I have a very fond memory of my sister and I in a Dalston carpet shop as children, mounting the rolled up carpets and sliding down as though we were at a theme park. That shop was owned by Siaw, a man who I knew to be a close relative of my mother. I haven’t seen him since I was a child.

A few weeks ago, I was reminiscing on those days and asked my mum how he was. As it turns out, he moved back to his home country Ghana some years ago. I also found out that Siaw was one of my mum’s first friends when she migrated to the UK.

For whatever reason, I didn’t expect this to be the answer to my question. Growing up, I assumed that Siaw, like us, was Nigerian, and that he was a part of my extended family. I didn’t expect my mum to tell me that someone who was initially disconnected from her had been looking out for her for over a decade, or that he would give her money for bus fares even when she didn’t need it. I didn’t expect that a man with no blood or ethnic relation to my family felt like home for the first half of my life.

As my mum finished catching me up, I couldn’t help but look inwards at my own heart, and outwards to my community. Bar what my faith calls me to do, which is to love my neighbour as myself, my community is primarily composed of people that I have been led to through circumstance. School, work, church etc; strangers in forced proximity who have become people that I love. Every friend starts as a stranger, but not every stranger is a potential friend.

When I look at the black community amongst Gen-Z, if you can even call it a community, I can’t help but believe that almost all of us unknowingly share this sentiment. In many situations, it seems that where we find comfort and joy, discomfort and arrogance follow, and they battle with each other. We complain, and then we farm out for fun abroad, and fail miserably at recreating it at home. We proclaim that the UK has ‘bad vibes’, but don’t even look at the planks in our own eyes to check if we’re the ones omitting them.

The reason I mention this is because it goes deeper than the events we hold; this energy permeates everything we do because it’s all we’ve ever known.

Our relatives purposefully chose to stay in the UK under the guise of creating better lives for themselves and for their eventual offspring. As we grew up, we saw the sacrifice behind the lives we were given whilst falling into the narrative that it would’ve been worse in the motherland. Our lives would have likely looked extremely different, and possibly in a negative way. However, the reality is that the lives of multigenerational immigrants and the socialisation that comes with that has created a large tension; why bother with the wider community when our families have proven that it can be done within?

We’re reliant on our families to create better circumstances because that is what they’ve tasked themselves to do, and we’re reproducing what they have given to us rather than developing it. A strong family unit will always be necessary, but now more than ever I’m realising that we as Black Brits, and especially as Gen-Z, have to move past that and deepen our relationships with each other.

Although the story of an immigrant moving to the West is one based on self-actualisation, it is ultimately incomplete without community. The relationship that my mum and Siaw had was one of protection and guidance. Two immigrants from different worlds who made themselves available to support each other and to be supported.

As for their children? We’ve been lulled into a false sense of complacency. The generations above us have set the seemingly necessary foundations for a successful life, and that’s all we’re concerned about. The fractures in this way of thinking are finally showing. In just the two examples of Professor Jason Arday’s dehumanisation and Diane Abbott’s previous abandonment, it is becoming fundamentally clear that for black people in the UK, being self-determined is not enough to relieve you from the hostility and hatred that certain people want us to experience. We need to move into a new era of Black Britishness that puts unity, respect and love at the forefront, because if we cannot do this for each other, nobody else will do it for us.

The Black Brit

I think one major concern is defining Black Britishness. In conversations with various friends, I’ve found that people are fearful of our cultural heritage being diminished in some way. In truth, as life continues this will more than likely be the case, but just because it stops being as potent doesn’t mean it stops being significant. We have the ability to move as a collective whilst acknowledging how vast and dazzling our individual cultures are. Our acknowledgement of each other should include acknowledgement of our cultures.

Certain forces at play want us to believe that we have to choose between being British and black; that if we are proud of what makes us black that the British side isn’t ours. When feeding into this narrative by denouncing our nationality, the decision of our comfort and peace in this nation always stays in the hands of someone else - it can be given to us and it can be taken away. Considering the history of the Commonwealth, I’d argue that we all, descendants of Africa and of the Caribbean, have a rightful claim to the UK, even if we are equally as or more passionate about the motherland.

We are in the unique position of being between two worlds, and this should no longer be justification for our humanity to be dismantled. Being black anything is a gift, and being Black British should feel just as rewarding.

To give ourselves some grace, the idea of the ‘Black Brit’ is still being conceptualised - in comparison to other parts of the black diaspora, it’s relatively new. This doesn’t mean that we should waste time. We are more than the history that has placed us here. We have the ability to go beyond and carve out our place in the world - and we’ve already begun. We have musicians that shape genres, organisations that put the Black British community at the forefront, and exhibitions that prove the palpability of our heritage.

We now have to make the individual decision to be in communion with one another, to love one another, and to treat one another as worthy of life, no matter our contribution to the world. Don’t let this moment be in vain.

Truer words haven’t been spoken since Audre Lorde said “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. Accountability in all things is a necessity, but we can’t keep relying on systems that have no intention of changing. We are the only change that we can rely on.

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Beats 360 launches with an idea that’s more interesting than most headphone releases bother with. Instead of picking one look and sticking with it, the ear cushions swap out entirely, letting the same £299.95 headphone change colour combinations depending on what you’re doing or wearing that day. The campaign film makes the point literally: Kendall Jenner surrounded by different versions of herself, each one styled in a different cushion colourway, building to the line “one headphone, every version of you.”

It’s a smart concept on paper. Headphones are usually the least expressive part of anyone’s outfit, one colour, bought once, worn until they break. Turning that into something you can actually restyle, for £9.95 a cushion kit during the introductory period, is a genuinely different approach to how a tech brand thinks about repeat purchases and personal style at once.

Beats 360 is available now in the UK for £299.95, with cushion kits from £9.95 during the introductory period. Order here.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

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There was a time when having a bad day was just having a bad day. You were tired, irritable. Maybe you cried in the supermarket because they were out of the yoghurt you wanted and, obviously, it was not actually about the fucking yoghurt.

You went home, you slept, you called someone, you carried on.

Now?

You might open Instagram and discover that your inability to choose a yoghurt without having an existential crisis could be caused by your attachment style, your cortisol levels, your childhood wounds, your dopamine habits, your nervous system, your limiting beliefs, your morning routine, your unhealed feminine energy or Mercury doing whatever the fuck Mercury is apparently doing this week.

And I say this as someone who deeply believes in healing. That is exactly why I think we need to talk about what we have done to it, because somewhere along the way, self-awareness became self-surveillance. And fuck me, we are tired. Not just tired from work.

Tired from watching ourselves work, rest, eat, react, love, heal. Watching ourselves watching ourselves.

There is an invisible little manager living inside many of us now, clipboard in hand.

Was that boundary healthy enough?

Was that response regulated enough?

Did you communicate consciously?

Are you drinking enough water?

Did you move your body?

Have you journalled?

Have you healed your relationship with money?

Did you meditate?

Did you get eight hours?

Have you stopped people-pleasing?

Are you embodying your highest self?

Jesus Christ.

Can I just have Tuesday?

Not an optimised Tuesday or a healing Tuesday. Not a high-vibration, protein-rich, nervous-system-friendly Tuesday where I wake at 5:30, scrape my tongue, expose my eyeballs to sunlight and whisper affirmations into organic coffee. Just Tuesday.

I think we were promised something very different. Personal development was supposed to give us more freedom, more choice and understanding, more room inside our own lives. And some of it has.

Learning why you react the way you do can change everything. Finding language for something you have carried silently for twenty years can feel like someone finally opening a window. Therapy can save lives. Good coaching can change trajectories. Understanding trauma can end generations of harm. This is not an argument against knowing yourself. It is an argument against turning yourself into a permanent fucking renovation project, because there is a strange cruelty hiding inside a lot of modern self-improvement. The assumption that wherever you are, you should probably be somewhere else. Calmer, leaner, richer. More secure and more productive. Less triggered. Better at boundaries, sex, parenting, better at being alone or better at being together. More healed, evolved and disciplined and magnetic. More you… Whatever that means…

There is always another version waiting just over the hill. And she wakes earlier. She has excellent skin. She never texts the wrong person. She does not lose her shit when someone leaves a wet towel on the bed.

She knows her purpose, she meal preps and she has healed her mother wound. Probably in linen. We laugh because we recognise her.

But beneath the joke is something much sadder.

