About Yours Truly, Mel
A love letter from the curly community — unbiased natural hair product recommendations written by the community. Created by a Black woman who loves to build and loves her natural hair :)
Growing up in a predominantly white neightborhood, I remember the day some kid teased that they were going to cut my hair off and use it as a powder brush. That's when the narrative that my hair just looked like one big ball of frizz started. So naturally, at 14, I had the bright idea to put a relaxer on my hair to make it "less frizzy", and it was one of the worst decisions I've probably ever made. What I didn't know back then was how to properly care for my natural hair; I really only needed a good trim and products for it to thrive. But alas, I chose to fry my hair instead.Growing up in the early 2000s, relaxer products were everywhere, and in my opinion, pretty harmfully marketed directly to kids like me. Dark & Lovely, Just For Me, and others made it seem like relaxers were a normal rite of passage for little Black girls.I did my big chop 6 years ago and have been natural ever since. I have never felt so confident in my natural hair. And I want to spread that confidence to others and help them navigate the often long, frustrating process of trial and error to find the right products.Yours Truly, Mel is a love letter to the curly community, written by all of you. Real recommendations from real people who have textured hair like you and I, and have been through similar struggles.
As someone who's been wearing my hair natural for 6 years, I've spent countless hours digging through Reddit threads and TikTok videos for product recommendations. I trust real recommendations and reviews, but it's super time-consuming.So I built something to fix that: an API that automatically extracts the most-recommended curly hair products across thousands of Reddit conversations. I built a custom NLP (natural language processing) pipeline that analyzes thousands of Reddit comments from communities like r/NaturalHair, r/CurlyHair, and others where people share their real routines and product recommendations.Built with: Node.js, Reddit API, compromise.js (natural language), Next.js + MUI (frontend), and MongoDB. With love and good hair days,
Bri
