Why Natural Hair Influencers Are Embracing Redken, Amika, and Other Salon Brands

24.08.2026, 15:38 allure.com

There's a shift happening online. My social feeds have always been filled with Black women doing their hair; sharing the best mousses for a twist-out, the scalp sprays they use between braiding appointments, and whatever hair growth miracle is doing the rounds. But lately, the products being raved about have been different compared to the last two decades of recommendations. Black women are posting about "life-changing" results they’ve gotten from brands I wouldn’t usually associate with being the best option for our hair type.

In one video, creator Deborah Wanjala advocates for the viral Abbey Yung hair method, displaying her years-in-the-making product arsenal packed with Amika, Living Proof, K18, and Redken alongside drugstore brands like Dove and Pantene. @not3shaunie also endorses Yung—a white creator with long, straight hair who continues to go viral for her guides to reversing hair damage—despite getting backlash for citing a creator who doesn’t look like her. Shaunie has multiple videos explaining how heavier curl creams and custards “sit on top of” her fine, low-density hair, causing it to “look lifeless and even thinner” compared to lighter serums like the ones Yung recommends. “I HATE how good these products work,” begins one caption of a photo with Redken and Ouai products in the r/Naturalhair subreddit. There are over 600 upvotes on the post, and the majority of comments are in agreement.

It’s not just my algorithm. Type “Black hair” or “curly hair” plus just about any salon brand into TikTok, Reddit, or YouTube, and you’ll be met with countless testimonies about how Redken, Amika, Matrix, Olaplex, and K18 have transformed someone’s textured strands. It’s a conversation that’s been resurfacing steadily in the past year within my own work and social circles. Many women I’ve spoken to are mixing and matching brands to build multiple ideal product lineups they can deploy depending on their styling needs for that week. “When my hair needs real care and nourishment, I opt for Cécred, plus beauty shop staple Silicon Mix,” Natalie Tuffuoh, a straight natural working in fashion, tells me. “But when I need a sleek blowout that’s guaranteed to last, I will always reach for an Amika, Kenra, or IGK product—and Cécred again.” She’s also a fan of ColorWow’s Extra-Strength Dreamcoat for maintaining straight styles between washdays.

And although it’s mostly straight naturals lauding the Amikas of the world, some curly and coily girls who wear their hair natural have been incorporating more of these types of brands into their wash ’n' go, twist-out, and diffusing routines. “Once I started treating my hair like it’s hair—and not like it’s curly—my hair started growing,” testifies Amsterdam-based creator @5sabrine in a video about why she stopped using products that are “only made for curly hair.” It’s just one in her ongoing series of “fine, curly hair routine” videos, which has racked up over a million views.

The last two to three years have seen countless creators document their discovery that hair density and thickness can matter just as much as texture when it comes to finding products that work for them. One is creator @yapahcurls, who labels herself as “your fine hair bestie.” She advocates for a wider understanding that fine-haired naturals can’t always follow the advice of those with thicker, denser hair like Whitney White (aka @naptural85), arguably the biggest hair influencer in the history of the natural hair movement. Yapah Curls’s product recommendation videos include a mix of brands primarily marketed toward Black customers, like The Doux, and offerings from Eva NYC, Garnier, and L’Oréal Paris. Yar Sudani, a hugely popular natural hair influencer with over 2.4M followers across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, also uses a mixture of brands in her popular Wash Day Diary series. Sometimes it’s mostly salon brands—like Olaplex, K18, Bumble and Bumble, and Innersense—but other times she’ll do a routine filled with products from Black-focused brands, like Pattern Beauty, Mizani, and Carol’s Daughter.

So why are women with natural hair shifting their routines toward so-called mainstream brands after years of advocating for brands custom-made for Black hair? The general perception (fair or not) is that the brands that have historically marketed toward Black consumers are typically more “natural” and offer top-notch moisturization; these other brands provide formulas that yield salon-quality results at home. It makes sense that the latter category is often reserved for styles that involve heat, like silk presses, blowouts, or diffuser-dried curls, but these brands are also making an appearance in air-dried styles on mostly fine coils, curls, and waves that might need lighter formulas.