A lot of us no longer know how to experience ourselves without evaluating ourselves. That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. We have become fluent in observation and terrible at inhabitation. We can explain exactly why we are feeling something while barely allowing ourselves to fucking feel it. We can name the pattern while still being inside the pain. We can say, “I am dysregulated right now,” while some small human part of us is simply trying to say: I am scared. We can say, “This activated my abandonment wound.” Sometimes the truer sentence is: I really wanted them to stay. We can say, “I need to work on my relationship with rejection,” while our human says: It hurt when they didn’t choose me. There is something unbearably tender about the ordinary language underneath all our sophisticated language. Maybe that is why we keep avoiding it. It is easier to turn pain into a project than admit that something broke our heart. Projects have steps. Heartbreak doesn’t give a shit about your Notion template.

I have spent years around people trying to change. Strong people, capable people. People everyone else relies on. And one thing keeps showing up. So many of them are not suffering because they refuse to grow. They are suffering because they have made growth another place where they are not allowed to be human. They turn healing into another performance and they become very good patients, very good clients, very good spiritual students, very good self-aware adults. They know all the language. They understand all the concepts. And underneath it? Some of them are still quietly asking: Am I acceptable yet? That question guts me. Because I think a lot of the self-improvement industry accidentally keeps answering: Not quite. Buy the next book. Take the next course. Heal the next wound. Fix the next habit. Become the next version. Almost there, almost lovable, almost worthy, almost enough. Keep going…

And obviously we should keep growing. Life changes us whether we participate or not. People die, bodies change, relationships end, children arrive, careers collapse and we move countries, we lose faith, we find it again. We wake up one morning and realise the life that once fit us is now strangling us.

Change is not the problem. The problem is that we have started treating every uncomfortable stage of change as evidence that something is wrong with us. We want the transformation without the awkward middle. The caterpillar and the butterfly are very marketable. Nobody wants to put “unidentified biological soup having an identity crisis” on a mug, but that is where most actual change happens. In the bit where you do not know… where the old thing is gone and the new thing has not introduced itself yet… where you are grieving something you chose… where the boundary feels worse before it feels better… where leaving was right and still fucking hurts… where becoming a mother can be beautiful and still make you miss who you were before anybody needed you at 3 a.m…. where success can arrive and expose how exhausted you became while chasing it… where healing does not look radiant. It looks like cancelling, sleeping. Disappointing someone or eating cereal for dinner. Not having a breakthrough, not finding the lesson. Not turning the whole fucking thing into content.

Sometimes growth is not becoming more. Sometimes it is finally refusing to keep abandoning yourself in order to qualify as “better.” And maybe that is the cultural shift we actually need. Not less self-awareness, but less self-policing. Not “stop healing.” Stop assuming healing should make you easier to live with. Easier to employ or easier to love. More productive, more palatable, more impressive. Maybe healing should occasionally make you inconvenient. Maybe becoming healthier means someone else gets less access to you. Maybe regulation does not mean remaining calm while someone repeatedly crosses a line. Maybe maturity is not being endlessly understanding and maybe sometimes the most evolved sentence available to you is: No. Or: I don’t want to. Or: That fucking hurt. Or even:

I don’t know who I am right now. And perhaps the most radical thing of all: I don’t need to solve that today. Because you are not a before picture, you are not a problem statement. You are not a collection of wounds waiting to be monetised. You are not your sleep score, your trauma response, your productivity streak, your attachment style, your body-fat percentage, your morning routine, your fucking potential.

You are a person.

Alive at a very strange point in human history, being asked to absorb more information, more change, more comparison and more pressure than your nervous system was ever designed to politely process while smiling on Zoom. Of course you are overwhelmed sometimes. Of course you contradict yourself. Of course you fall apart and of course you know better and still do the thing. Knowing is not the same as being ready. Understanding is not the same as being done and healing is not the same as never hurting again. And growth was never supposed to become another weapon we hold against ourselves.

Maybe the question is no longer:

How do I become the best version of myself?

Maybe it is:

Can I become someone I no longer have to constantly escape from?

Someone I can sit beside when life gets ugly, someone I do not punish for being tired. Someone I do not abandon the second she becomes inconvenient. Someone who does not need to earn rest by collapsing first. Someone who is allowed to change without treating every unfinished part of herself like a fucking emergency. I think I would like to meet that version. Not the best one, not the highest one and for sure not the most healed one. Just the one who finally stopped standing over herself with a clipboard. And came home.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

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I know we all recall the strange reality of 2020: the sudden uncertainty, the closed doors, the (very needed) social distancing, and the moment many of us realised our usual beauty routines were no longer accessible. For textured hair consumers like myself, lockdown created an unusual challenge — our relationship with salons, stylists and professional guidance was interrupted almost overnight.

So, what did we do? We went back to the drawing board. Recipes passed down through generations became our staples, and social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram became our new salons — a place to share, connect and spread knowledge on how to care for our hair at home.

Fast-forward to 2026 — technology has advanced, and social media has become our ultimate go-to for everything under the sun, birthing a new wave of hair gurus and critics — everyone has an opinion! Brands changed strategies, products launched, all claiming to be science-backed and evidence-led. But how has this constant access to information and shift in the industry transformed our buying behaviour? In a market saturated with endless product drops and clinical jargon, I’m trying to figure out the true cost of a curl — is it just financial, or is it tied to the mental toll of filtering out the noise? This structural tension poses a new question: Has independent, personal knowledge become the ultimate luxury in a space designed to keep us guessing?

In this article, I explore how textured hair consumers, including me, are navigating a beauty landscape shaped by money, identity, technology and information overload. Because the biggest question facing us now isn’t just what product should I buy? — it’s how do I know what actually works for me?

The Price of Conformity: Financial Deficits and Desirability Politics

It’s no secret that the rising cost of maintaining our hair is at an all-time high. Products, styling and general upkeep are slowly draining our pockets — and for textured hair consumers, the cost of looking after our hair can sometimes feel never-ending.

During my time as a Beauty Buying Assistant, I had the amazing opportunity to see first-hand just how much product exists within the beauty world. Looking back, moving into haircare was honestly a dream come true. I got to speak directly with brands about new launches, hear all the claims behind their latest “wonder products”, and understand the science and storytelling that went into convincing consumers why they needed them — and I won’t lie… I was completely sucked in. Launch after launch, event after event, I was in beauty heaven! Samples would land on my desk, products would be gifted, and I could experiment with different formulas without really thinking twice.

But then something hit me — I wasn’t actually buying these products with my own money…

Most, if not all, of the haircare products I accumulated during my time there were gifted. There was no real financial cost attached to my curiosity. I could try the latest treatment, the newest shampoo or the viral product everyone was talking about without having to think about the impact it would have on my bank account.

Fast-forward to now, and in a completely different field, I no longer have the luxury of trying a new product every other day. Once all the remaining product had been given away or used, I too began feeling that pinch. EVERY purchase now requires a little more thought.

“Do I actually need this? Will it work for my hair? Am I buying this because it’s genuinely beneficial, or because I’ve been convinced that I need it?”

And that’s when I started to dig deeper.

Because if I — someone who has worked within the beauty industry and has had access to education, products and conversations with brands — can still feel overwhelmed by the amount of choice available, what does that look like for everyone else?

Jamelia Donaldson, founder of TreasureTress, whom I had the absolute pleasure of meeting at a beauty event, has produced an incredibly important piece of research focusing specifically on Black consumer behaviour and textured haircare.

What immediately stood out to me from the TreasureTress Trend Report was a demographic disconnect that, although not entirely surprising, says a lot about the relationship between textured hair consumers and the industry.

“Black British women account for a staggering 10% of the UK’s total haircare spend, despite making up just 2% of the adult population.”

Now, me personally, I consider myself to be a DIY girlie through and through! There’s just something so rewarding about successfully recreating a look I’ve been wanting to try or mixing together my own natural-based concoctions. I started braiding my own hair in secondary school too, simply because my mum didn’t have the time or the expense to take me to the salon every time I wanted a new style, and I also wasn’t the best customer — if I hated my hair, believe me, I was taking it out the same day.

Being young, I was notoriously expressive with my hair. I dyed it, shaved it (thanks, Rihanna), braided it, slicked it — whatever you could think of, I did it. It was very much giving, “If someone else could do my hair, then I could do it too.” And because I understood my face shape and my features, over time I quickly learnt which styles suited me and which didn’t. So, often, going to a salon wasn’t my first point of call.

As a result, my personal expense when it comes to hair maintenance is considerably lower than some of my friends. Some of them have intricate styles like locs, so naturally they were exposed to the salon from an early age, requiring them to keep up with maintenance and keep those locs looking beautiful. Others just don’t enjoy doing their hair altogether and actually enjoy the ritual of someone else taking on the labour so they can sit back and relax — footing the bill after.

