Going to the salon to get your hair braided, relaxed, or slicked into a sky-scraping updo is a communal experience for many Black women. It's a space full of lively, loud storytelling that could produce laughter and tears — ideally both at the same time. As you admire the other hairstyles in the room, you feel connected to the other Black women and girls there with you.
Black hair salons can function as a mini vendor's market, nail spot, and community center all at once. Naturally, they've evolved over the years to cater to specific textures and techniques. You can find salons that specialize in wig installation, extensions, natural hair, and more.
Even as options have increased, there are still Black women who have issues finding a stylist for one reason or another. Sometimes, they're living in a hair desert, where access to a qualified stylist is limited or nonexistent. And even when there is someone around, you may run into a whole other host of issues. Securing appointments, the rising costs of services, the fees or policies stylists may arbitrarily add on, the long waits — it's a lot.
In many cases, you can wind up volunteering your entire day when you book an appointment. "If I'm not in New York, I have to get a [hair] appointment, and I'm going to be there all day," Dana White, founder of Detroit-based salon Paralee Boyd, shares. "And I don't have time for that." White's salon specializes in blowouts for textured hair, promising a far less stressful experience.
Just as mainstream salons like Drybar do, these Black-owned salons offer a single service: a blowout or a silk press. White is sure to emphasize that Paralee Boyd is a silk-press specific institution. "As Black women, we've invented a process that's uniquely for us, but there's no box for it yet," White says.
A silk press typically involves using a hot comb or flatiron after blow-drying to "press" textured hair into a silky straight style. A blowout is done with a blow-dryer and round brush. "You can call it a blowout bar if you like, but we are a silk press salon," Bronx native Ebony Knight, owner of Textured Press shares. "There's a difference between [the two]. That's what I want women to understand — it isn't the same and that's intentional."
Silk press bars are opening in a climate of distrustful and anxious Black women who have been scarred by bad stylists or are too scared to try someone new. "As someone with textured hair, you can't assume that people know what they're doing with your hair because the cosmetology school curriculum doesn't currently include textured hair," Piersten Gaines, founder of Texas-based salon, Pressed Roots, tells Allure.
Unfortunately, Gaines is right. There is currently no nationwide standard mandating classes on textured hair in cosmetology schools, so many stylists are forced to seek education elsewhere. Megan Cruz, executive director of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools (AACS), previously shared with Allure that they've recently taken steps to include more instruction on textured hair in educational tools and curricula.
Each of these founders has heavily invested in training their hairstylists. Because they focus on just a few services, they can become masters of their craft and create the most consistent styling results. Clients can walk in and feel comfortable sitting in anyone's chair, which almost sounds too good to be true. "In order to do that, you got to be on point," Kali Sterling, founder of Georgia-based Press Bar shares. "If I say you can go to Nicole next, Nicole really has to know what she's doing [with hair]." That's why consistent and cohesive staff training is so important.
She and three other silk press and blowout bar owners we spoke to all have the same goal in mind: to offer all the things we love about Black hair salons without the things we may not like so much.
Gaines shares that a "lifetime of really bad experiences in salons" motivated her to develop Pressed Roots while studying at Harvard Business School. The California-raised entrepreneur noticed all the effort she and her friends put into finding a hairstylist while they were living in Boston and Cambridge. Some would travel to New York or even Houston for an appointment. "Women with textured hair spend so much money, so much time in salons, and they don't really have the services that match their needs," she says.
It starts with training stylists on the Pressed Roots way of doing things. "All of our stylists go through [our] boot camp, and they learn our method of blowing out hair so it serves for consistency," Gaines shares. "People know what to expect when they come in because all of our stylists are doing silk blowouts all day, every day." In addition to styling, hairstylists learn how to identify and address the different needs of their clients to leave them with healthy, blown-out hair. The consistency in training also guarantees that each appointment will take anywhere from 90 to 120 minutes, Gaines says.
Even if you're not spending the equivalent of business hours there, Gaines still wants her customers to feel the community aspect hallmark of Black salons. "When there are things happening in the world, [Pressed Roots is] a safe space where we're all there experiencing it together," she shares. "We can all empathize with each other." Cultivating that atmosphere is all about details, including the size and shape of seats and even the music selection. Pressed Roots' playlist has daily themes like Trap Tuesday and Throwback Thursday. "It's a novel experience, but at the same time, it brings you back. It's nostalgic to what that old-school salon vibe kind of was," she says.
Gaines initially had her sights set on Atlanta, but once she discovered the dearth of reliable stylists in Dallas, she chose to set up shop in Texas. Pressed Roots opened in March 2020, closed due to COVID-19, and re-opened two months later. Since then, the salon has been a hit with consumers, leading to a second location in Plano and a long waitlist of people eager to try its services. "The mission is to make quality hair care accessible and easy for all women and so for that to be the case, we need to be in every major city," she says.
