Revolutionize Your Hair Care Routine with the KinkTamer Blowdryer
Coming March 2026
So it felt perfectly natural when, decades later, I became fixated on a problem the beauty industry had long accepted as normal: blow dryer comb attachments that fell off, broke, disappeared, or failed at the worst possible moment.
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As a second-generation stylist, the salon wasn’t just a workplace—it was inheritance. It was muscle memory and math. During the busiest hours of the day, losing a comb attachment wasn’t merely annoying. It was costly. Every minute spent searching for a replacement meant stalled clients, broken flow, and lost revenue. In a profession where time is money and reputation is everything, that loss mattered.
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I didn’t complain about the problem. I studied it. I lived inside it. And then I drew the solution—rough lines on paper, guided by years behind the chair and a lifetime of seeing what others overlooked.
Against the odds, I found an engineer willing to turn my sketch into something tangible. He created a shell—not functional, but real. I could hold it. Turn it over in my hands. Proof that the vision existed outside of me.
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That’s when the real resistance showed up.
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Having an idea is one thing. Even having a prototype is something else entirely. But trying to move forward in manufacturing as a Black woman—without the right language, credentials, or gatekeepers—was a lesson in how innovation is often policed.
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Rooms went quiet when I spoke. Questions were asked that had nothing to do with the product and everything to do with whether I belonged there. I was talked over. Redirected. Dismissed with polite smiles that masked closed doors. The industry wasn’t hostile—it was worse. It was indifferent.
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I was expected to shrink my vision, to partner quietly, to hand my idea over to someone who looked more “manufacturable.” Someone more familiar. Someone safer.
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I knew absolutely nothing about manufacturing. But I knew what erasure felt like. And I knew when something was being taken instead of taught.
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Still, the dream would not let me go.
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It pressed on me in moments of exhaustion. It followed me home after rejection. It reminded me that Black women have always been asked to birth the future without credit, without capital, without comfort. And yet—we do.
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I was standing at a crossroads: walk away from a vision that refused to release me, or step fully into an industry that clearly hadn’t made room for someone like me.
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I chose the harder path.
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Because the dream wasn’t finished with me yet.
Inventing While Black
An excerpt from my memoir of the journey of being a Black inventor in America
It was a lonely journey—one I didn’t yet have language for. I knew nothing about manufacturing. Nothing at all. Zip. Zero. Zilch. But even with all that not knowing, I couldn’t turn away. The idea had taken up residence in my mind, settling in like heat with nowhere to go. It simmered. It steamed. It refused to release me. I couldn’t see how it would end—only that it had chosen me.
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As a child, I was always reimagining the world around me. Tools, systems, everyday objects—I instinctively saw how they could work better. When I was seven years old, I imagined a camera on a telephone, a way to see the person on the other end of the line. This was 1958 or 1959. Long before technology could catch up to imagination.
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Back then, no one thought it strange that these ideas lived in my head. I was known for having an “overactive imagination.” That phrase followed me for years—sometimes spoken playfully, sometimes dismissively. I would later understand that imagination, especially in Black girls, is often mislabeled as excess instead of recognized as foresight.
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