When Charlotte Mensah was a young child growing up in Accra, Ghana in the 1970s, she would spend hours watching her aunties having their hair intricately threaded, an ancient African technique where hair is wrapped tightly using yarn or thread. She didn’t know then that she would go on to become one of the most influential hairdressers in the UK. Renowned for championing natural black hair textures in mainstream culture, she has worked as hairstylist to singers Janelle Monáe and Erykah Badu, and the writer Zadie Smith.
According to Smith, in an essay she penned about Mensah’s magic earlier this year: “Charlotte can make a great mane of braids appear where previously there were only split ends and hair loss.”
A three-time winner of afro hairdresser of the year and the first black woman to be inducted into the British Hairdressing Awards Hall of Fame in 2018: the extraordinary course of her 40-year-long career is now the subject of an exhibition, Charlotte Mensah: Community Matters in west London. It charts her rise from growing up in the Ghanaian capital, through her early days as a junior hairdresser in London’s West End in the 80s, to styling celebrities for magazine covers.
The dynamics of black hair and the beauty industry have changed dramatically in this time. According to Madeleine Haddon, senior curator of the V&A East, who has worked with Mensah on the exhibition: “This is a story of Black British creativity and many of the prejudices and hurdles that she [Charlotte] had to overcome in the 80s and 90s, but also how she changed the beauty industry and transformed perceptions of black beauty.”
When Mensah moved from Ghana to Stonebridge, north-west London, aged 11, she first became conscious of her hair – and was bullied for it. Whereas the black children at her school wore their hair relaxed, in braids or in cornrows, Mensah had what she calls a “TWA” – a tiny weeny afro. “I turned up with this short hair and they all started laughing at me,” she says. “I used to cry … they just thought my hair was so funny and I looked like an alien.”
When she left school at 16 in the mid 80s, Mensah landed an apprenticeship at the first luxury black hair salon in the UK, Splinters in Mayfair, which opened in 1970. At that time, Mensah had only practised at home, styling her younger sister’s hair in “simple little braids, twists, cornrows”.
Splinters was worlds away from her bedroom in north London. The teenage Mensah was sweeping the floors at a salon where clients such as Diana Ross, and Flori Roberts – the eponymous owner of the first cosmetics brand developed specifically for women of colour – passed through the door. She then worked her way up through some of London’s top black hair salons, such as Terry Jacques in Knightsbridge, which was frequented by Luther Vandross and Brandy. “It opened my eyes to a bigger world that I didn’t think existed,” she says. “I saw those women that came into the salon, they were very independent, they had their own businesses, and I thought, ‘I want to be like one of these women’.”
In 1999, at the age of 29, Mensah opened her first salon, Hair Lounge in Kilburn. The location later moved to Portobello Road, in London’s Notting Hill, where, 25 years and countless awards later, Mensah can still be found braiding hair and chatting to customers every day. As Smith has written: “Charlotte Tilbury is unlikely to do your makeup at the Selfridges counter, but Charlotte Mensah will definitely braid your hair in Ladbroke Grove. She’ll also weave it, cut it, blow it out, colour it, treat it, whatever you need. Her craft is her passion, and she applies it to everyone equally, from the pop star prepping for a show to the auntie getting ready for church.”
For the last 10 years, Mensah has also had an eponymous product line, a high-end range of hair oils and finishing mists. It grew out of a need – growing up in the 70s and 80s, relaxed hair and curly perms were the fashion, but the products necessary for them weren’t sold in mainstream shops. Mensah had to travel out-of-borough to buy brands such as Dax and Sofnfree, that were imported from the US.
Now the landscape has changed. Boots and Superdrug have designated afro hair sections stocked with brands such as Camille Rose and SheaMoisture, for different black hair types. The celebrity-owned beauty business wave has ushered in brands such as Pattern by Tracee Ellis Ross, Cecred by Beyoncé and UK-based afro hair care lines, such as Afrocenchix. “There’s more access,” says Mensah. “So if I’m a young black girl living in Sheffield, I can go into my local high street or online and find something for my hair, which never used to happen.”
Mensah has also pushed the creative potential of black hair styling into the mainstream. One of the pictures in the exhibition is a photograph of the British boxer Nicola Adams in a Grace Jones-style boxed afro on the cover of Vanity Fair UK, styled by Mensah. Others of her covers include model Jourdan Dunn with spiralling braids for Heroine magazine, the singer Celeste with cornrows on Found And Vision, and writer-actor Michaela Coel bare-faced with Bantu knots for New York Magazine.
Her aim now is to address the remaining social prejudices surrounding black hair types, the notion that natural, kinkier hair textures need to be “tamed” or straightened to look “beautiful”. In particular, the lack of access to hairdressers outside big cities trained to style black hair types is a significant barrier.
Last year, the BBC reported that out of 259 colleges in England, only 82 said they taught a curriculum inclusive of afro hair care, and women are still travelling across the UK to get their afro hair cared for. Mensah suggests that education on treatment and styling of different hair textures outside the European standard is needed to tackle the issue. She has set up her own academy, based in London and Accra, which offers a training and mentorship programme for hair stylists.
“You should be able to walk into any hair salon on your high street and have your hair done, [an experience] which doesn’t exist,” she says, referring to the fact that many stylists still do not have the expertise to work with hair of all textures. “That comes from the education system … I can do all hair types. So everyone else should be able to.”