Neither approach is wrong — but it does highlight just how differently the cost of maintaining textured hair can look depending on how much time, knowledge, skill and access you have.

Interestingly, there’s been a major shift in the practice of hairdressing culture, and there’s equally been an increasing amount of conversation online around the experience of booking independent hairstylists, particularly those specialising in the styles that have dominated the textured hair spaces across social media recently — from wig and sew-in installs to silk presses, braids and natural hair styling. Many independent stylists have refined their craft and built successful businesses around these services, and rightly charge prices that reflect their time, expertise and demand.

At the same time, there’s an ever-growing conversation among consumers about the experience that comes alongside those prices. We’ve all seen the social media discourse: customers sharing stories about inconsistent service, perceived differences in how regular clients and influencers are treated, strict cancellation policies, deposits and late fees, or stylists cancelling appointments themselves with little notice. Of course, this isn’t a total reflection of every independent stylist, and there are plenty of talented professionals providing a top-tier service. However, the conversation itself reveals how consumers assess whether the overall experience feels worth the hassle.

And perhaps the most telling part of all of this is that some of us are heading back to the very women who started this whole thing: the traditional “aunties.”

The aunties never disappeared. They’ve adapted. They’ve learnt the trending styles, sharpened their skills and found themselves occupying a sweet spot in the market. They’re able to offer accessibility, flexibility and familiarity, often without the long list of terms and conditions that can sometimes make independent salon experiences feel incredibly painful. There’s something uniquely valuable about the service they provide. An independent stylist may charge separately for each stage of a multi-part routine or increase prices depending on length — most of the time, the final bill doesn’t include washing or treating a client’s natural hair — but aunties often provide a much more comprehensive service — washing, cutting, styling and finishing your desired look as part of one affordable package.

Community stylists shouldn’t just be considered as the “cheaper option” but as an integral part of an informal economy and community ecosystem.

For consumers like me, that difference matters. Because when you’re already trying to work out where your money is best spent, paying for a service isn’t just about the final hairstyle. It’s about whether you’re getting value, care and an experience that makes you feel like your money was well spent.

I’ve always been someone who frequently enjoys styling my own hair. When I’m over it, though, I’ll stick it out and take on the 4-day conquest to do my own braids, or I might just locate my 26-inch 5x5 lace wig and call it a day. Between dealing with a sensitive scalp and managing my fine hair, daily styling doesn’t give me too much grief. A slick pony can take me less than 10 minutes to do (on a good day). Keeping it casual, I can opt for a shorter-length extension for work — very respectable, very demure — however, I can always go for a longer length for the club! It’s a style that works incredibly well for me.

A twist-out for some women might be the perfect low-maintenance style — one that somehow gets better as the week goes on. For others, it might be braids or locs, allowing for longer periods between styling sessions. Some of us opt for wigs so we can leave our natural hair alone for weeks at a time, and others simply prefer going straight natural. There is no single formula for managing textured hair, and honestly, that’s part of what makes our hair so beautifully versatile.

The issue of wearability isn’t the style itself, but rather what happens when we step outside of our own routines and into spaces where our hair is being perceived. Hair density, curl pattern, length, scalp sensitivity and overall hair health can all influence what a routine requires, but so can the environment we’re wearing it in. What feels completely normal and manageable at home or a social event can suddenly feel like an incredibly calculated decision when you’re getting ready for work, attending an interview or entering a space where you know your hair is going to be noticed.

I find the conversation around curl patterns, social desirability and the actual cost of upkeep particularly interesting. Because the labour involved in maintaining textured hair transcends the physical and is often a mental game of conflicting truths: What is the best way to navigate the corporate experience as a Black woman? And more importantly, what unspoken rules have we collectively absorbed about how we present, and when do we decide that some of those expectations are no longer ours to carry?

There is an uncomfortable reality here: we can know that our hair is beautiful, versatile and entirely our own, while simultaneously understanding that certain presentations of it are more readily accepted than others. A slick ponytail might feel like an effortless choice for me, but for another woman, wearing her natural texture into the workplace may require an entirely different level of consideration. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with her hair, but because of the perceptions attached to it.

This is where haircare becomes more than a question of maintenance. It becomes a negotiation between personal identity, professional expectations and social desirability. And when we’re constantly having to calculate how our hair will be received, the cost isn’t always found on the receipt.

Marketing decoded: What Are We Really Buying?

Working in the beauty industry opened my eyes in ways I couldn’t have imagined — you truly get to see the amount of work that brands put into designing and creating products to solve all kinds of needs. Marketing has always interested me, especially the psychology behind it. I find it fascinating how a single product can be sold in completely different ways, reaching completely different audiences. And when it comes to textured haircare, the products seem never-ending.

The Black hair shop is a whole experience in itself; it’s almost like a socio-cultural relic that we all share. Products in their thousands line the shelves, from haircare to accessories — there isn’t anything you CAN’T find in there. It’s almost like a money vacuum; you go in for one thing and come out with two new shampoos, a new leave-in conditioner, some gummy wax and a lip gloss while you’re at it. You would think having it all at our fingertips would encourage us to have a healthier relationship with our hair; however, I don’t believe too much choice is always a good thing.

Textured hair has its own set of structural characteristics that influence how we care for it. Its curl pattern and points of curvature can make it more susceptible to tangling, dryness and breakage, particularly when it is manipulated frequently. That means the market has understandably responded with products claiming to address everything from breakage and frizz to length retention and scalp concerns. But this is where I start to question the relationship between what catches our eye and what actually delivers results. Are we choosing products because the packaging and marketing have convinced us they are the answer, or because we genuinely understand what our hair needs?

As technology advances, so does everything else — haircare included. What’s interesting to me is that, as much as marketing plays a significant role in influencing us to spend, we, the consumers, have more impact on the direction that trends are followed. Social media continues to influence the choices we make towards beauty today, and it’s also used as a collective voice to spread awareness, knowledge and education across the social sphere.

For many of us, YouTube was that girl! Influencers such as Jackie Aina, Aaliyah Jay and Alissa Ashleywould only have to mention a product and the makeup girlies would run to buy anything they mentioned. As apps like TikTok became more popular, regular people like me and you had the same amount of reach as major influencers, changing the way social media was consumed. Big brands were no longer solely in charge of trends; increasingly, they were responding to what we, the consumers, were getting into.

As our economic climate changes and things become more expensive, I think our relationship with beauty products is changing too. We’re becoming more conscious of where our money goes and, perhaps more importantly, what we’re actually getting in return for it. We’ve seen this shift happen in skincare over the last few years. I’ve experienced it personally through incorporating Korean skincare into my own routine, but as a former Buying Assistant, I’ve also seen retailers create more space for these brands and the conversations surrounding them.

However you feel about K-Beauty, I don’t think the appeal is just the sleek, chic packaging. A huge part of the attraction is knowing what you’re buying, why it’s there and what it’s supposed to do. We’ve started to care about real ingredients and real results, and I think that growing curiosity is beginning to influence the way we think about haircare too.

Throughout my life, I’ve suffered with issues such as dry scalp and breakage and, trust me, I’ve tried every product under the sun. When I was younger, my mum didn’t necessarily know what would work either, so she did what many of us have seen at home: she experimented with what she had available. At one point, she mixed my Sulphur 8 hair pomade with a steroid cream for my eczema, which eventually seemed to do the trick!

Looking back, I don’t think this was simply a case of using the “wrong” product. We were trying to solve a genuine problem with the information we had. And this is where I think the real gap exists: there is no shortage of products, but there is still a shortage of accessible education about what those products are for, how to use them and what the ingredients are supposed to do.

We see it all the time. Brands make big claims to entice us into buying their products, and what you can end up with is a vicious cycle: purchasing, using, not seeing the results, buying something else and, before you know it, keeping the money out of your pocket and putting it into the pockets of huge corporations. But this power shift has inadvertently changed who gets to shape the conversation. We can now question brands more openly, challenge misleading claims, test products and share our own experiences with other consumers. Increasingly, we can also work with brands to promote products because we actually use them ourselves.

Representation plays a huge factor in this observation too. Social media has not only created space for a more personable voice to be heard, but its use of UGC creators in advertising has boosted this even further. Growing up, it was rare to see someone with textured hair featured in a mainstream beauty campaign unless the product had specifically been designed towards Black women. There was no way you were going to see a Head & Shoulders advert with a Black girl with an afro on the television — it just wasn’t going to happen.

