As a child, all my friends were skinny with thin lips, olive brown skin and straight hair. I had chubby cheeks with thick lips, pale skin, freckles, and curly hair.
I didn’t look like anyone… not even my own mother.
I was four when I began to take notice of how I presented in public. I confided in my parents, I wanted to cut off my long hair and make it straight, noting I felt unattractive because I just didn’t fit in.
They immediately dismissed my complaints, arguing how strangers in public were often paying me compliments and that I was just being ridiculous and wrong.
Still, I had it in my mind… I didn’t fit in.
Later that evening, my mother brought me a bottle of Nexxus Versastyler Artistic Designing Lotion from her supply. After using it on my hair I started to see some calmness from the craziness.
She said, “When you grow up, you will notice that people will want the very things you don’t like about yourself. Embrace your natural beauty”
I would repeatedly hear my parents tell me… “You are naturally beautiful!”
Nexxus Versastyler would be the one thing I wouldn't go without for the next 2 decades. It was like water, easy to put on and I didn’t have to do anything except let it dry… boom my curls were smooth, calm, bouncy and fun.
I grew into a confident adult. How could I not? I got compliments nearly every day.
"Wow how do you fix your hair? "It's so pretty" or "Is your hair really natural?" or other things like "What do you do to make the curls so defined?"
I found myself telling everyone my secrets to curly hair without frizz… starting with, “use Versastyler”. And ending with a reminder to embrace their natural beauty.
Then came 2012…
Nexxus discontinued Versastyler!
Immediate panic set in… which lasted for the next two years, while trying every product on the market…. Nothing worked! The product was too sticky, too greasy, too heavy, straightened out my curls, made my hair frizzy, it was a nightmare! How could it be that there are so many curly hair products and not one worked?
I tried the YouTube and TikTok routines with 4-5 products on their hair. Loads of products saturating my natural hair felt beyond manky. My hair felt weighty and greasy… as if I had slime all over my hair and everything that it touched. I found I was washing my hair nearly every day to get the ick off my natural hair… while trying to find a style that I could relax with that didn't take hours to accomplish.
I resorted to eBay and paid $90, $139 and even $230 for 10 ounce, 13 ounce bottles of old Versastyler. These bottles were between 10 and 30 years old, well beyond the recommended shelf life.
One day I poured some eBay-bought Versastyler, into a clear bottle and noticed it was greenish… yikes, mold!
So I did what any journalist does… I wrote about it. Emails flew in… I must have received 2,000 emails within the first 6 months. They were just as distraught as I was! They all had similar stories…
"I am a mixed kid and I have this crazy hair and nothing works on it except Versastyler… what am I going to do now?"
That was my story… their words resonated deeply!
It was INSANITY… trying product after product and ending up with the same dissatisfied result.
By this time, I literally looked like a mad scientist… with my frizzy out of control hair… mixing chemicals at early hours of the morning… and so that is what I became.
I started working with chemists and studying the ingredients of just about every curly hair product out there and why some do some things and not others and how certain ingredients mixed together have a good or bad result… and why these YouTubers were using 3-6 different products. It was for the mixed chemical reaction.
I also learned that a huge percentage of products advertised to curly hair are just stock products that they buy, change the bottle and fragrance then market.
I know this because that is what most labs encouraged me to do, advising that it’s “easier and cheaper than working with a chemist”.
Flabbergasted by their concocted scheme at my expense, this only motivated me more… people are using the same terrible product with different labels. These stores are just worried about the graphics and not the result of the product. They probably don’t even have curly hair!
Now… ten years later, we were able to bring back the magic of Nexxus Versastyler without the dangerous ingredients used… and we call it Curl Water.
Currently we are producing small batches so the price is steep. However, if more people support us, we can produce a larger quantity which will reduce the buyer price.
Support Curl Water…. in the name of defrizzed curls, embrace your natural beauty!
