How Golde’s Trinity Mouzon Keeps Her Natural Hair Healthy and Finds Time for Self-Care
“I was very much inspired by this idea of taking wellness and making it more easily approachable for young consumers like myself,” Trinity Mouzon, founder of wellness brand Golde, tells Vogue. “I didn’t see myself very well represented in the wellness space as a young Black woman. And that’s where Golde came from.” The 27-year-old co-founded Golde alongside her now-fiancée, Issey Kobori, at the age of 23. After three years of continuous hard work together, one can find Golde in major retailers such as Nordstrom, Goop, Revolve, Sephora, and more, with Mouzon and Kobori earning a spot on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
The New York native’s wellness journey started from a young age, beginning with learning to love herself and her hair. “My mom was very instrumental in helping me to understand how to think about my hair,” Mouzon recalls. “Growing up as a little girl, your hair was something that needed a lot of love. It needed a lot of maintenance. My mom always referred to it as our hair. I was taught that I was allowed to feel frustrated about it,” especially, she notes, on detangling days, sitting in between her moth’s knees on the floor. “But it ultimately was something I had to nourish and take care of and inherently love.”
Her process of finding self-love and affirming her natural hair wasn’t always easy. “As I approached middle school and high school, I certainly felt the pressures of existing in an overwhelmingly white world,” Mouzon says. “When I was reading magazines, there were not people with my hair texture. [It felt like] people weren’t even talking about it,” she continues, adding that she began to relax her hair on and off with a home kit around this time. Then, when she was 15 years old, she cut off all of her hair to embrace her one-inch Afro. “It was the first time I ever cut off all my chemically processed hair, just to reveal 100% natural hair that had not been treated with any heat or anything.”
Mouzon recalls spending a lot of time on YouTube while re-embracing her natural hair. “But I almost feel like I really didn’t get to the level of comfort with my hair that I have now until I stopped subscribing to what other people were doing with their hair,” she says of her realization that she had to step back and learn what her own unique texture needed and wanted to do. What ultimately led her to have a healthy and balanced relationship with her hair was when she embarked upon her journey with Golde. “I was a busy, broke entrepreneur and I didn’t have time or money to get these treatments or braids or anything. I just need my hair to be out of my face and detangled. I yielded to what my hair needed and then listened to it and followed that.”
For these reasons, protective styling is a huge part of her routine today, and she spends most of her days in braids. A few individual braids in her hair does the trick for Mouzon, as she’s found “that style lasts a few weeks, it’s super easy and kind of fun.” When it comes to her go-to products, she often reaches for Briogeo’s Quinoa Co-Wash. If she’s considering budget, Giovanni’s deeper moisture conditioner is a less expensive favorite. “As much as I like to use the fancy stuff, I just need something that I can comfortably use like one-third of the bottle and not feel like I just spent $25 on like a single shampoo session,” she says. Otherwise, she uses a lot of natural oils on her hair, such as camellia oil, “which I got into through my partner’s mother, who’s from Japan where camellia oil is really popular,” as well as Jamaican black castor oil. “It’s really, really good. It s very thick. So I don t really put that on my scalp, but it’s good on the ends of my hair and to smooth things down.”
