Where I Got My Curls Cut After Two Years

When my salon shut down, I didn't know where to go.

For most of my pre-teen years, I hated my curls. Visits to my neighborhood salon often resulted in heaving sobs and dramatic declarations that my life was over. Nobody seemed to know how to handle them—not even my own curly-haired mother (see below). Movies like The Princess Diaries hit too close to home—I also once had a hairbrush snap in half in my hairdresser’s hands—and convinced me that the only way to win the affections of a man and the throne of a fictional country was to straighten my hair.

Thanks, mom.

I felt like a frizzy freak until I was around 13, when my mom took me to Devachan in Soho. A woman named Melanie from Staten Island sat me down with The Curly Girl Handbook, reassuring me that my hair was unique but also manageable *for an extraordinary fee. And I never looked back. I trusted her with my curls for several years, followed by a man named Rick, who I thought was fabulous because he told me that he “almost didn’t make it out of the ‘80s alive.” I didn’t always leave with the best haircut—RIP to what I now call my “Rick James-era”—but I did feel in control.

And then, in 2022, Devachan permanently closed.

I am stubborn, so despite reading many horrible things about DevaCurl products, I still use them. (If you’ve seen my hair, you know it’s still very much intact.) I also read many negative things about the salon toward the end and am glad I no longer patronize it. But after over a decade at Deva, I didn’t know where to turn or who to trust. So, I didn’t cut my hair… for two whole years.

I needed to get my hair cut eventually, though, and this summer, after seeing a photo of the back of my head, I decided something had to be done, like, yesterday, and started asking around.