That didn’t mean Head & Shoulders wouldn’t work for us. But how is it possible to know whether it does if the only people you consistently see using it have straight hair? Immediately, you subconsciously categorise those kinds of brands with a certain type of hair and naturally go looking for something that feels tailored to you.

That’s why I think representation is about more than visibility. Lack of representation materially affected our ability to evaluate whether a product was intended for us. The industry didn’t suddenly discover that Black women buy haircare. It discovered that Black women were already buying it — and now better representation is making it easier for us to see where we fit within the wider market.

This is also why I lean strongly towards education being the key to a happy pocket and a healthy head of hair. Unless you had the privilege of knowing your hair from a young age, or were introduced to the salon way of life, treating textured hair could feel like Groundhog Day — years of manipulation and a lack of education around how to properly care for our hair can leave us repeatedly buying, trying and starting again.

I think it’s important to recognise that naturally textured hair has its complexities. It’s curly, it tangles easily and can be prone to breakage, so it’s crucial to find styles that suit your personal capacity for maintenance. I often wonder how different the Black experience would be if our hair wasn’t tied to this socio-political history. Wearing your natural hair can feel like something you have to grow into, finding a way to almost introduce yourself to a world that is often telling us that it’s not acceptable. What a freeing feeling it would be to just wear your hair however you wanted — and I feel that a lot of us have started to do this.

Everyone will have a different idea about what is considered “budget-conscious” when it comes to haircare, and this is exactly why this conversation is needed. Being cheap isn’t always the same thing as being economical. I personally would much rather invest in a routine that genuinely works for my hair within my budget, than continuously buy inexpensive products that don’t address what I need, only for those purchases to accumulate over time.

Sometimes, the cheaper option is costing us more.

The interesting point is that investing in your hair will look completely different depending on who you are. For the DIY girlies, that investment might be learning how to braid your own hair, trim your ends, or buying a steamer or heat cap that makes your deep-conditioning routine more effective at home. For someone else, it might mean paying for a professional appointment once a month because they simply don’t have the time, patience or desire to do their own hair. Neither approach is better. The real luxury is knowing what works for you and where your money is best spent.

Something I’ve noticed recently is the major shift a lot of us are making towards higher-end brands such as Redken, K18 and Olaplex. Yes, these brands are bringing more science-led formulations into the conversation, but I think the education and representation improving over time are also playing a key role in making them feel relevant to us. When we see women who represent us using these products, demonstrating how they work and what they can do, the gap between “this isn’t for me” and “this can work for my hair” becomes much smaller. It’s not rocket science; we respond to what we can see, understand and relate to.

And this is the main reason why I don’t see natural haircare and science-led haircare as opposing sides of some imaginary beauty war. They can work together exceptionally well, building your very own personalised hair regimen. Investing in an advanced shampoo or treatment for one part of your routine and still reaching for an affordable product from your local beauty shop for another is my kind of routine. There are just some products I love bouncing between.

The goal isn’t to build the most expensive routine possible. The goal doesn’t have to be using the cheapest products available either. It’s to develop an understanding of what each product is doing, what your hair truly needs and where an investment will genuinely make a difference.

The CURLNOISE. Edit: Investing in Expertise

Mastering your hair isn’t a journey you have to take entirely alone. Sometimes, the best investment you can make isn’t another product, but paying someone who can actually help you understand what your hair needs. If you’re ready to step out of the trial-and-error cycle and build a more tailored routine, finding the right professional can be worth far more than simply paying for a hairstyle.

For those looking for a more education-led approach to Afro and textured haircare, Hair Lounge by Charlotte Mensah on Portobello Road offers a full-service experience built around cleansing, conditioning and finishing, alongside treatments such as Manketti Oil and protein treatments. Their approach is a useful reminder that professional haircare doesn’t have to stop at the finished look — understanding how your hair is being cared for underneath it matters too.

For those wanting to better understand their curls and coils, The Curl Bar London offers curl styling and education, curl-by-curl cuts, steam and treatment services, with its team placing a clear emphasis on helping clients embrace and understand their natural texture. That education can be just as valuable as the service itself; learning how your hair behaves can make what happens at home feel far less like guesswork.

And sometimes, the most valuable thing you can invest in is a proper consultation. For highly individualised advice, expert Subrina Kidd at The Collective is another name worth exploring for anyone looking to build a routine around their own hair rather than simply following whatever is trending online.

The point isn’t that everyone needs to be booking luxury appointments every month. It’s that professional expertise can give you something a product never can: a better understanding of your own hair. And when that knowledge helps you maintain more of your routine at home, the investment can continue paying you back long after the appointment is over.

Ruka is another interesting example of what happens when innovation starts with the realities of textured hair. The UK brand has continued to rethink protective styling through its Braid-it Synths® 2 range, using collagen protein fibre in place of conventional plastic-based synthetic fibre and offering different textures to suit the way consumers actually wear their hair.

For me, that is where the future of textured haircare gets exciting. We don’t need to choose between what is familiar and what is innovative, or between the salon and the beauty shop. We need more solutions that help us understand our hair, care for it properly and make decisions that actually fit our lives.

Because investing in your hair should never simply mean spending more. It should mean spending with purpose.

Changing the Frequency: The New Rules of Curls

Falling into the curly, coily and kinky hair bracket comes with its own learning curve. Our hair is tied so deeply to identity, heritage and culture, but true understanding starts when we accept that texture is personal. There is no one-size-fits-all blueprint. A routine or product that works miracles for someone else might completely fail for you — and that’s okay.

Whatever hairstyle you choose to rock, the goal should be to do it from a place of knowledge and confidence. Whether you’re wearing a pixie cut, a sew-in or intricate Fulani braids, the relationship you have with your hair in between those styles matters too. The same energy, capital and concern we willingly invest in maintaining our protective styles deserves to be invested in understanding our natural hair. What does it actually like? What environments influence the choices we make? And how do we genuinely want to show up in the world?

Healthy hair does not have a singular look. There is no direct correlation between waist-length hair and optimal health, and the goal shouldn’t be to chase someone else’s version of it. At the same time, we cannot remain naïve to the amount of noise surrounding us. Through social media, community trial and error and emerging technologies, we have more access to information than ever before — but more information does not always mean more understanding.

That is why I keep coming back to the same idea: understanding has become the ultimate beauty luxury. The modern consumer has more power to question claims, investigate ingredients, learn from others and decide what actually works for them. In a market flooded with digital noise, knowledge is what allows us to filter it.

And perhaps that is the real shift we need to make. Surviving the chaos of the modern beauty market isn’t about choosing between traditional haircare and science-led innovation. It’s about knowing enough to use both intelligently. It’s about knowing when to invest, when to save, when to ask a professional for help and when you’ve already got what you need sitting in your bathroom cabinet.

It is time to let go of the pressure to do it all perfectly. You do not owe anyone a twelve-step Sunday routine, and your hair health shouldn’t feel like a second job. Once you understand what your hair needs, you gain something far more valuable than another product recommendation: the freedom to wear your hair however you want, in a way that fits your lifestyle, your wallet and your terms.

True luxury isn’t about buying another product; it’s about having the clarity to know what works for you. We are changing the frequency of how we look after our curls, putting ourselves firmly back in the driver’s seat. The latest viral product will come and go, but knowing your hair will always be worth investing in.

The CURLNOISE. Discourse:

The guesswork stops here. Has the constant influx of social media trends made you feel overwhelmed with your hair routine lately? What is one product switch or budget hack that has actually saved your wallet this year? Drop your thoughts in the comments below — let’s chat!

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

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We’re hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with Tobi Kyeremateng, an award-winning cultural producer and founder of Black Ticket Project, which has distributed over 35,000 tickets to working-class young Black people across theatre, festivals and exhibitions. She’s also co-curator of the Barbican’s Project a Black Planet events and gatherings programme.

Session Topic

How Tobi Kyeremateng navigated working with a cultural institution to curate ‘Project a Black Planet’: a deep dive into how she approached curating within the Barbican, exploring cultural institutions in the UK, their relationship with Black audiences and artists, and the role of public programming, creative engagement and creative learning teams.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 21st September

Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm

To RSVP please sign up below.

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“Why are you so obsessed with ugly shoes?” My sister asked me this one time;

“Are they ugly?” I immediately thought.

The question, however I struggled to give her a direct answer so instead I laughed it off and said, “it’s my personality”.

