The stylists behind Faux Locs and the Baby Curl Twist went through a rollercoaster journey opening a salon for natural hair

• Stylists from the legendary Khamit Kinks natural hair salon opened the Kinky Kollective in 2019.
• The pandemic almost ruined their business, as novices on YouTube recycled their trademark styles.

Khamit Kinks, known for its celebrity clientele that included Solange Knowles, Oprah, Lennie Kravitz, and Stevie Wonder, was, for years, the New York City salon for styling and caring for natural hair.

Anu Prestonia, the salon's owner, had started working with hair as a student at Howard University and later styled covers for Essence Magazine. In 1997, she opened Khamit Kinks in TriBeCa, where it occupied the same block as Jay-Z (before he married Beyonce), Maxwell, and Robert DeNiro. ''Sometimes people – Black and white – squint as they go by as if they were wondering what we were doing in a mostly white area,'' Anu said at the time. ''But I say, why not?'' When the rent spiked in Manhattan a few years after that, she moved Khamit Kinks across the Brooklyn Bridge to Boerum Hill.

From 2011 to 2019, the salon at 400 Atlantic Avenue was known to be a space for well-heeled Black women and men to receive expert hair care and hang out. Stylists were trained in trichology – issues related to the hair and scalp – and clients came to them as they transitioned from chemically treated styles and tight braids, known to cause traction alopecia, to natural styles that aren't so damaging to hair follicles. The styles they invented took on lives of their own: Goddess Braids, the Senegalese Twist, the Casamas, the Chaka Khan, and Extension Locs.

Natural hair was having a renaissance, and Brooklyn felt like the center of that. For so long, natural, tightly-coiled African hair had been considered an act of protest against Eurocentric beauty standards. A rejection of anti-Black dictates of what Black women must do to fit into a corporate culture that despises natural hair. Gradually, Black style icons like Viola Davis, Lupita Nyong'o, and Issa Rae helped to shift these expectations, and more stylists learned how to work with natural hair to create sleek looks that didn't wreak havoc on the scalp. (In 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Crown Act to ban hair discrimination, but it has not passed the Senate. New York passed a version of the law in 2019.)

I discovered Khamit Kinks in 2010. After years of using chemical straighteners and adding heavy extensions that weakened my hair at the roots, I was experiencing a lot of hair loss. I was desperate for a natural hair expert. For the next eight years, I remained a loyal client as stylists coaxed my hair back to health. It wasn't cheap – a single visit would set me back a few hundred dollars, and the 20% tip was non-negotiable – but there was no other place like it.

But then, Anu announced, in a rush, that she was shutting down and retiring. While many of us saw a successful business, the reality was more complicated, as Anu explained in a recent email. "I would never open a brick and mortar business again, particularly not in New York, and only if I owned the building," she wrote. "Had I owned the properties I rented, I would still be in business now." (Anu has since started a new business producing perfume and natural beauty products.)

In her farewell email, Anu passed the baton to Taeisha Black, a 20-year veteran of the salon who had worked as a stylist and then as Khamit Kinks' manager.

For Taeisha – whom Angela Bassett once called to consult personally – it was a bittersweet moment. (Note to readers: We're using first names to avoid confusion.)

Taeisha had long dreamed about opening her own salon in Brooklyn. Then in her mid-40s, she wondered if this was finally the moment to climb out from behind the shadow of Anu, a larger-than-life figure who had been called the "the Hair Braider to the Stars." Nurturing and styling natural hair, particularly the 4C, which is categorized as the tightest coil in the curly hair texture chart, was Taeisha's passion. Her craft. Her life's calling.

As her excitement grew, the business plan seemed to write itself: There would be a storefront on Atlantic Ave, just like Khamit Kinks. She would paint the walls at the entrance a bright yellow and she would find a vintage velour couch in teal or turquoise for the reception area. From her years managing Khamit Kinks, Taeisha had mastered the art of running a smooth operation, including keeping wait times (a common complaint in many Black salons) to a minimum. The stylists she had worked alongside already had the skills, and there was a built-in clientele.

