentional.”