Kellie Brown on Self-Love, Inspiring Community, and Sticking to a Beauty Routine
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.
When Kellie Brown posts on Instagram, or TikTok, or YouTube, her goal is to inspire her online communities to love themselves fully. “Or at least start a self-love journey and understand that feelings of insecurity are not singular and that everyone experiences those no matter where you come from, what your size is, or what your race is,” the Philadelphia-born consultant and creator of #FatatFashionWeek says. "I want people to understand that, really, the journey of life is to push past those feelings in order to be our best selves.”
Brown’s ability to spread this positive message began with some soul searching of her own; learning to love her hair, in all stages, was an important part of that journey. “My hair changed when I started swim team growing up,” Brown says. “The chlorine breakage was real." Then with puberty, Brown experienced “those moments as a Black girl growing up when you beg your mom to do your own hair or to wear it out,” with which came the heat damage and burning that many of us know all too well. “I always loved my hair, but I was a participant in damaging it because I was trying to look grown up and cool and all that,” Brown says.
She decided to stop getting relaxers a few years after college. But even then, the pressure to blow dry her hair surrounded her, whether it was from people she dated or working within the PR world. “I was blowdrying for so many years because natural hair was not really celebrated until basically yesterday,” Brown says. When her late mother was going through chemotherapy, Brown was inspired to embrace her hair completely. “I cut off all the damage when I cut my hair with her,” Brown says. “That was the second half of my hair journey… letting my hair grow out, and seeing what my actual texture was without the damage.”
“Self-love has been really a lifelong journey for me being a chubby kid,” Brown adds. “[I ve learned] humans will always find a way to separate themselves and to try to have elitist attitudes, whether it s economic, if it s your hair type, if it s your skin color, whatever the thing is. I think that my parents did a really good job at reinforcing my value and, and verbally affirming me, and showing me where my self-worth comes from. They gave me that foundation to remember to be kind to myself."