One Monday that October, she sat down with her lawyer to discuss the details, and her dream seemed to disintegrate. There was no way she could take on the weight of a $13,000 to $15,000 a month rent on Atlantic Avenue, where high-end shops had been taking the place of Yemeni restaurants and pharmacies. Maybe she could rent a suite, week-to-week, in a Harlem high-rise, her lawyer suggested.

Taeisha remembers weeping quietly in the chair across from him. "I thought I was too good to be in a suite," she said later. There was nothing wrong with Harlem, home to the Apollo Theater and the Cotton Club. Taeisha was a born and raised Harlemite. Brooklyn just better embodied the Afrocentric culture – the braiding, the hair twisting, the head wraps; a certain ideal of a gorgeous, polished, confident Black woman – that Taeisha loved and embraced. "Black hair is history. It's a community," Taeisha said.

But a suite in Harlem was what was possible, now. A few weeks after meeting with the lawyer, Black invited five Khamit Kinks stylists to join the new venture, called the Kinky Kollective. Two stylists, Jahmillah Collier and Anta Fall Diakhate, said yes.

Jahmillah, had started at Khamit Kinks with Taeisha when they were both 22, and she "had the creative edge," Taeisha said. "She was the trendsetter." One of her creations, the Baby Curl Twist, was adopted by the actress Tracie Thoms as her signature look until recently, and went mainstream as the Passion Twist.

Anta, who had come to New York from Senegal and was a few years younger, was a master braider. She had always balanced shifts at Khamit Kinks with her day job as an accountant at H&R Block, but she had taken the salon's closure especially hard.

Anta helped Taeisha find space in a 26-suite building in Harlem, two blocks from the Apollo Theater, where various stylists and aestheticians had also set up shop. The three women launched a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo and raised about $8,000. Working together, their vision was brought to life: A 90s R&B playlist was assembled, the walls were done up with solid color panels of fuchsia, green, yellow, purple, and blue. As word spread, it turned out that many of the old Brooklyn clients didn't mind traveling to Harlem to get their hair done, and new clients appeared from New Jersey, the Bronx, and upper Manhattan.

On December 7, 2019, the Kinky Kollective studio opened in Harlem.

Three months later, COVID-19 came to New York.

In the blink of an eye, the city shut down, including all non-essential businesses like salons. The vibrant Harlem streets were transformed into an eerie pandemic landscape. Client relationships formed over years now hung in limbo. Just months after taking a leap of faith, Taeisha, Jahmillah, and Anta were on their own, unsure if they'd even have a business to return to. It was devastating.

YouTube Appropriation

When Taeisha approached her about joining the Kinky Kollective, Anta hadn't needed much convincing. Over the years, Khamit Kinks had become her closest community, the place and people she looked forward to seeing the most after a stressful week studying business administration or preparing taxes from her desk at H&R Block. Taeisha, Jahmillah, and the other stylists had helped her learn English. It was with them that she learned proper braiding techniques that didn't cause tension on the follicles and lead to hair loss. At Khamit Kinks' "First Friday" meetings, where they discussed customer reviews, she had learned professionalism, like being militant about honoring clients' appointment times and not chatting on her cell phone while braiding.

So, when Anu announced the salon's closing with just a week's notice, Anta had felt angry and unmoored. "I felt like a family member was leaving me. I cried so much that day," Anta recalls. "People were like, 'What's going on with you? Have you lost your mom?' Once it sunk in that it was gonna be gone for good, it really was tough for me. It took a while to get used to it."

But this new salon would be even better – a partnership among equals. What's more, Anta's clients had reassured her that "wherever I would go, they would come."

Jahmillah's path had been different. As one of Khamit Kinks' most successful stylists, she had struck out on her own, visiting private clients at home, even before the salon shuttered. Often, she worked seven days a week.

When Covid hit, Jahmillah focused on self-care. With the extra time at home, she was more consistent about doing the exercises and stretches that she hopes will ward off varicose veins and carpal tunnel syndrome – professional hazards of her work. Jahmillah's creativity was also flowing and she started putting together ideas for brand new styles. To pay her bills, she set up a curbside service for custom wigs.

Jahmillah was also keeping up with online trends, which quickly gave way to concern that her clients – Black men and women – were getting terrible advice while in lockdown.