From its inception around the turn of the 20th century, commercial Black hair care has been a response to the lack of options on mainstream beauty shelves. For much of that history, many of the products were focused on getting coily hair straighter and keeping it that way for longer. But more recently, the message was all about being au naturale—and that included the formulas.

“Black-tailored brands took a natural approach for much of the past two decades, focusing on using natural oils and butters and sulfate- or silicone-free products in contrast to the Black-focused brands of the 20th century, like Lustre Pink or Soft Sheen,” says cosmetic scientist Javon Ford. Cosmetic scientist AJ Addae of Sula Labs agrees. “This focus on claims around being clean and botanical-based was the result of mistrust around chemicals,” she says, pointing to moments throughout history where the medical and cosmetics industries have used Black patients as unwitting test subjects. Retin-A, for example, was invented after a doctor conducted dermatological experiments on Holmesburg Prison inmates, most of whom were Black men. In the last two decades, the public has become more widely aware of the risks of traditional lye-based relaxers, like scalp burns, carcinogen absorption, and exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals linked to a doubled rate of reproductive cancers and fibroids—which already disproportionately affect Black women.

Around the same time, sulfates and silicones, two synthetic ingredients, fell rapidly out of favor across hair types as they garnered bad reputations for stripping the hair and causing build-up, respectively. Black beauty consumers started going back to the natural ingredients their grandmothers might have used, Addae says. Alternatives like cleansing apple cider vinegar, mayo hair masks, and plant-based oils started rising in popularity, both as DIY remedies and ingredients brands marketed toward Black hair would advertise.

That natural messaging worked for a long time—and still does, for some consumers. But then, the clean movement at large hit a few mold-covered stumbling blocks. Around the same time, the general public started to get more comfortable openly criticizing hair brands that didn’t sell products that worked for all hair types and textures. In some cases, this meant massive beauty conglomerates like Unilever and Procter & Gamble acquired the most successful natural-focused, often Black-owned indie brands. In other cases (or, often, in tandem), mainstream brands with budgets beyond the wildest dreams of the indies were pouring cash into R&D for curl-focused products for the first time.

In 2024, 10 years after the brand first launched, Olaplex came out with its Bond Shaping Technology line made specifically for curly hair types. Amika launched its Power Hour Curl Refreshing Hair Spray in 2021, bringing its curl-specific line up to three SKUs. The brand's Hydro Rush line (launched in 2023) gets lots of love from natural hair influencers for fulfilling their hair’s hydration needs without weighing it down. The Hydro Rush products are often used in tandem with Amika’s repairing The Kure collection. When K18 launched in 2020 with a shiny, new, patented technology to compete with Olaplex, it amplified the appetite for bond repair without explicitly saying which hair type its products catered to. Most of the brand’s launch campaigns have featured a range of straight, wavy, curly, and coily types; in 2024, its AirWash Dry Shampoo launch campaign included a model with braids.

Now, Black women suddenly have more product options, and the fine, curly hair set realized that these brands with decades of experience prioritizing their white counterparts might actually have formulas that were better suited for their hair texture. Independently, many people who had tried embracing their natural texture felt empowered to go back to wearing straight styles at least some of the time. Both groups seem to be driving this rediscovered enthusiasm for salon brands.

These larger, better-funded brands are also generally able to move faster when it comes to developing and releasing new technology, including those that have a lot of benefits for curly and coily textures. Take bond repair, which came up over and over in interviews for this story. Since Olaplex started selling a version of its in-salon bond-repair treatment directly to consumers in 2018, the ubiquity of bond repair has been steadily climbing to the point where even those without hair damage think it’s a routine imperative. The impact of this technology on my damaged textured hair was my first introduction to using a brand that wasn’t necessarily marketed toward my hair type or even tighter textures at that time, even though it’s a category of product that we could especially benefit from.

“Curly and coily hair types have a more complex structure that affects how the fiber responds to tension,” hairstylist and Olaplex ambassador Naeemah LaFond explains. “The bends and coils create uneven stress distribution along the strand, which can make the hair more susceptible to breakage and moisture loss without proper care. When the disulfide bonds that hold the hair fibers togethe