Co-Founder Simone Mair On The Return Of CURLFEST
CURLFEST Co-Founder Simone Mair Breaks Down The Exciting Return Of CURLFEST
- CURLFEST co-founder Simone Mair shares her journey of learning to love her natural hair after college.
- The festival aims to amplify small businesses and provide education, empowerment, and community for natural hair enthusiasts.
- New 'Road to CURLFEST' experiences like fitness, brunch, and panels expand the festival beyond the main event day.
Simone Mair’s billowing natural hair stands out in a crowd. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s takes up its rightful space as a flower in the sun. It’s exactly what you can expect to see at Curl Fest. The annual hair festival is back after a year-off with new activations, new hosts, more panels and the same great melanin.
As one of the co-founders of CURLFEST and the Operations Director, Mair has her hands in every aspect of the festival. We spoke to her about what attendees can expect this year, the road to CURLFEST and the early journey of her learning to love her own natural hair.
“It actually happened after college,” Mair shared. “When I cut all of my perm off, I was still just wearing weaves [and] braids and I didn’t know what my hair looked like. And it was after I had that little bit of time between graduating college and having my first career, I decided to force myself to learn how to work with my hair, how to love it, how to feel beautiful in my hair.”
The Curly Girl Collective
Created by the Curly Girl Collective, CURLFEST was born to fill a void in the beauty industry at the forefront of the natural hair movement. And it has grown tremendously over the years and this year, fans can expect more events, vendors, panels and experiences.
“You can expect the same kind of Curlfest magic that we bring every year,” said Mair. “The Empowerment Stage is beyond the music and the products. People really just want to connect. They want to hear education, they want information about natural hair, and they want to hear experiences. And there’s so many tentacles to the Curlfest brand that it’s not just about hair, it’s beyond hair. It’s entrepreneurship. It’s talking about maybe hair loss sometimes. It’s connecting with other women who are going through similar experiences.”
HelloBeautiful is a media partner for this year’s CURLFEST and you can catch HB’s Editorial Director of Style & Beauty Shamika Sanders and MadameNoire Managing Editor Danica Daniel moderating panels at the event. In addition to the Empowerment stage, beauties love to vibe out to music from the DJs, the vendor marketplace and all the food offerings. And according to Mair, there are lots of surprises.
“We have a dope list of sponsors that will be on our beauty role and also our vendor marketplace. We aim to amplify all of our small businesses, so we’re very excited to bring them back. We have nearly 100 small beauty vendors, small businesses that will be serving the community at Curlfest.”
Most excitingly, Mair is looking forward to the Road To CURLFEST experience. “We’ve been hearing feedback for quite some time. So we launched Road to CURLFEST this year. People want to talk about fitness. People want to go to a brunch party. People want to go to a panel discussion or influencer dinner, a bar crawl. All of these things are ways that we can tap into and broaden the experience beyond the day.”
Tickets for CURLFEST are still available with a promo code. “Tickets are really low and reasonable right now. So we do encourage people to take advantage of that. Okay. There’s also a promo code that we have right now for the Curlfest experience and it’s “CurlFest26″ You get 25% off of all Curl Fest tickets. We encourage folks to take advantage of that too.”
Buy tix, here.