"YouTube amateurs, who were not licensed or educated in caring for natural hair as far as nourishment, and only do the technical work like adding extensions, were teaching people how to braid their own hair," Jahmillah said. "They encouraged the use of gel for a sleek look, but gel tends to wear the edges down" – the baby hairs around the hairline – "causing hair loss."

Her fears were confirmed as clients – slightly desperate about the deteriorating state of their hair – started reaching out. "I think I'm just going to cut it off!" they were telling her. "I don't know what to do."

"If they were desperate enough to chop it all off, it meant that they'd be back when we re-opened and I needed to be prepared for clients who were each going to be uniquely transformed by the pandemic," she said.

But by the third month of the shutdown, the situation was getting increasingly dispiriting. Some of the styles that Jahmillah and other Khamit Kinks stylists had created eons ago – and perhaps derided as "too ethnic" at the time – were now being recycled with new names. The Trini Braid had reappeared as the Knotless Braid, and the Silky Dread was now the Faux Loc.

Jahmillah felt a little hurt and wistful. A pioneer, she was being pushed aside, her ideas taken without credit.

"Social media has become the gateway for appropriation," she said. "I've watched other creatives and innovators kind of get put on the sideline while a newbie uses social media to promote the style."

'Just have to pray and see what happens'

When we spoke last October, Taeisha swore that her lawyer's advice to rent a suite had been prescient. Had they signed an expensive long-term lease, how would they have stayed in business? But as week-to-week renters, the Kinky Kollective had avoided that crushing responsibility during the pandemic. But in those quiet months at home with her two daughters – one four and the other 26 – she had felt that same wave of self-doubt that had hit her back when they had discussed finances in his office.

That June, after the murder of George Floyd, there had been anger in the streets, but also a sense that the world was changing. If ever there was a moment to open a salon for natural hair, one that celebrated and nourished Black beauty and created space for Black New Yorkers to be themselves, it had to be now.

"Honestly, it was hard to hold that tension between where I wanted to be and where I am now," Taeisha said. "I'm holding it together because of God. I mean praying, and crying, and pleading, and begging."

Taeisha, Jahmillah, and Anta checked in via text, sharing information they were getting about when they could open up, what loans and grants were available for independent contractors, and just regular conversations like, "Wow, this is crazy. What are we gonna do?"

The chats would often end the same way: "Just have to pray and see what happens."

Kinky Kollective Reopens

In July 2020, the Kinky Kollective reopened its doors.

Right away, an influx of clients descended. A few clients asked for private sessions (one brought her own humidifier) and were willing to pay a premium for that. That winter, after the vaccine rollout, when it felt safer to share space, more requests poured in. Because the space was small, the three women arranged to alternate work days to meet social distancing guidelines. Vaccine mandates were a touchy subject and they didn't necessarily agree. They expected their clients to also have wide-ranging views.

Jahmillah had been right about clients' hair suffering under the stewardship of self-appointed online experts and their improper braiding techniques and bad product recommendations. "Some of them actually did big chops," Jahmillah said. Many welcomed the social distancing restrictions: "They appreciate this new privacy as we nurse their hair back to health," she told me.

Home hair care requests trickled in, too. Taeisha, thinking of her four-year-old daughter who was too young to be vaccinated, was less inclined to acquiesce. "In the client's mind, it's safer to have the stylist go to their home. But then the stylist has to travel and encounters several people along the way," she said. "I know a barber who died of Covid after seeing home clients before the vaccines were available."

Though still a vibrant, joyous space, the suite sometimes felt empty.

Still, despite the uncertainty, there are some exciting possibilities for what comes next. Jahmillah wants to open an online natural hair school focused on caring for kinky hair. Anta, who completed her Sisterlocks (miniature dreadlocks) certification during the lockdown, now wants to become a Sisterlocks ambassador and see the Kinky Kollective expand. Taeisha joined a mastermind group to help stay focused on the dream, and she just launched a Kinky Kollective line of hair and beauty products, which is sold at the salon.

They plan to do their own thing, and work as a unit. It was, after all, the three of them that did this, together. When the story of the Black hair revolution is told, Taeisha wants the Kinky Kollective to be part of that history. "The pandemic was evidence that you can be all the way at the top, and come crashing down," Taeisha said. It also underscored a timeless lesson: "We need each other," she said.