How This Model-Designer Achieves Her Signature Curly Bob and Finds Joy in Having a Couple’s Hair Regimen

Photo: Courtesy of Shereen Mohammad. 

Texture Diaries is a space for Black women across industries to reflect on their journeys to self-love, and how accepting their hair, in all its glory, played a pivotal role in this process. Each week, these women share their favorite hair rituals, products, and the biggest lessons they’ve learned when it comes to affirming their beauty and owning their unique hair texture.

A scroll through model-designer Shereen Mohammad’s Instagram page is a virtual escape to a peaceful haven. The images she’s curated are a mix of romantic sunsets, selfies with pops of color on her lids, and various eye-catching stills from shoots for brands like Lesse and Maria Stanley. Then there are her handmade clothes—dainty crochet tops and sky blue ruffle skirts—which she releases periodically on her Instagram page. Mohammad often models her clothes herself, and those pictures are made all the more eye-catching by her Whitney Houston–inspired curly bob.

“It was a long journey for me,” the New Yorker says when asked about the road to embracing her signature hair look to its fullest. She recalls, around 2013, that she noticed a lot of people doing big chops. “But I wasn’t confident enough to do something like that,” Mohammad says. From age nine, she had equated beauty solely with straight hair due to a lack of representation growing up. “My teachers and classmates gave me tons of compliments when I wore my hair straight,” she remembers. Wanting to fit in, Mohammad begged her mother for a perm, which she was not allowed to get until she was 12 years old, and kept it for 10 years.

In college, she began realizing her curls were just as beautiful, though they were often met with negative attention when she wore them out. “I remember people would say, ‘Your hair is big and crazy,’” she says. “How could that be a compliment?” she would think to herself. Four years later, she began to further understand her hair thanks to a salon that cut quite a few inches off by accident. Mohammad was devastated by how short it was, but later learned to look at it as a blessing in disguise. “It forced me to not only deal with my hair without the dead ends, but also how to manage short curly hair,” she says. Aside from Ms. Houston, Mohammad found confidence to rock that asymmetrical, billowy bob from Solange, the hairstyles in Christopher John Rogers’s fall 2020 collection, and Maxwell’s Afro in the iconic video for the song “This Woman’s Work.” To perfect the look, her products of choice are a deep conditioner, leave-in, and styling cream, all from Ouidad. “These products always leave my hair feeling airy and fluffy,” she notes. After washing, she typically stretches out her roots by putting her strands into a sleek bun, or blow-drying, if she’s short on time, with the Dyson dryer, which “changed my life,” she says. Then, on semi-damp hair sectioned off into eight parts, she applies the curl cream for moisture—making sure to not use too much so that the hair doesn’t get weighed down—and adds flexi rods to the sections before sleeping. In the morning, she removes the rods and fluffs her hair out.