Celebrity Hair Brands: Are We Buying the Product or Buying the Person?

Grow Good: When the Proof Is Actually in the Pudding

Cardi B's hair is long. Genuinely, visibly, undeniably long. And healthy. And real. And at one point she had us all pouring onion juice on our heads because she swore by it and some of us actually saw results.

That matters more than it might seem. Because when Grow Good launched with its DIY hair growth positioning, the credibility wasn't coming from a lab or a lineage or a cultural institution. It was coming from the woman's actual head. She is walking, talking, Instagram posting proof of concept every single day. You don't need to read the ingredient list. You can see the results.

But the Grow Good story goes deeper than the hair on Cardi's head. The brand describes itself as rooted in heritage rituals passed down through her Dominican family, translated into a modern wash-and-care system. And this is where the credibility gets interesting because Dominican hair care has always been its own discipline. The Dominican blowout is called a Dominican blowout for a reason. There is a generational, cultural knowledge of hair in that community that precedes any brand launch and doesn't require a celebrity to validate it. Cardi B isn't just the face of Grow Good. She is, in a meaningful way, the origin story and the embodiment of Dominican traditions passed down through salons, roller sets, tubis, and ampoules, all in one powerhouse.

Here's what makes this different from the other brands in this conversation: we trusted Cardi B's hair routine before she had a product to sell us. We watched her talk about her hair on Instagram for years. We copied what she did. We took notes when she shared her kitchen recipes. And then she packaged what we'd already bought into, what she'd already proven on her own head, and made it available for less than £20 a product.

That is not a celebrity cashing in. That is a woman sharing what actually worked, with modern science behind it, at a price point that doesn't exclude the community it was built for.

Would we buy a DIY hair growth brand from someone whose hair didn't look like that? Maybe not. But would we trust the benefits of natural things we can find in our own kitchen that stimulate hair growth? Yes, because it's accessible, and accessible things feel honest. With this, Cardi passes the test and the Dominican lineage behind the formulations means the product has cultural roots that could stand even if the celebrity stepped back. Because when we see Grow Good, we see something bigger than a brand. We see the beauty of the nuances in how different cultures approach hair. Curly and textured hair doesn't belong to one race, one culture or one community. Finding the common denominators, the shared rituals, the things that work regardless of where you're from are one of the most exciting things about being in this space. We're always down to try a new trick. Especially when the roots run this deep. 

Pattern Beauty: Founder, or Face?

Joan Clayton's hair was what I always needed my hair to look like growing up. Most of all, it always looked healthy.

Tracee Ellis Ross has spent decades being visibly, joyfully, unapologetically curly in spaces that weren't always built for it. When she launched Pattern Beauty in 2019, it felt like a natural extension of everything she had always publicly represented, not a brand pivot, but a logical conclusion.

The Pattern Beauty review has barely changed since: it’s a genuinely good brand. The formulations are texture specific across curly, coily, and tight textures. The community focus is real. 1% of every purchase goes to a nonprofit of the buyer's choice, and the brand's declaration reads like a love letter to Black hair rather than a marketing document. The Pattern product range is extensive: curly shampoos, conditioners, curly styling creams, scalp care, heat tools, a viral hair steamer that has its own following entirely. These are not products that exist to sit on a shelf next to a famous face. They perform.

But here is the question the brand hasn't had to answer yet: where does the founder end and the ambassador begin?

And here is our read, which is perhaps more generous, and more honest, than the question implies: we think Pattern Beauty works precisely because Tracee Ellis Ross chose not to separate the two. Her curl journey is the brand's origin story. Her texture is the target demographic. Her face is on everything, not because the product needs her to survive, but because she is the community the brand was built for. When we buy Pattern Beauty, we are not buying Tracee Ellis Ross. We are buying into the community she built it around. She is the ambassador but the brand she's ambassadoring is bigger than her, and that's the point.

That distinction makes Pattern Beauty more credible, not less. The product can stand without her because it was never really about her. It was about us.

Manketti Oil by Charlotte Mensah: The Brand That Didn't Need a Stage

And then there is Charlotte Mensah. And this is where the conversation shifts entirely. Because Charlotte Mensah and the Manketti Oil are, in many ways, the most important entry in this conversation. 

Charlotte Mensah is not a celebrity who launched a hair brand. She is a hairstylist (a world class one) who built a brand because the expertise was already there and the products the community needed simply didn't exist yet.

Trained at the London College of Fashion in the late 1980s under Winston Isaacs, widely known as the Godfather of British Afro Hairdressing, Charlotte has been a leading figure in the natural haircare movement since the early 2000s. Her salon, Hairlounge, sits on Portobello Road in London a decades old business that has served clients from entertainment, politics, and business for years. She has been named Afro Hairdresser of the Year three times at the British Hairdressing Awards and earned a place in their Hall of Fame. She is recognised as the authority on Afro, mixed, and curly hair by Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Tatler. She wrote the book, literally. Good Hair, published with Penguin, is a bestseller.

Her product range, built around the Manketti Oil, uses organic, ethically and sustainably sourced oils formulated specifically for Afro, mixed, and curly hair types.

There is no celebrity in the foreground here. There is no famous face borrowed to sell a formula someone else made. There is just an incredible woman who spent decades mastering her craft, built a business from that mastery, and created products because her clients needed them and nothing on the market was good enough. She is a trailblazer in Black British hairdressing and we'd go as far as to say she is one of the first to create celebrity hair care products, as opposed to hair care products that are simply celebrity owned. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

We attended her exhibition recently and the Manketti Oil is something we are genuinely excited to try. Not because a famous person told us to. Because the woman who made it has spent her entire career earning the right to tell us it works.

That is a different kind of credibility entirely. And it might be the most important one in this conversation.

So Are We Buying the Product or Buying the Person?

The answer, if we're being honest, is almost always both. And that's not necessarily a criticism, it's just the reality of how trust works. We are wired to believe people whose results we can see and whose stories we can follow.

But the standard we'd like to hold them to, the standard we think the community deserves, is this: the product should be able to stand without the face.

Each of these brands passes the test differently and that's exactly the point.

Cécred brings the science and the lineage. The Bioactive Keratin Ferment technology is real, the clinical testing is real, and the family roots in hair care are real. Beyoncé's name amplifies all of it but unlike most celebrity brands, there is something substantial underneath the amplification.

Grow Good passes it through a different kind of proof. Not from a lab, but from a head of hair we've been watching for years, and from a cultural tradition of hair care that was never going to wait for a celebrity to endorse it. The Dominican heritage behind the formulations is the brand's most underrated credential and the most honest one.

Pattern Beauty passes it because the face was never really the point. The community was. Tracee Ellis Ross isn't selling us her hair. She's giving us back to ourselves. The brand was built for a community that needed to be seen, and it sees them. That's not a small thing. That's the whole thing, a brand built for a community can outlast any individual who founded it.

And Charlotte Mensah? Charlotte Mensah didn't need the test. She is the test. The craft came first. The product followed. The decades are the selling point — and they always were.

None of these brands wins outright. All of them are doing something real. But the question we'd like you to carry with you, the one the campaign doesn't want you to ask, is the same one we opened with: just because this worked for her, will it genuinely work for my hair?

Know your hair. Ask the questions. Buy with your eyes open.

And if the product can stand without the face that's usually a very good sign.

With love and curls,

xoxo

Curly Hair Diaries