Every day in my chair, I hear pieces of the same conversation. A client touches her roots and apologizes for them before I even say hello, as if the appointment itself were a confession. Another asks if her hair is "too much" for a wedding. I hear that one constantly. It stays with me. After ten years behind the chair, I stopped hearing those moments as small talk, and started hearing them as a pattern that deserved a real answer instead of just a good blowout.
That's how Unleashed Beauty: A Black Woman's Guide to Loving and Caring for her Natural Hair came to be. It's not a marketing project. Simple as that. It's the conversation I have on repeat, written down so it can reach people who will never sit in my chair, in a city I may never visit.
Where the Book Started
I kept noticing that the questions clients brought me were rarely just about technique, and underneath "how do I detangle this" was usually something closer to "why does my hair make me feel this way," which meant both questions deserved a real answer instead of a rushed one squeezed in between foils. The book holds both. I mean that literally.
I am a Master Cosmetologist, and I have spent years teaching other stylists and clients alike how Black hair actually behaves, not how it gets stereotyped in a magazine or a movie. That educator side of me kept showing up in consultations long before I ever sat down to write a single page. Clients would ask a question, I'd answer it fully, and then I'd think about the thousands of women asking the same thing with nobody in the chair across from them to answer honestly.
I wrote this in the voice I use with clients: direct, warm, and with no shame attached to any stage of the journey. Whether someone is three months natural or has been wearing their curls out since childhood, the tone stays the same.
What's Actually Inside
The book moves through three main areas I return to constantly in real appointments.
- Societal perceptions and stereotypes around natural Black hair, and how they shape self-esteem, sit right alongside the actual properties of Black hair and the real risks of chemical treatments.
- Everyday care: moisturizing, detangling, washing, and protective styling.
- Step-by-step styling guides for braids, twists, and bantu knots, plus hair growth, scalp health, and the common causes of dryness and breakage.
None of it is theoretical. Every chapter grew out of a real question asked in my studio in Smyrna, or in a DM, or in a comment section under a tutorial I posted at midnight because I couldn't sleep.
The self-esteem chapter took me the longest to write, because it's easier to explain a detangling method than to unpack why a woman might associate her own hair with rejection, and the two are connected more than most people realize. Confidence at the sink often starts as confidence in the mirror. Nothing about that is small.
Who I Wrote This For
I wrote this for the woman who was told her hair was unprofessional before she understood what "professional" even meant. I wrote it for the client who spent years relaxing her hair because nobody ever showed her another way, and for the one who went natural years ago but still feels lost standing over the sink on wash day. I wrote it for beginners. I wrote it for women who think they already know it all, and most of us know less than we assume. I certainly did, before I made this my career.
You don't need to live near Smyrna to use it. The book was built to travel.
Get the Book
Unleashed Beauty is available now in paperback and on Kindle. Both formats work well.
Read it in one sitting, or keep it close and return to a chapter whenever you need it. Either way works. I organized the styling guides so you can flip straight to braids, twists, or bantu knots without hunting for the page you need.
If You're Local
If you're in the Atlanta area and want the version of this conversation that happens in person, that's still what I do best. Come sit in my chair. We'll talk through your hair's actual needs, not a stranger's assumptions about it, and build a plan around our services page that fits where you are right now, whatever stage that happens to be.
You're always welcome to book an appointment directly, book or no book. Consistency is the thing I preach most in the chair, and this book is just that same message in a different format.
Writing Unleashed Beauty didn't replace the work I do at KodakStylez. It grew out of it, page by page, question by question, and it points right back to it.
