CURLY HAIR TURNS A PAGE THANKS TO AUSTINITE
How Michelle Breyer helped guide ‘The Curl Revolution’ in hair.
Michelle Breyer talks hair — curly hair. Its texture, its porosity, its thickness.
She can look at your hair and give you a number and a letter combination that signifies the type of hair on your head. She can talk products and haircuts. She talks in curly-hair lingo like “the big chop” — that moment when you cut your chemically straightened hair off to go natural — or “the holy grail” — that product that for at least one day makes your hair look better than you ever knew it could.
Now 54, the Austinite has known curly hair all her life. She grew up in California at a time when all she really wanted was a ponytail that swished like the straight-haired girls around her had.
Her straight-haired mother didn’t know what to do with her hair, so she just had it cut into a pixie for years.
Then, as Breyer grew older and feathering became the rage of the 1980s, she feathered her hair, but she had to weigh it down with hairspray so heavily that if she lifted a strand, the whole wing of the feather would lift up with it.
For her birthday every year, a friend would give her the gift of blowing out her hair in an attempt to straighten it.
“I lived in fear that anyone would know how curly my hair was,” she says.
Breyer is the co-founder of the website Naturally Curly, naturallycurly.com, which became a resource and a community for curly-haired people around the world. On Tuesday, she launches her first book, “The Curl Revolution” (Greenleaf Book Group Press, $19.95).
The idea to write the book had been bubbling up for a while. “It always seemed completely daunting,” she says.