This Woman Travels the World to Help Women Embrace Their Natural Curls

Girls are seven times more likely to love their curls if people around them do, according to Dove’s recent “Love Your Curls” campaign. One woman is turning that concept into a way of life. Nikki Walton — known to her legions of fans as the beauty blogger and author CurlyNikki — is on a globetrotting mission to help transform women’s perception of naturally curly hair from a burden into a blessing, according to Forbes.

A former full-time licensed psychotherapist, Walton is hyper-aware of the ways in which self-image can affect mood and self-esteem. She started by analyzing herself. As a “curly girl,” she says, she used to only feel pretty when she would straighten her thick locks. Even her partner noticed the drastic difference in her attitude while they were university students in Missouri. “When I got to college, my then boyfriend [now husband] had a heart-to-heart with me after he observed how my self-esteem would fluctuate depending on the state of my hair — outspoken and confident when my hair was straight, withdrawn and kind of sad when my hair was curly,” she told Forbes.

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At that time, Walton would have her boyfriend drive her three hours to a place get her hair “washed and ‘pressed’ under scorching heat, ultimately achieving bone straight tresses that lasted a week,” according to her site. He saw the irony in the fact that Walton was a psychology major yet was participating in a stressful, time-consuming ritual, and her happiness was almost completely dependent on it. “Your hair is beautiful no matter how it is,” he reminded her, she told Forbes, “and you should be comfortable with it kinky, curly, or straight.” Walton took his words to heart.

So, after years of forcing her spirals into submission, she taught herself the science of curly hair and learned to love and embrace her natural mane. The root of the problem, she said, is society’s distorted perception of beauty and its pervasive effects on our psyches. “Hopefully at this point, we all understand that beauty is measured by subjective standards that change over time and across space,” Walton told Forbes. “With that said, there is indeed a Euro-centric and Western-oriented beauty standard that affects women of all races in the United States and abroad. The reality is that advertisers push this straight hair/fair skin standard across the world, propagating it as normal and good. By default, everything that doesn’t meet this standard is somehow abnormal and bad. Thus, straight hair must be ‘good hair.’”

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She brought her newfound attitude to online hair-care forums, where she made a name for herself and — at the urging of other forum members — started CurlyNikki to keep the dialogue flowing. And because travel is one of her passions, she saw an opportunity to wander around the world, hosting meet-ups to bring members of her global, online network together in real life. Her message resonated more deeply than she’d imagined, with hundreds of women showing up at each gathering.

Now, she’s on a full-time mission to spread her message far and wide. Walton regularly travels the world on what she calls calls “Curly Culture Missions,” drawing inspiration from and building community around women from all ethnic and racial backgrounds, with hair textures that run the gamut. She’s also trying to make a tangible difference. “I … found that curly [-haired] women in other countries often had trouble getting access to natural hair products,” she told Forbes. “So I decided to take the show to Greece, Brazil, Japan, Spain and so on. I would convince manufacturers to donate some products. I found that these women were just like curly women in the U.S. — full of love, hope, and great potential.”

Now a guru to many women who’ve latched onto her message of self-love — not to mention the author of two books: When Good Hair Goes Bad and Better Than Good Hair — Walton seems to feel a responsibility to be everywhere all at once, but of course that’s impossible. That’s why she developed an app to “share tips on the run or product recommendations when in the hair care aisle.” According to her site, the app — which has playfully named categories such as “The Curl Street Journal” — was downloaded 45,000 times within five months of its launch.

Despite her success, Walton is fully aware that her mission may seem like a petty, cosmetic issue to people who don’t understand how deeply hair can affect a woman’s identity, confidence level, sense of attractiveness, and sexuality. “People will say on the site sometimes: ‘It’s just hair, it’s not that deep,’ but they come to the site [CurlyNikki.com] every day, so maybe it is that deep. For black women especially, it’s wrapped up in our quality of life,” says Walton.

Though she enacts significant social change across the world, Walton doesn’t consider herself a political activist — in fact, she rejects the title, saying she hasn’t earned it. Instead, she simply sees herself as a good citizen. “If I see an injustice, I’ll call it out,” she says. “I think the world might be a much better place if we all did this more often.”

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