Celai West is a Texture Activist and is actively working to help bring awareness and create change in the fashion and entertainment industries by pushing for the inclusion of kinky hair textures in the media as well as better training for hairstylists who are booked to work on sets with talent who have ethnically textured hair. She also aims to use her platform to show the beauty of her kinks & coils…because ALL girls with ALL textures are beautiful and should be treated fairly. #KinkyHairMatters
While on set, Celai started to notice that most of the hairstylists who were hired by production did not know how to style her hair. Additionally, some would occasionally express their displeasure with doing her hair as soon as she walked on set or sat in their chair.
Celai then noticed that she rarely sees girls or women with her kinky hair texture on TV or in the mall ads. She assumed it was because no one knew how to style their hair on set, as she experienced, so Celai and her mom decided to team up and create hair tutorials to show hair care as well as styling techniques for ethnic textured hair. She wanted to use her platform to teach everyone how different but how easy it can be to care for and style kinky hair textures.
During NYFW in September 2018, Celai asked to wear her hair “100% natural, totally shrunken, like how it grows out of my scalp” instead of blown out, big and fluffy per her usual. Later that night, her mom asked why she made that choice. It was at that moment Celai opened up about how she had been mistreated on set by the hairstylists, how excluded she felt, how she never sees any girls on her favorite shows with her hair type nor on the walls in the stores she shops in. “…and I decided that I’m gonna change that!“
“I want to tell little girls that have my type of hair that it’s beautiful and you don’t have to listen to what other people say.”
Celai West was recently invited to London to join forces with World Afro Day 2019. She spoke at the Big Hair Assembly, an event aimed at changing the negative views towards afro hair in schools around the world and made an appearance on Lorraine, a local morning show.