I suppose this question was always going to come, one way or another considering my recent shoe purchases. Perhaps I have an acquired taste. When I sit with myself and confront the question, I know it is more than taste or even personality for that matter. This means it’s important enough for me to need to unpack, as at the point of the question, the true answer felt slightly intangible. I then realised, this isn’t about shoes; it is about how we negotiate being different while growing into adulthood.

“Nolwandle has a rebellious spirit, and we need to pray about it”, my mother has always said. I have always chuckled under my breath when she said such. To pray about my rebellion is to infer there is something wrong with it. As a child, my mother would lay our clothes on the bed once we have showered, and during the autumn of the winters, she would lay out a lot of polo necks. To which I would refuse to wear. My younger sister had an equal amount of irritation when it came to polo necks.

When I said, “mom, I don’t want to wear a polo neck”, this is one of the instances I would be labelled a rebel. Now, I am not saying my mother is delusional, of course I had my rebellions moments, as every other child.

But to have agency over my body and what I choose to wear is not rebellion. It is ownership. At the time, I found polo necks ugly and frankly unbearable because the fabric would make the neck itch. What kind of child endures discomfort for the sake of aesthetics? Which my mother cared about, she was not just our mother but a stylist too, she made sure we looked good, whether that be civvies (civilian clothing) and or how we dressed at church. This really matters with her, if your dress was creased or she was not pleased with the styling in any way. Do expect her to tell you to change or you won’t be joining her in the car.

Over the years, I have had to learn to take agency over my style and be proud of it whether or not you will let me in your car.

As I write this, I smirk at the reminder that at my previous place of employment, I had a “colleague” that refused to have me in her car. I assume the aim was to exclude me and not have me a part of the team. I did the project anyway, our manager had to organise for me to be transported using the company car instead.

I am capable of standing alone, I accept the truth that some people will want to exclude or silence me. I can not afford to be a person that always wants others to strip me off my authentic garments, for an exchange of a seat in a vehicle.

I would much rather walk in my so-called “ugly shoes”, than exchange my freedom of expression and sovereignty to be a passenger in a stranger’s rustic vehicle. I know walking on this road will take longer, but my peace won’t be sacrificed. And when I arrive, I will arrive as an extended and good representation of my highest potential, not a shell of what I could have been, had I sacrificed parts of my identity.

Now if you were to look at my recent choices in footwear, you might just agree with her. You may also be someone who doesn’t want me in their car or next to them as a result of how I styled myself that day. The shoes I wear tend to make people do a double take, maybe even question my character for a moment.

And honestly? I’m incredibly proud of my most recent pair: Hot Pink Puma Mostros.

(this image does not belong to me, a mere depiction of my shoes, as mine are hot pink, not baby pink )...

They are a slick design that feels timeless, their sturdy when the laces are attached properly and they remind me of football. If football boots are masculine, Puma Mostros are most definitely femme.

Then I have a pair of sneakers from Zara, let’s call them “wanna be Balenziaga”. Without a doubt these will make you stop stare, and if you care enough, you will find yourself whispering, “did you see what Cheeky wore?”.

(this image does not belong to me, it is a mere depiction of my shoes) ...

If you are my mother, you will gasp and almost faint at the sight of them. As she did one evening at my sister’s graduation dinner.

For the dinner I wore a tight maroon dress with frills that fall diagonally from my hips to my knees. The evening was beginning to be a bit chilly so I also had a denim jacket on, as the dress revealed my shoulders. I remember for my hair, I had it braided in blonde passion twists that were shoulder length. This look was entirely broken down with the pairing of my “wanna be Balenziaga” and my mother was absolutely gobsmacked. She had to control herself as the only difference now was that I am no longer a child and of course she could not tell me to change at home, which was about forty kilometres away . It was slightly awkward as now everyone was looking at my shoes and the atmosphere went silent. To be honest I had no care for what they thought about those shoes; and my sister and I laughed off my mothers one minute panic moment. If I remember correctly her exact words were, “how could you wear those shoes?”. There was a brief moment where she questioned my life choices when she said that.

This moment taught me something. I can be unique, yes but as I grow and transition into real adulthood, I should be more cognizant about the spaces in which I choose to express my uniqueness. Not because I’m afraid of being myself or standing out. But because fashion is a tool. It can be a strong signifier of who someone is or who someone is pretending to be in that given moment.

What we wear speaks before we do. And maybe that’s what changes as we grow older: we begin to think more carefully about what we put on our bodies, what it communicates, and how we want to be read by the world. We are constantly negotiating our identity to blend in or be accepted by the crowd.

Watch what happens when I consciously choose to not do myself up, and package my face with makeup and conceal my hair under a wig. People change depending on how I package myself. That is when I know I am surrounded by dwindling characters and not humans who stand firm in who they are.

In those moments, they are perhaps affirming something deeper. That I am not ordinary, I do not want to blend in if the status quo makes no sense at all. Even in the moments I find myself being socially compliant or diluting my personhood, I always find that something in me resists it. Perhaps that’s what my shoe collection is really for. A reminder that I am unique and I shall walk the walk with pride.

On a deeper level, I do not believe that I am doing anything out of the grain and perhaps I am responding to the trend or resurgence of ugly shoes, which I believe has silently catapulted into mainstream fashion when “Crocs” had their big comeback moment.

I have a pair of those too, are you shocked?: Pink Crocs

(this image does not belong to me, it is a mere depiction of my shoes.)

The shoes are not rebellion - they are reassurance of my identity.

Mu ugly shoes were never about being different. They were about reminding myself that I am.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

Welcome to GUAP’s weekly newsletter.

We have curated a selection of creative opportunities for you to digest. We know how difficult and overwhelming it can be to find opportunities. So as a way to support your creative journey we have separated this newsletter into different mediums. We hope you find something that resonates with you and helps lighten the load.

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Following the release of their global campaign, “The A-Z of Timberland”, Timberland will launch a pop-up space on in London from Thursday 17th - 19th September during London Fashion Week.

We would like to giveaway a ticket to you and a plus 1 to attend the private closing party in partnership with Balamii taking place Tonight, 6pm-10pm.

Enjoy cocktails and performances by Saiming, JD.Reid and Heléna Star.

SIGN UP BELOW

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“Touch grass.”

It’s the internet’s favourite insult, urging people to step away from their phone, log off and come back to reality. But beneath the meme lies a fundamental, biological truth that we often forget in the rush of everyday life: we need nature to survive.

Spending time outdoors isn’t about escapism; it’s basic physiology. Getting out into open space strips back our mental clutter, lowers cortisol, and gives our overburdened nervous systems a chance to reset. Nature offers fresh air, warm sunlight, and a physical stillness you simply cannot buy in a city.

But what happens when ‘touching grass’ is treated as an exclusive privilege rather than a basic human right?

For so many of us raised in concrete postcodes, our proximity to Mother Nature is limited to depressing, dried up patches of ‘grass’ framed by dual carriageways and council blocks. Even these tiny spaces come with conditions. Some ironically guarded by rusted ‘No Ball Games’ signs that tell us our play, our laughter, and our presence are unacceptable. Growing up around those signs, we learn early that public space isn’t really ours to occupy freely.

This environmental deprivation isn’t an accident; it’s by design. Research from Friends of the Earth reveals that Black and Asian communities in the UK are twice as likely to live in green deprived areas. We are systematically walled off from the natural world before we even get the chance to explore it. When your daily horizon consists of grey tarmac and beige flats, the idea that nature is readily available to everyone feels like a cruel joke.

When we do try to venture to the countryside, the geographic, financial, and social divides become impossible to ignore. According to the UK Government, only a meek 1% of visitors to national parks come from Black, Asian, or minority ethnic backgrounds—despite us making up around a fifth of the nation’s population.

Being in the 1% is also a very physical feeling. It’s the uncomfortable experience of stepping off a rural train platform and immediately feeling the weight of the ‘white stare’.

The British countryside has been culturally coded for centuries as middle-class territory—a fantasy of national identity that rarely includes us. Walking through those quiet villages, you aren’t just a hiker enjoying the scenery; you become a hyper-visible outsider. You feel the stares from pub gardens and the lingering glances from passing cars. You end up carrying an invisible mental tax just to go for a stroll, constantly aware of your body in a space that feels inherently unwelcoming.

This isn’t a coincidence; it’s history. When the Windrush generation and South Asian migrants landed in Britain, they didn’t head for the countryside. They settled in concrete, industrial hubs like London, Birmingham, and the West Midlands—places where the work was, and where there was safety in numbers.

