“I don’t know what brands I can trust, I don’t know what stylists I can trust,” said 21-year-old D’Ambria Hinton, after experiencing bald spots after using DevaCurl for only eight months. When I put out a call on the Facebook group asking for people to share their stories, the overwhelming sentiment was betrayal. For many women, the road to hair acceptance had been long, hard, and expensive, and the brand loyalty they felt to DevaCurl was akin to religious faith. The curl world is premised on individuality - no two heads of hair the same, no two strands the same - but DevaCurl promised to have an answer for all of them, to bring out the “best in every curl,” from spiraling 2c waves like mine to kinky 4c coils. DevaCurl, founded in 1994 by beloved Curly Girl: The Handbook author and curl evangelist Lorraine Massey, is regarded by many as the best product out there (Massey left the company in 2013). In recent years, largely thanks to the natural-hair movement led by women of color, the beauty industry has started paying attention to women with curly hair. At least if DevaCurl was the culprit, there would be a concrete explanation for my suffering, other than some vague genetic sensitivity and the slow passage of time. Poring through their accounts, I was shocked, upset, and also … a little relieved. In a Facebook group called Hair Damage & Hair Loss from DevaCurl - You’re not CRAZY or ALONE! started by Florida-based hairstylist Stephanie Mero, which now boasts over 50,000 members, women posted photos of their patchy bald spots, flaky and irritated scalps, dryness, breakage, and limpened curl pattern, all of which I was also experiencing. Like me, most of these issues had only started cropping up around 2018, shortly after the company changed ownership. I was making my way through the stages of hair-loss grief - hovering somewhere between bargaining ( why couldn’t I have developed adult acne instead?) and acceptance ( maybe I’ll just get really into hats) - when news broke last month that thousands of DevaCurl users were experiencing issues similar to my own. I had done so, at least partly, in recent years because of DevaCurl - the widely beloved hair-care line that tamed my frizz into soft ringlets and gave me the confidence to finally quit my straightener cold turkey. Like so many other curly-haired women, it was a long road to embracing my unwieldy mop. The fact that I was now part of this shedding sisterhood was hardly comforting rather, it seemed a cruel irony that I might lose my hair when I had only just started to appreciate it. Absent any unusual lab results that would explain the changes, she said that I was likely suffering from a common form of genetic hair loss called androgenetic alopecia, reassuring me that about a third of women experience noticeable hair loss at some point in their lives. ![]() So when I went to my dermatologist in 2018 to confirm my suspicion that some of this precious hair might be falling out, I was bereft. ![]() After decades of expensive keratin treatments, snapped hair ties, and a vicious flat-ironing regimen that left a graveyard of charred ends in front of the mirror every morning, I had finally come to accept my thick nest of curly hair.
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