An excerpt from the Cut -
The Beautiful Language of Braids Black hairstylists and creative muses open up about their love for the iconic style.
By Faith Cummings
The Black hair salon is a sanctified space, with each chair getting its believer closer to goddess-level status, from the wash bowl to the hair dryer to the styling chair. These shops are portals to transformation — equal parts magic and the sweat and toil of the artisans who lather, roll, bump, press, and braid day in, day out, with unparalleled results.
These parlors of beauty and style are also spaces of choice, converting even the most ambivalent and unsure into full-blown sirens simply with a decision pulled from the salon walls. There’s no shortage of potential styles to select from blown-up poster collages in full color, fashioned on models who look like you, your mother, and your friends, with a few sightings of our patron saints Beyoncé and Rihanna in all their coiffed Black-girl glory for good measure.
I’ve reveled in these spaces all my life, from pictures that remind me of the braids I had done right before a childhood graduation to earlier this summer when friends’ weddings called for hairstyles that could emanate elegance in the face of New York’s subtropical heat and humidity. Over the past year and a half, these salons have been a lifeline when I sought to protect my hair and make it ready for anything, shifting the energy from styling it to carrying on despite a devastating virus and its resulting chaos. I bonded with braiders who were strangers mere hours before about the state of our world and politics, when we all started getting waist-long braids and all the tricks we have for not letting them fall into unsavory places, and relationships, as I definitely hopped out of the chair and headed straight to a marathon date just months ago.
https://www.thecut.com/2021/09/the-beautiful-language-of-braids.html
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