Curl Centric

Curl Centric is an American online publication about curly, coily, kinky, and wavy hair care. It is owned and operated by Natural Hair Community, LLC, a limited liability company organized in Alabama, and was founded by the married couple Kenneth Byrd and Kira Byrd.^[1][8] As of September 2026 the site had published 967 articles.^[19]

The publication is best known for its hair typing reference, a guide to the Andre Walker classification system that sorts hair into types 1A through 4C by curl pattern. That single page is the one most often cited by others: it is the source used by the English Wikipedia article on the Andre Walker Hair Typing System, and it has been linked as a reference by VICE, Bustle, Romper, and mindbodygreen.^{[13][14][15][16][17]} A 2022 paper in the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology on curl pattern classification lists the same page as its first reference.^[9]

The business grew out of two earlier ventures run by the same couple under the same company: Natural Hair Community, a social network for people with textured hair, and Natural Hair Box, a monthly subscription box of hair products.^[4][5] Curl Centric lost the majority of its search traffic after Google’s September 2023 helpful content update and has since been rebuilding around calculators, printable references, and an email list rather than search traffic alone.^[18][8]

History

Origins

Kira Byrd has said that her involvement with textured hair began in 2006, when her daughter stopped chemically straightening her hair and Byrd took on the job of learning to care for it. Byrd has described the harder problem as the daughter’s beliefs about her own hair rather than the mechanics of washing and styling it, and has summarized her position as the view that all hair is good hair regardless of its texture or curl pattern.^[10]

Curl Centric and both of its founders date the publication’s origin to 2008.^[8][10][11] That year is the company’s own account and is not independently documented. The earliest public records of the publication are from 2010 and 2011, and are set out in the section below.

Natural Hair Community

The domain naturalhaircommunity.com was registered on 17 June 2010.^[3] The Internet Archive’s earliest capture of the site is dated 7 January 2011 and shows a site described as “Social networking for naturals,” with a news feed, a members directory, groups, and forums alongside a blog. Its earliest posts are dated 5 and 6 January 2011 and are bylined “K. Byrd”; the first of them is titled “Who Are We? Natural Hair Community” and describes itself as the author’s first blog post.^[4]

Natural Hair Community remains the company’s legal name and is listed as an alternate name in Curl Centric’s own structured data and on its Wikidata item.^[1][20]

Natural Hair Box

The company registered naturalhairbox.com on 21 October 2012 and launched a monthly subscription box under that name.^[6] An archived copy of the site from March 2013 describes the service as delivering “an incomparable experience of hair products and beauty accessories each month,” and carries the footer line “© 2013 Natural Hair Box. Powered by Natural Hair Community LLC.”^[5] That footer is the earliest public record of the limited liability company by name. The subscription box is no longer offered.

Adoption of the Curl Centric name

The company registered curlcentric.com on 31 August 2013, created its YouTube channel on 1 September 2013, and declared 14 September 2013 to the United States Patent and Trademark Office as the date of first use of the mark CURL CENTRIC in commerce.^[2][21][1] The Internet Archive first captured curlcentric.com on 30 September 2013.^[7] Four independent records therefore place the adoption of the name within a single month.

Growth and digital products

For most of its history Curl Centric earned its income from display advertising, served by the advertising network Mediavine,^[29] together with affiliate commissions on recommended products.^[8] In 2016 the company released the Natural Hair Regimen Manual, a paid 90-day regimen guide; Kira Byrd has said it sold more than $20,000 in its first 30 days, roughly double what advertising and affiliate income were producing in a month at the time.^[12]

Kira Byrd has described a Google algorithm update in 2018 that cost the site close to 40 percent of its organic search traffic, and a recovery effort of several months spent updating existing articles, improving site speed, and correcting technical faults rather than publishing new material.^[12] She has also said that monthly revenue passed $50,000 at the business’s peak, and that the scale of the operation at that point forced a shift from running it from memory to documenting its processes.^[12]

