Actors and beauty brand founders traveled to Washington, DC to relay their experiences being paired on the job with hairstylists unskilled in curly or coily hair, as they advocated for a federal bill that would provide grants for cosmetology schools to add textured hair education to their curricula.
The Texture Positive Act of 2024 (H.R. 8875) was introduced this past summer by U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), who convened the panel in late December on Capitol Hill to discuss the need behind it.
The federal bill aims to close a critical gap in cosmetology testing and training, in which many mainstream cosmetology schools in the U.S. fail to offer education about textured hair, despite upwards of 65 percent of Americans having hair that's curly, coily, or wavy.
Actors Michelle Hurd (Star Trek: Picard) and Jason Winston George (Grey’s Anatomy) were featured speakers, conveying their upsetting experiences being assigned on set to hairstylists and barbers who didn’t know how to work with their textured hair.
Also lending their insights were Ajia Minnis Cruz Lanham, founder and CEO of Thrive Hair Bar in Washington, D.C., and Youma Niangadou, a former fashion model, founder of the Youma’s Beauty brand, and creator of the documentary The Natural Hair Struggle in Fashion.
“Through producing the documentary, I got to speak to hairstylists who admitted they lacked skills to service natural-haired people because they did not receive that education in cosmetology school,” Niangadou says.
“Which is not fair to them at all, considering they pay upwards of $20,000 to attend cosmetology school.”
The federal bill is a complement to the current state-by-state movement championed by the Texture Education Collective, requiring that cosmetologists licensed by the state receive training and testing on textured hair.
The Texture Positive Act of 2024 next faces action in the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.
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