The natural hair stylists at Curly Oasis salon are back with more curly hair wisdom, styling advice, and stories of hair trauma and healing as curlies of all kinds share their journeys and learning to embrace their natural texture and living authentically.

Wafaya Abdallah brings her decades of experience in the beauty industry, and commitment to clean beauty, to conversations with industry pioneers, inventors, entrepreneurs, stylists, and clients. Meet some of the game-changers working to elevate the industry, and find inspiration for your own journey to showing up in your highest power. While embracing natural hair is the entry point, these stories are about so much more: learning to accept, care for, and love our unique qualities is an experience anyone can relate to.

Michael Yost has been a hairdresser for 25 years, and a business owner for 16 of those years. Much like the rest of the industry, he didn't think much about styling curls or natural texture until the last seven years or so, even though he's a curly man himself. Around that time, he also sold his business, and now, Michael is the president of Strategies, which teaches salon and spa owners how to create, run, and grow a team-based business around a co-elevating culture that builds up profits by building up people. Like Wafaya, Michael and his organization believe that good numbers are a reflection of a healthy and happy staff, thriving in a culture of safety and growth, with a clear sense of purpose. Michael joins The Curl Code to talk about growing up curly in Pennsylvania, raising curly sons, and how much he's seen himself and his industry grow and change over the last few decades.

Strategies and Oasis Curl Salon have partnered on a technical and business training course called Crosswalk, bringing the culture of curl and team elevation to salon owners from all over the country. Michael visited Rockville for an on-site with the team, and to kick off the classes. Learn more about topics like leading with empathy, avoiding owner burnout, and becoming an eco-friendly salon on the Beauty Business Strategies podcast.

Luby Ismail came up in the same Egypt as Wafaya; longing for straight, silky hair, and taking hot irons and chemical relaxers to it to try and meet the beauty “ideal.” As an adult, Luby is an intercultural educator and public speaker, and realized one day that she couldn’t be authentic in her teaching if she wasn’t authentic in herself. Her journey includes living with multiple sclerosis, and in this episode, she educates us on ways even people with the best intentions can fail to see the fullness of lives that differ from their own.

From founding Connecting Cultures, which fights Islamophobia, to her husband’s documentary filmmaking, and her son’s environmental activism, Luby’s whole family is committed to using education to build bridges, making the "foreign," "familiar," and working for the betterment of humanity.

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Meet Luby’s husband, Alex Kronemer and his film company: https://www.upf.tv/