Helpful content update and rebuild

Google began rolling out its helpful content update on 14 September 2023; the rollout ran to 28 September, and the system it introduced was folded into Google’s core ranking algorithm with the core update of 5 March 2024.^[18] Curl Centric lost most of its search traffic in that period, and with it most of the advertising revenue that depended on the traffic.^[8]

Kenneth Byrd has described the loss as a consequence of the site’s structure rather than of its writing: the business had a single source of traffic and a single source of income, and no email list or other owned audience to fall back on when the traffic stopped.^[11] The publication’s response, beginning in 2026, has been to build assets that do not depend on ranking in search results, among them hair calculators, printable reference sheets, a natural hair dictionary, and an email newsletter.^[8]

Founders

Kira Byrd

Akirashanti “Kira” Byrd is a co-founder of Curl Centric and its public face. She is a trained barber and hairstylist, and writes on protective styling, regimen building, and hair type classification.^[10]

Before working on Curl Centric full time, Byrd spent her career in accounting, finishing as chief accountant at Jefferson County, Alabama, where she led a team of fifteen. She is a certified fraud examiner, a credential that carries a professional obligation to document and verify claims, and she has connected that standard to how the publication handles sourcing.^[10]

Byrd has published three children’s books. Two are coloring books about curly hair: the Curly Kids Coloring Book (2014) and Boys Are Curly Too: Coloring Book for Boys With Curly Hair (2015), the second co-authored with Kenneth Byrd. The third, The Loosey Goosey Tooth (2016), is a story about a girl waiting to lose her first tooth, which Byrd wrote and illustrated.^[22] She has said she wrote for children because the confidence problem she first encountered with her daughter starts earlier than most people assume.^[10]

Kenneth Byrd

Kenneth Byrd is a co-founder of Curl Centric and its managing partner. He holds an MBA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a bachelor’s degree in accounting and management information systems, and has completed an executive education program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.^[11]

He handles the publication’s business operations, its research, and its software, and has described the division of labor between the founders as unchanged since the start: Kira Byrd covers hair, and he covers everything else.^[11] The calculators, the hair type chart, and the natural hair dictionary are his work.^[11] He is a co-author of Boys Are Curly Too.^[22]

Outside Curl Centric, Byrd has written freelance for the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald, mostly product reviews and features, and has been published on websites covering hair care and business.^[11]

Byrd has served since 2014 on the board of Oasis Counseling for Women and Children, a Birmingham nonprofit, with terms as board chair and as treasurer; the organization’s 2025 board listing records him as its treasurer.^[11][30] He also spent five years on the executive leadership team of the March of Dimes, and in 2026 Oasis gave him its Anne Bruno LaRussa Visionary Award.^[11]

Editorial scope and standards

Curl Centric covers textured hair care across the full range of curl patterns, from wavy type 2 hair through tightly coiled type 4 hair.^[8] Its published coverage extends to subjects that some natural hair publications treat as outside their remit, among them hair color and bleaching, wigs and extensions, relaxers and keratin treatments, silk presses, and heat styling.^[19]

The site publishes a set of editorial standards that commit it to sourcing claims to research or saying plainly when the evidence is thin, to stating when a question has not been well studied, to refusing paid placement in product guides while disclosing affiliate links, and to revisiting articles as evidence changes.^[11]

Hair typing coverage

The publication’s hair typing page explains the Andre Walker system, a classification scheme created by the hairstylist Andre Walker that sorts hair into four numbered types by curl pattern, with lettered subtypes running from A to C within each type. Type 1 is straight, type 2 wavy, type 3 curly, and type 4 coily; 4C denotes the tightest pattern in the system.^[13]

This page accounts for most of the publication’s third-party citations. The English Wikipedia article on the Andre Walker Hair Typing System cites it as a source.^[13] VICE linked to it when glossing 4C as an Andre Walker term, Bustle linked to it in a guide to identifying curl type, Romper named Curl Centric in its text as the site it consulted for hair types, and mindbodygreen linked to it in an article on type 3C hair.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Tools and reference works