"I took for granted how new we would be in this market," White shares. The doors to Paralee Boyd first opened in 2012 in Southfield, Michigan. Ten years later, those doors are now in a whole new city and state — Dallas, Texas. (The original location and its second Detroit spot were closed during the pandemic.) The salon has a strict walk-in policy because White wanted to remove the hassle of having to book an appointment. The Paralee Boyd method "is meant to get you out," after all. However, quick styling doesn't mean you won't get a check-in call after you leave the chair.
White is mindful of how Paralee Boyd can serve the Black community and others with thick curls or coils, which includes crafting the right ambiance. When you entered the Detroit location, you were greeted with a gallery of photos of Black women who are customers and White's grandmother, Paralee, who the salon is named after. Kaytranada played in the background. The pictures on the wall served to remind Black women that they belong in this space, and those same photos decorate the Dallas location. "I wanted my staff to remember why we're here, why we're doing what we're doing, and I wanted my customers to see themselves reflected beautifully," White notes. "We don't get that a lot." The walls of the Detroit location were full of photos
She admits it's been hard for some folks to accept that this isn't the traditional salon where they can sit and talk all day or choose a service other than a silk press. "We don't want the hair salon to be your country club," she says. "We want you to be a member of a country club [with] fabulous hair and not pay an arm, a leg, and two toes to get your hair done and then make you wait for five hours."
Though sometimes it feels like you need to donate a kidney to afford certain services, at Paralee Boyd, all you need is $50 for either a blow-dry or a silk press. White is so committed to keeping the services affordable that she didn't change her prices until 2020, raising them from $40 to $50. "A lot of business owners I've talked to set their prices based on their image, not actually what they're doing," she says. "And so I didn't raise my prices for seven years."
The closure of her first two locations hasn't been a setback for White. In fact, she says it was one of the best decisions because it gave her more time to begin the franchise process and grow her business. "I want to in 30 years to have a young lady talking about when she was getting her hair done as a little girl up Paralee Boyd," she says.
Ebony Knight got into the hairstyling business because she needed to pay the bills. She started with the women in her neighborhood before committing fully and getting her cosmetology license. In 2013, she opened her salon suite, Majestic Hair Studio. Three years later, she pivoted to doing silk presses exclusively. "When I looked at my analytics, I was like, 'Well, [silk presses are] what's making me the most money, maybe I can zero in on this.'" Now, she's the one-woman show behind Textured Press.
The studio started as a pop-up. "This is something the culture needs," Knight says, though on the first day, only 25 people showed up. The sparse crowd was a temporary blip; today, Textured Press has a waitlist that is 200 people long on average. "When I opened up [I understood] that I had to hone in on my niche. Besides servicing Black women with a silk press, I also wanted them to leave the salon with more information than they came in with so that they could take care of their hair on their own," she says.
The service is $85, a price point Knight is committed to keeping while still maintaining a "bougie" atmosphere. "I thought back to when I was a little girl and how my mom literally would exchange food stamps for service when we were getting our hair done, that was the woman that I wanted to be able to afford to come into Textured Press," she says. "I wanted her to be able to afford to bring her daughter or daughters into the salon to be serviced because they deserve healthy hair, too."
The salon was experiencing some real growth in 2019 — Knight hired a second stylist, and they were on track to hit their goals until the pandemic. Though she had to go back to working solo, it was almost a blessing in disguise. As salons shut down, she passed the time on Instagram live teaching women how to do their hair in the absence of a stylist. Those tutorials helped her develop a deeper relationship with her online community. "I think that was one of the best things that could have happened to the business is being able to really cultivate that relationship [with consumers]," she shares. "Now they feel like, 'That's my girl. She carried me through the pandemic.'"
At 23, Kali Sterling was already a hair salon owner. An unlicensed one, sure, but an owner nonetheless. After realizing she may have bitten off more than she could chew at a young age, Sterling took a break from the scene until 2010, when she decided to go back to school and get her license so that "things can fall in place," she shares. They did. Three years later, she got her physical salon space: Kali's Hair Studio.
By 2018, though, Sterling focused her business on what was paying the bills: silk presses. "We only offer services where your hair can still breathe, grow, and be healthy," she shares. Today, the salon also offers micro-links and basic hair coloring services.
Training is one part of the business while cultivating a space is a whole other portion. Sterling is also keen on honoring Black hair culture in every aspect of the salon. "We have murals and pictures of how [hairstyling] used to be in the early 1900s and late 1800s with African-Americans in the kitchen styling hair," she shares. "Madam C.J Walker is everywhere in my salon."
Sterling hopes to open an Atlanta location in the future and has her eyes set on an out-of-state spot, too. She'd love to franchise Press Bar all over the nation, though she plans to offer more than just one service. "There's so much money out here for everybody. And the more of us that are doing it right, the better it is for our customers so that they can have more options," she shares.
Black women deserve to have reliable salon options so that they can be pampered in peace. These founders have established their lane within the larger industry to give them what they want: better service and an experience that is true to their culture.
Read more stories from the Melanin Edit:
- Vaseline, Cocoa and Shea Butters, and the Legacy for Black Skin
- 5 Black DJs Who Are Setting Global Beauty Trends
- How Bodegas Became Cultural Centers for Beauty
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