Back then, rural Britain wasn’t just unfamiliar; it was very hostile. Unsurprisingly, for many first generation immigrants, survival took priority over leisure. The idea of going hiking or ‘exploring nature’ was a luxury our elders couldn’t afford—neither in their pockets nor in their peace of mind. Over generations, that necessity morphed into an assumed cultural norm: we don’t do the outdoors. We internalised the idea that the countryside wasn’t built for us, so we stayed where it felt safe—within the boundaries of the city.

This disconnect is engineered early, long before adulthood. I spoke to a teacher at an inner-city school in Coventry who told me that, while school trips used to bridge that gap, budget cuts mean inner-city kids are getting out into nature less and less. For many of those kids, a single trip just an hour down the road is their first time ever seeing a sheep in real life, standing on a rolling hill, or catching sight of the ocean.

The transformation when these kids step onto open land is immediate. Freed from hyper-surveilled streets and the rigid boundaries of urban life, they can climb trees, run carelessly, and let their imaginations take over. That uninhibited play builds creativity, resilience, trial and error, and an innate respect for the environment.

The same spark was reiterated by Polly, a volunteer at Hackney City Farm: “The kids are in a state of pure wonder,” she told me. “What surprises me most is how fearless they are around the animals. We have these massive cows, and the kids are tiny—but they don’t care. They’re just filled with pure curiosity.”

That wonder is vital for child development and how young people map their place in the world. When you deny children access to those environments, you shrink their idea of what belongs to them. You teach them early on to limit their expectations of the world outside their neighbourhood.

For young people from the Global Majority across Britain, the pressure is doubled. We live in an era dominated by hustle culture, hyper-visibility, and digital exhaustion. We’re expected to constantly perform and work twice as hard, all while navigating spaces where our identities are under a microscope.

In this context, taking time to do ‘nothing’ in nature becomes a radical act. Rest is a form of resistance against a system that measures our value purely by our productivity.

Except now, the script is being flipped.

Disrupting this long-standing exclusion is a vibrant wave of diaspora-led creative collectives. Groups like Flock Together, Muslim Hikers, and Black Girls Hike aren’t waiting for an invitation—they’re actively taking up space and redefining what the UK outdoors looks like.

By offering safety in numbers, these groups strip away the fear of hyper-visibility and the awkwardness of being ‘the only one’. They provide a space where people don’t have to justify their presence or explain themselves. They prove that stepping into the countryside isn’t about seeking permission from a white counterpart—it’s an act of radical rest, a rejection of burnout, and the reclamation of a birthright that was ours all along.

At the end of the day, ‘touching grass’ shouldn’t be a luxury item. But right now in the UK, the stats and our own everyday experiences say otherwise. Access to nature has been quietly sliced up by race and class for decades. The difference now? A new generation isn’t asking for permission anymore. We’re stepping onto the land on our own terms, ignoring the side-eyes, and taking back what was always ours.

Reclaiming our space outdoors isn’t about waiting for an invitation. It’s about pulling up, breathing in, and remembering the countryside was never meant to be private property.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

At 28, 30 stopped feeling like a birthday and started feeling like a deadline.

My anxiety about turning 30 may be personal, but it has not developed in isolation. Online, success has become something we are expected to perform publicly, and 30 is often presented as the age by which our careers, finances, relationships and identities should make sense. For Black women, this timeline can carry another layer: the expectation to overcome structural barriers, honour our families’ sacrifices and become examples for those coming behind us.

wo years left and far too much life to figure out.

The life I thought I would have

When I imagined turning 30, I pictured myself at the peak of my career. I would have my dream job, earn enough money to enjoy my life and experience financial freedom. I would have my own car, my own home, investments and a successful relationship.

Essentially, I thought I would have it all together.

Now that I am approaching 30, the reality looks different. I have only recently started investing. I am progressing in my career, but I am also transitioning toward something that still needs time to build. I have not reached the financial freedom I imagined; I am single, and there are still parts of my identity I am figuring out.

I understand myself far better than I did in my mid-twenties. Yet when I focus on the milestones I have not reached, it becomes difficult to recognise how far I have come.

Where did this timeline come from?

Let’s not lie: social media has influenced it.

Online, approaching 30 often looks like finally having everything together. You have the salary, the beautifully decorated home, the carefully planned holidays and the independence to live alone. You have a space that belongs entirely to you, where you can rediscover yourself before considering marriage or cohabitation.

The women we compare ourselves to can appear to have achieved all of this and more. There is nothing wrong with admiring their success, but we often compare our entire reality with the parts of their lives they have chosen to show us.

We see the announcement, not always the years of uncertainty that came before it. We see the new home, but not necessarily the assistance, sacrifices or setbacks behind the purchase. We see the dream career, but not every rejection, sleepless night or moment of doubt.

My generation has experienced adulthood with unprecedented access to other people’s lives. We are not only living our own; we are watching thousands of other people live theirs at the same time. There is always another person to compare ourselves with and another milestone we seemingly should have reached already.

But social media is only part of the story.

My expectations also came from my community and from wanting more for myself than circumstances allowed my parents. I wanted to become the first person in my family to achieve certain things: the first to buy a home, the first to reach particular career goals and one of the first to complete two degrees, including a master’s.

For me, success has never felt entirely individual. It carries the hope of making my parents proud, creating opportunities that were previously unavailable to my family, and showing those coming after me what may be possible. Reaching a milestone can feel like evidence that the sacrifices made before me meant something.

That ambition came from love and hope. However, when your progress feels connected to an entire family’s progress, an ordinary delay can begin to feel like a much bigger failure.

The difficulty of being the first

The difficult thing about being the first is that there is not always someone around you who has already reached the place you are trying to go.

You may inherit ambition without inheriting the blueprint, professional connections or financial knowledge needed to navigate it. Without direct access to people who have achieved similar goals, you often have to build from the bottom up. You discover what works, make mistakes and learn how to correct them. When something goes wrong, you have to find the strength to recover and continue.

Being the first can also make you feel responsible for those who come after you. I want to be an example, but I also want to remain accessible. I want people to be able to approach me for support, guidance and honest advice.

For some Black women, success comes with an unspoken expectation that we will hold the door open once we enter rooms our families or communities have historically been excluded from. That responsibility can be meaningful, but it can also make personal ambition feel like a community assignment.

When strength becomes an expectation

Black women are frequently praised for being strong, resilient and able to overcome difficult circumstances. While resilience can be empowering, constantly being described as strong can leave little room for uncertainty, softness or asking for help.

When I feel behind, I am not only confronting my personal expectations. I am also confronting the idea that I should be able to handle pressure without letting anyone see its effect on me.

For some Black women, this exists alongside the message that we must work twice as hard to reach the same places as others. In careers, business, and creative industries, many of us have encountered situations where we felt required to prove our competence, increase our visibility, and navigate biases associated with being both Black and female.

We can be celebrated for breaking ceilings while receiving little acknowledgement of the emotional exhaustion of repeatedly entering spaces not designed with us in mind.

When achievement still feels insufficient

I have completed two degrees. I have entered the technology industry, started developing my writing career, and created my own platform to pursue my passion for the creative space.

Those are significant achievements.

However, I devoted much of my early and mid-twenties to education. Because so much of my energy went into that area, I did not have the same knowledge or capacity to focus on everything else.

I was learning how to enter professional spaces while also trying to understand financial systems that were rarely discussed around me. I did not grow up surrounded by investment conversations, property strategies or people who could show me how wealth is built. I have had to begin developing that knowledge for myself.

This is why comparing outcomes without comparing access is misleading. Two people may be the same age but begin with completely different levels of knowledge, support, security and opportunity.

When I compare myself to someone who spent their twenties building wealth or pursuing a completely different path, it becomes easy to feel behind. But that comparison ignores what I was building during the same period.

My progress is not insignificant simply because it happened in a different order.

Releasing 30 as a deadline

If I stopped treating 30 as a benchmark, I would give myself more credit.

I would recognise the work it took to complete two degrees, establish myself in technology, begin transitioning towards the career I want and create a space for my writing. I would stop letting the absence of a single achievement cancel out everything I have already accomplished.

A healthier definition of success would include more than money, property and relationship status. It would include mental stability, positive relationships, and a community that encourages me to reach places I might not have considered on my own.

It would also include contentment not as an excuse to stop growing, but as the ability to appreciate where I am while continuing to work towards where I want to be.

I do not want to abandon ambition. I want to release the belief that ambition must follow a perfect timeline.

Black women should not have to carry everybody else’s burdens. Nor should working twice as hard become the measure of our worth. We deserve examples of Black womanhood that include rest, uncertainty, reinvention and journeys that take longer than expected. We should be allowed to become without constantly turning our lives into proof of resilience.