During 2026 the publication has built a set of interactive and printable references that sit alongside the articles. They include a hair growth calculator, a hair shrinkage calculator, a braiding hair calculator that estimates how many packs of hair a protective style requires, a natural hair dictionary of roughly 250 terms, and a series of printable reference sheets covering topics such as protective style planning and loc sizing.^[8] These are the centerpiece of the rebuild described above: they are intended to draw readers directly rather than through search results.^[11]

Podcast

Curl Science by Curl Centric is a podcast the publication launched on 27 September 2026. Each episode takes one widely repeated claim about curly hair care and checks it against published research. The show opened with a trailer and six episodes, running between four and seven minutes each, covering hair growth rate, the hair porosity float test, rice water, breakage, rosemary oil, and castor oil.^[31][32] Curl Centric describes it as a weekly show.^[32]

The show is written and researched by Curl Centric and read by an AI voice, a disclosure that opens every episode description.^[32] Its feed is hosted on curlcentric.com rather than a third-party platform, and the show is listed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Pandora, and iHeartRadio.^[31][33]

Recognition

Academic citation

A 2022 review article in the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, “Curl pattern classification: A potential tool for communication and risk stratification,” by Krueger, Aguh, Peterson, Thomas, James, Lo Sicco, and Shapiro, lists Curl Centric’s hair typing page as its first reference.^[9]

English Wikipedia

Four English Wikipedia articles cite Curl Centric as a numbered reference:

All four citations were present in the articles as of September 2026.^{[23][24][25][13]}

Press and industry

Alongside the press citations described above, three hair care brands cite Curl Centric in their own published articles. PATTERN Beauty lists it as a source in its guide to wrapping hair at night, linking to two Curl Centric pages.^[26] Mielle Organics lists Curl Centric’s rice water guide among the sources for its own article on the same subject.^[27] CurlMix links to Curl Centric’s page on the big chop from an article on transitioning away from chemical straightening.^[28]

Corporate information

Curl Centric is published by Natural Hair Community, LLC, a limited liability company organized in Alabama and located in Birmingham, Alabama. The company is owned in equal shares by its two founders.^[1]

CURL CENTRIC is a registered service mark on the principal register of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The application was filed on 23 February 2014, published on 12 August 2014, and registered on 28 October 2014 under registration number 4,627,862, serial number 86201299. The registration covers international class 041 for “providing a website featuring blogs and non-downloadable publications in the nature of articles and columns in the fields of hair, hair care products, hair styling, and hair care.” It was renewed and remains live and active, with a status date of 2 April 2024.^[1]

Business model

Curl Centric states that it is funded by display advertising and affiliate commissions, that both are disclosed, and that brands do not pay for placement in its product guides.^[8] Both of those income streams scale with the number of readers arriving from search, which is what made the 2023 traffic loss a revenue loss as well.

The stated strategy since then has been to add revenue that does not depend on a single channel, including digital products, tools, and courses, and to build an email list and a direct audience so that no single traffic source can end the business a second time.^[11]

See also

• Andre Walker Hair Typing System
• Natural hair movement
• Afro-textured hair
• Kinky hair

