4C ONLY Is Sparking A Kinky Hair Revolution

It’s one thing to launch a beauty brand. It’s a completely different thing to spark a beauty revolution. That’s what 4C ONLY is looking to do for kinkier, tighter hair textures with a launch that feels more like a social club than a haircare line. Either way, we want in on this ground-breaking venture. 

[SEE ALSO: 7 Black-Owned Hair Styling Tools We Swear By]

4C ONLY arrived in November as the first-ever Black-owned haircare brand on the market dedicated to 4C kinks, curls and coils. And, it’s pretty much all-Black everything: Black chemist, Black creatives, Black hair experts. On top of that, in the midst of natural hair movements and Black hair magic, the brand is centering hair textures that have often been left out in beauty conversations, rendered invisible, or as an afterthought for most brand launches.

“It’s like with 4C hair, we’re all at the end of the scale and the fringes of the beauty world and people don’t really talk about us,” said 4C ONLY Chief Marketing Officer Alicia Ferguson. “And the revolution, right now, for us is helping 4C people be seen, be heard, and really retelling and reimagining the narrative around our hair. We’re really just creating space.”

We recently held space with Ferguson and Daryce Tolliver, NYC-based hair expert and 4C ONLY Hair Consultant, to get deets on their growing movement. As I often say, where two or more Black women are gathered, we will talk hair — and we talked about everything from ingredient choice and no-smoke formulation to the packaging and their desire to make the brand a lifestyle and not just a process. And, of course, what it means to have something made by women with kinky hair for women with kinky hair.

“It’s invaluable when someone from the community is able to create a product because it’s coming from an authentic place. If you’re creating for yourself or for other people that experienced similar challenges and walked the same life as you, emotionally it’s coming from a different space,” said Ferguson.

“And it makes it more genuine because your audience is you,” Tolliver added about the brand and its marketing. 

“It’s like looking at your sister. ‘Can I really lie to her about this? Do I want to make sure it’s factual? Do I want to make sure that I’m putting things out that will actually be helpful for her?’” she asked. “So I think even from the way that this product is even marketed, you can see the importance of it being for us by us.”

That’s why the first offering is called the “Too Easy” collection, “because wash day shouldn’t feel like a chore,” said Ferguson. It includes a conditioner, leave-in, and styling cream that actually live up to the hype. The four-step offerings check off boxes on nearly every pain point inherent to tighter textures: hydration and shine, slip and detangling, fragrance, ingredients, length retention, and heat protection. 

The handmade vegan and cruelty-free offerings are all-natural and infused with such things as shea butter, argan, grapeseed, hemp, and jojoba oils, and slippery elm and aloe vera extracts. 

“It has all the ‘juices and berries’ that your hair needs to be hydrated, to be healthy,” said Ferguson. “All of the ingredients that have been infused into these products actually took [those concerns] into account. A lot of the ingredients are organic or, even if we are using a preservative, when you look at the pH scale, it’s really low.”

Tolliver noted that many of the ingredients are good for both the hair and the skin. “I try to use skin as the [analogy] for people to understand how your scalp works,” she said. “The things that you wouldn’t do to your face, you shouldn’t do to your scalp or things that you are doing to your face would be helpful for your scalp.” 

That and the products’ performance in everything from deep conditioning and detangling to blowouts are what led her to stand behind the line.

“When somebody tells me something, I’m like, ‘Alright, let me see,’” said Tolliver. She said the leave-in’s “no-smoke” factor was one of the first things she tested out. 

“I have 360 square feet of salon space,” she said of her NYC-based A Curl Can Dream salon. “You shouldn’t smoke [hair] in there at all, the blow dryer shouldn’t smoke it all,” said Tolliver. “I put a pretty decent amount [of leave-in] on the hair to test the limits and there was no smoke! That is really the telltale of whether something can be deemed heat protecting or not, whether its boiling point is high enough to get the hair dry before it burns. This was a yes!” 

And for the product junkies, Ferguson said thinking about how products are typically used influenced their decision to put all of theirs in jars. “It’s based on market research — 4C women and just how intuitively we use products, especially when it comes to the styling steps,” said Ferguson. 

She added that it also addresses a common struggle: using all of the product. “There’s nothing more that I hate than trying to jam the bottle on the palm of my hand trying to squeeze out all the products,” she said. “I want all of my product; I paid for it! Here, you can scoop to the very last drop of all the products that you need.”

Being able to address all of these issues comes from conversations. Conversations are what sparked its inception three years ago, and Ferguson hopes similar conversations will help it expand its reach.

“I would love to go deeper into content and create more narratives of what it is to be a 4C woman. We said we’re starting a revolution, but it doesn’t end there,” said Ferguson. “How can we dive deeper and have these conversations that dive into what the pain points are that we have? And, even if you’re not 4C, we invite other people to join because the products are just good. We’re holding space for folks and looking to be in full stride and are just carving out our niche,” she continued.

“This is our space and we’re being truly unapologetic about it.”

4C Only is available at 4conly.com.