We can honour our families, support our communities and remain ambitious without treating every delayed milestone as a personal failure.

The next generation needs honest examples of women who discuss how long meaningful things can take, acknowledge that progress includes setbacks, and understand that longevity is more valuable than a single fleeting moment of recognition.

There will always be another goal and another level to reach. If we do not learn to value the process, arriving will simply leave us searching for our next high.

Approaching 30 is not the end of becoming. This isn’t the final version of who we are.

It is simply another beginning.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

We’re hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with Tobi Kyeremateng, an award-winning cultural producer and founder of Black Ticket Project, which has distributed over 35,000 tickets to working-class young Black people across theatre, festivals and exhibitions. She’s also co-curator of the Barbican’s Project a Black Planet events and gatherings programme.

Session Topic

How Tobi Kyeremateng navigated working with a cultural institution to curate ‘Project a Black Planet’: a deep dive into how she approached curating within the Barbican, exploring cultural institutions in the UK, their relationship with Black audiences and artists, and the role of public programming, creative engagement and creative learning teams.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 21st September

Time: 6:30pm - 7:30pm

To RSVP please sign up below.

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In 1984, Jim Jannard was driving along California’s Pacific Coast Highway when sunlight began entering his sunglasses from the side. The problem seemed banal until he compared them with the motocross goggles he had been developing. The goggles covered the face properly. The sunglasses did not.

So he went home and made something new.

The first prototype for what became Oakley’s Eyeshade was assembled from a Lexan goggle lens, a coat hanger and electrical tape. It looked less like an accessory than a piece of sporting equipment that had escaped its intended environment. Oakley would spend the following decades turning that attitude into a design language: wraparound lenses, sculptural frames, technical materials, objects that seemed to belong to a future in which sports equipment no longer had to apologise for looking strange.

Fifteen years later, a footballer walked onto a pitch wearing a pair of them.

And suddenly, the history of Oakley became entangled with the history of Edgar Davids.

There is something almost perversely appropriate about the fact that the most recognisable accessory in Davids’ career was not chosen because he wanted to look distinctive.

He needed it.

Davids developed glaucoma after a series of eye injuries in 1995 and underwent surgery. By 1999, he was playing in protective glasses. He first wore them publicly for the Netherlands against Belgium in September of that year. The orange-tinted lenses were functional too. Davids later explained that the colour helped him distinguish the white ball against the green pitch.

The object had a medical purpose.

Davids gave it a cultural one.

By the time Euro 2000 arrived, the glasses had become so inseparable from him that Le Monde was already writing about the strange spectacle of a Juventus midfielder walking around Amsterdam in black wraparound frames and orange lenses. The newspaper noted that the original medical necessity had developed into something else: Davids had simply grown attached to them.

That is one of the great accidents in football style.

Something happens to your body, you find a way to accommodate it, and eventually the thing that was supposed to make you less conspicuous becomes the first thing everyone notices.

But the glasses only worked because there was already an Edgar Davids underneath them.

He had been building that character for years.

Born in Paramaribo, Suriname, in 1973 and raised in the Netherlands, Davids belonged to a generation of Dutch footballers whose presence complicated the country’s increasingly polished image of itself. The Netherlands of the 1990s was often sold abroad through the elegance of Total Football, Ajax academies and an almost architectural idea of how football should be played. Davids represented another side of that story: Surinamese heritage, Amsterdam street football, Black Dutch identity, basketball, hip-hop and an appetite for everything that existed outside the conventional football curriculum.

His world was larger than football.

A remarkable 1999 profile by Simon Kuper captures this better than most biographies do. Kuper describes Davids as an autodidact obsessed with basketball players and rappers, someone who collected tricks rather than football trivia. When he was excluded from the Dutch squad for the 1994 World Cup, he spent the tournament playing on Amsterdam playgrounds and practising things he had seen on television.

That detail is revealing.

Davids wasn’t simply learning football from football, he was absorbing culture.

And you can see it in the way he eventually looked.

The dreadlocks were part of it. The jewellery was part of it. The glasses were part of it. The clothes were part of it. None of these elements existed in isolation because Davids did not seem interested in the idea that a footballer had to have one carefully approved version of himself.

He was curious, confrontational, occasionally difficult, and incredibly good.

At Ajax, Louis van Gaal gave him the nickname that would follow him for the rest of his career: the Pitbull. It was not particularly poetic, but it was accurate. Davids was tenacious, aggressive and relentless in midfield, a player whose size was almost irrelevant to the amount of territory he could occupy.

He won the UEFA Cup with Ajax in 1992 and the Champions League in 1995. After a difficult period at Milan, he moved to Juventus in December 1997 and became one of the most important players in Marcello Lippi’s midfield. By the late 1990s, he was no longer simply one of the young products of Ajax’s academy. He was one of the defining midfielders in European football.

The Juventus years are where the visual lore really crystallised.

There was Zidane, all height and grace, making the game appear almost weightless.

There was Del Piero, with his immaculate technical precision and cultivated Italian elegance.

And then there was Davids.

Shorter. Faster. Dreadlocked. Goggles on. Legs constantly moving. Tackling as though possession were something that had been personally stolen from him.

He looked almost futuristic in a team whose image was otherwise rooted in the grandeur of European football.

The contrast mattered because Davids wasn’t beautiful in the traditional footballing sense. He was compelling.

That is a different quality. Beauty asks you to look, compulsion makes you keep looking. And trully, his personality helped.

The same 1999 Kuper profile begins with Davids telling the journalist that he is badly dressed. He had apparently done this before. The article describes a player who was aggressive, proud, volatile and extremely certain of his own judgement. At one point he approached tennis player Richard Krajicek in an Amsterdam bar, introduced himself despite being unknown to him and confidently announced that he would soon be playing for Holland and driving a big car.

It sounds almost fictional, but that is the thing about Davids. He had the peculiar quality of somebody who seemed to have already imagined his own mythology.

And fashion, for him, was not a decorative afterthought.

He understood clothes as another form of language.

In 1999, the same year his goggles were becoming inseparable from his footballing identity, Davids founded Monta Soccer in Amsterdam.

The timing is extraordinary.

The contemporary relationship between football and fashion can make it difficult to remember how divided those worlds once were. Performance clothing belonged to sport. Streetwear belonged somewhere else. A footballer might wear expensive trainers and denim away from the pitch, then change into a tracksuit for training. The two wardrobes had different purposes and different ideas about who they were for.

Davids thought that separation was ridiculous.

He later described street football as inseparable from fashion and said that, when he was playing, the options were essentially limited to tracksuits that made players look as though they were on their way to the gym. Monta was designed to occupy the space between on-pitch performance and off-pitch lifestyle.

The reaction to the brand was telling.

People did not know what category it belonged to, was it sport or was it lifestyle?

That uncertainty is almost a perfect description of Davids himself.

He was a footballer who wanted to understand fashion, a sportsman interested in design.

A Dutch player born in Suriname who became synonymous with Italian football.

A man whose most famous accessory came from a medical condition but became a marker of personal style.

A player whose image was aggressive while his creative interests were surprisingly expansive.

The categories kept failing him, but Davids seemed to enjoy that.

Years later, he took the fashion interest further. While living in London, he studied at Central Saint Martins, learning about design, materials and the business behind fashion. Forbes described the transition from football into fashion as organic, pointing out that Davids had already created Monta more than a decade before pursuing formal fashion education. He later developed Monta Heritage, a more refined continuation of the original concept.

That part of his story is often treated as a footnote.

It shouldn’t be.

Because it changes the way we understand everything that came before it.

Davids wasn’t a footballer who happened to dress well, he was somebody genuinely interested in the mechanics of style. He wanted to understand why things worked.

In a 2016 interview about fashion, photography and surrealism, he spoke about learning the entire creative process at Central Saint Martins, from concepts and drawing to materials. He also designed shoes, working through the process from the initial idea to the factory.

There is a particular intelligence in that trajectory.

Most athletes become interested in fashion because fashion becomes interested in them while Davids seems to have gone in the opposite direction.

He was already looking. This is perhaps why his image feels surprisingly contemporary now.

Football has become one of fashion’s most productive cultural territories. Players are no longer merely photographed in their uniforms. Their arrival at the stadium can generate almost as much attention as the match. Their clothes become editorial material. Football shirts move through streetwear. Luxury brands sign players. Players become collaborators, ambassadors, designers and, increasingly, brands in their own right.