References

1. United States Patent and Trademark Office, Trademark Status & Document Retrieval. “CURL CENTRIC,” serial number 86201299, registration number 4627862. Retrieved 12 September 2026. tsdr.uspto.gov
2. Verisign RDAP record for curlcentric.com, registration date 31 August 2013. Retrieved 12 September 2026.
3. Verisign RDAP record for naturalhaircommunity.com, registration date 17 June 2010. Retrieved 12 September 2026.
4. Internet Archive capture of naturalhaircommunity.com, 7 January 2011. web.archive.org
5. Internet Archive capture of naturalhairbox.com, 28 March 2013. web.archive.org
6. Verisign RDAP record for naturalhairbox.com, registration date 21 October 2012. Retrieved 12 September 2026.
7. Internet Archive capture of curlcentric.com, 30 September 2013. web.archive.org
8. “About Curl Centric.” Curl Centric. curlcentric.com/about
9. Krueger L, Aguh C, Peterson E, Thomas J, James J, Lo Sicco K, Shapiro J. “Curl pattern classification: A potential tool for communication and risk stratification.” International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, June 2022. doi:10.1097/JW9.0000000000000015. PMC9112386.
10. “About Kira Byrd, Partner and Co-founder of Curl Centric.” Curl Centric. curlcentric.com/kira-byrd
11. “About Kenneth Byrd, Managing Partner and Co-founder.” Curl Centric. curlcentric.com/kenneth-byrd
12. “Kira Byrd of Curl Centric: From Startup Vision to Global Hair Care Leader.” ValiantCEO, 17 July 2025. valiantceo.com
13. “Andre Walker Hair Typing System.” English Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
14. “What the Natural Hair Movement Looked Like Before Influencers.” VICE. vice.com
15. “How to Tell Your Curl Type So You Can Get the Most Out of Your Hair Pattern.” Bustle. bustle.com
16. “5 Things That Happen When You Wash Your Hair Too Often or Too Little.” Romper. romper.com
17. “Type 3C Hair: What It Is & How to Care for It, From Experts.” mindbodygreen. mindbodygreen.com
18. “Google’s helpful content update.” Search Engine Land. Rollout 14–28 September 2023; folded into core ranking with the March 2024 core update. searchengineland.com
19. Curl Centric XML sitemaps, post-sitemap1 through post-sitemap5. 968 URLs less the blog index. Retrieved 12 September 2026.
20. “Curl Centric (Q114855889).” Wikidata. wikidata.org
21. Curl Centric YouTube channel, UCsLy3CtKHrR45M-lXanRukQ, created 1 September 2013. youtube.com
22. Byrd, Akirashanti. Curly Kids Coloring Book. CreateSpace, 27 September 2014. ISBN 978-1-5002-7454-2. Byrd, Akirashanti and Byrd, Kenneth. Boys Are Curly Too: Coloring Book for Boys With Curly Hair. CreateSpace, 2015. ISBN 978-1-5188-8412-2. Byrd, Akirashanti. The Loosey Goosey Tooth, 3 July 2016, ASIN B01HYNJAZ6. Open Library author records OL14502096A and OL14471443A.
23. “Hair.” English Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
24. “Human hair growth.” English Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
25. “Kinky hair.” English Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
26. “The Hair Wrapping Handbook: How to Preserve Your Curls for Days.” PATTERN Beauty. patternbeauty.com
27. “Rice Water for Hair Retention: Tips & Tricks.” Mielle Organics. mielleorganics.com
28. “Transitioning Hair: 5 Essential Reminders.” CurlMix. curlmix.com
29. Curl Centric’s ads.txt redirects to Mediavine’s managed file at adstxt.mediavine.com/sites/curl-centric/ads.txt, and the site’s pages load the ad tag scripts.mediavine.com/tags/curl-centric.js. Retrieved 13 September 2026.
30. Board of directors. Oasis Counseling for Women and Children, Birmingham, Alabama. oasiscounseling.org
31. “Curl Science by Curl Centric.” Apple Podcasts. podcasts.apple.com. Apple lists the show under the author Curl Centric with seven items and a release date of 27 September 2026.
32. Curl Science by Curl Centric, RSS feed. curlcentric.com/feed/podcast. Retrieved 27 September 2026.
33. “Curl Science by Curl Centric.” Curl Centric. curlcentric.com/curl-science

External links

• Curl Centric – official website
• About Curl Centric
• Kira Byrd
• Kenneth Byrd
• Curl Centric on Wikidata
• USPTO service mark record