Davids himself has spoken about how different the landscape would have been for him today. When he was playing, dressing rooms were much more uniform. Social media has made every player’s clothing visible, allowing footballers to express themselves in ways that would have been less noticeable in his era. He said, rather tellingly, that he would have had “a ball” with today’s freedom.

Of course he would.

Imagine Edgar Davids in 2026. He would have been unbearable, and probably brilliant.

The interesting thing is that he does not need to be retroactively inserted into contemporary fashion. Contemporary fashion keeps finding its way back to him.

GQ Netherlands recently revisited his wardrobe, moving from Amsterdam streetwear label Patta to Roberto Cavalli and looking back at outfits from the early 2000s alongside his more recent appearances. The point isn’t that Davids has maintained one fixed aesthetic. Quite the opposite. He has always been able to move between streetwear, tailoring, luxury and sportswear without losing the underlying character.

That is what makes the image durable; Trends change, Davids doesn’t really have a trend.

He has a vocabulary and the vocabulary is much broader than the goggles.

The goggles simply happen to be the punctuation mark. They made his face immediately legible.

Put him in a Juventus shirt and he was Davids, put him in a Netherlands shirt and he was Davids, in streetwear and he was Davids, in Cavalli and, somehow, still Davids.

That is harder than it sounds!

Most people with a strong aesthetic become trapped by it. The signature becomes costume. The thing that once distinguished you eventually becomes the thing that prevents you from changing.

Davids managed to avoid that.

The clothes evolved, the silhouette changed, the environments changed, yet the personality remained recognisable.

And there is another reason the glasses matter: they complicate the usual relationship between disability and image.

In most celebrity culture, an imperfection is something to conceal, correct or work around until it disappears from the photograph.

Davids did the opposite.

The thing that marked a vulnerability became the thing that made him visually indestructible.

There is something almost beautiful about that transformation, but it is also very practical. Davids never presented the glasses as some elaborate act of rebellion. They were functional. He needed them. He continued playing.

The fashion happened afterwards.

That distinction is important because it explains why they never looked like a costume.

He wasn’t wearing the future, he was wearing what he needed.

And because Edgar Davids was Edgar Davids, what he needed happened to look extraordinary.

Oakley had spent years making eyewear that borrowed from motocross, cycling and other forms of high-performance sport. Its original philosophy was rooted in experimentation, engineering and a refusal to make sports equipment look conventional.

Davids took that philosophy somewhere Oakley probably could not have predicted and that is why Edgar Davids is more interesting than the phrase “football style icon” allows.

His influence isn’t simply that footballers later started caring about clothes.

It is that he demonstrated how a person could become an aesthetic without becoming artificial.

His appearance wasn’t separate from his temperament. His clothes weren’t separate from his interests. His football wasn’t separate from his personality. The contradictions were the point.

The glasses were medical -> The glasses became fashionable.

The footballer became a fashion figure -> The fashion figure went back to studying.

The street player built a brand -> The aggressive midfielder became interested in surrealism, photography, design and materials.

The man who once told a stranger he was badly dressed eventually became the person whose own wardrobe would be revisited decades later as a source of inspiration.

There is a lovely absurdity to the whole thing.

A pair of goggles originally designed for athletes became one of the most recognisable objects in football while a player born in Paramaribo became one of the defining faces of Amsterdam and Turin.

A man famous for breaking up attacks became an unlikely bridge between football, street culture and fashion and a medical necessity became one of the strongest pieces of visual authorship in the history of the sport.

You can still see the original logic in the photographs. It doesn’t look like somebody trying to create an icon, it looks like somebody who had become too specific to be mistaken for anyone else.

That is probably the highest form of style.

Not being ahead of fashion or being dressed better than everyone else. Not even being particularly fashionable.

Just being so completely, stubbornly yourself that eventually the rest of the culture has to find a vocabulary for you.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

We're hosting a free online event exclusively for GUAP community members with Shanice Mears, a British creative entrepreneur and advertising leader. She is best known as the co-founder of The Elephant Room, an independent creative company focused on culture, community and diverse creative talent.

Session Topics

- Building a community that matters: Shannie Mears shares lessons on building The Guestlist, an exclusively inclusive online network providing opportunities, industry networks, events and collaboration

- Positioning yourself for success: Over the last few years, Shannie Mears has accumulated a range of accolades, including Forbes 30 under 30 and Management Today 35 under 35. Intentional about creating her own doors and tables, learn Shannie’s top 5 tips to position yourself for success.

Curated & Hosted by OURPPLS

Date: Monday 14th September

Time: 6:30pm

To join please click the link below.

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The two trace their chemistry back to family, to growing up on opposite sides of a connection between Ghana and Jamaica that runs deeper than either of them expected, through Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, the transatlantic slave trade, and the Maroons who carried Ghanaian roots into Jamaican soil centuries ago. Three years and nine tracks later, that history sits underneath the drums.

Watch the full conversation now.

Listen to the album here.

Welcome to GUAP’s weekly newsletter.

We have curated a selection of creative opportunities for you to digest. We know how difficult and overwhelming it can be to find opportunities. So as a way to support your creative journey we have separated this newsletter into different mediums. We hope you find something that resonates with you and helps lighten the load.

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If Adéla’s ‘Ain’t In LA’ is marking a general consensus for the music industry and its listeners then it’s safe to say that the people are yearning for the underdogs to win. Fed up of the long-running chokehold that American artists’ have held over charts and pop culture, music fans have taken to social media to express their appreciation for any non-stateside stars via collages soundtracked by the unofficial song-of-the-summer. Artists like Zara Larsson, Tyla and Ayra Starr have appeared with the text “The baddest b*tches ain’t in LA, they’re from…” before adding the act’s respective country.

Considering this, Spotify’s latest campaign couldn’t have come at a better time, as it’s Hometown series sees three UK-based musicians, performing in and celebrating their beloved birthplaces. Nemzzz and Beebadoobee are two acts taking part, but it’s Walsall wonder Jorja Smith taking the reins and kickstarting the initiative gracing Walsall Arena with an intimate performance that can never be replicated.

Rapper and collaborator Wesley Joseph stepped on stage and proved that the West Midlands are quietly-producing some serious talent. The crowd were fixed on the ‘Ghostin’ songwriter’s pen game and stage presence. Joseph’s debut album Forever Ends Someday dropped back in April and it seems Jorja’s audience are familiar with a track of his or two, especially ‘July’.

Sporting a barbie-adjacent crimped ponytail, Smith walked out grinning widely to the tune of ‘Blue Lights’, the song that started it all back in 2016, delivering some impressive belts. Jorja tugged heartstrings twice in the span of five minutes instantly reciting an acapella version of ‘Teenage Fantasy’ paired with blue and purple hue lighting.

Her Afro House collaboration with Wizkid ‘Alive’ shortly follows and creates a gentle flow among the crowd. This only builds as ‘I Lied, You Lied’ plays out next and ‘For Life’ which remind fans Smith isn’t just an R&B star, she’s a musical chameleon. Previously flirting with EDM sounds via Preditah link-up ‘On My Mind’ nine years prior, now Smith is promoting her newly-released and fully-fledged Dance LP What Are The Odds.

The 29-year-old then introduced the Blue Lights Choir to the stage, a group set up by Jorja in 2022 for young girls aged 11 to 18 to sing together and have fun through music. Singing ‘Greatest Gift’, the lyrics of this track were nothing short of fitting with lyrics like “I know how hard it feels / You got me, I’m still right here” and “All you do is make me proud”. Although Smith might’ve been based in London from 18 onwards, her presence in the West Midlands is stronger than ever.

There was a moment of transparency ahead of ‘This City’ as Smith revealed the angst she’d started feeling towards London. Wishing she’d come back to Birmingham, she put pen to paper and confronted the UK capital as it “Sold a dream of a home, it’s a liе”, describing that, “This place ran it’s course, I’m tired of running”. The message of this song will always cut deep, but performing it in this 600-capacity Walsall venue made these lines cut deeper than ever.

It was then time for three back-to-back bangers, also known as the Jorja Smith holy trinity, courtesy of ‘Little Things’, ‘On My Mind’ and concert-closer ‘Be Honest’. The energy was unmatched as Smith and local fans and security couldn’t help but singalong and bust out a move to these definitive hits. This three track run was the perfect end to a personal night and kept spirits high with subtle murmurs of ‘Be Honest’ filling the corridors of Walsall Arena and Arts Centre, long after the ‘Go go go’ singer departed the auditorium.

Although tracks off her most-recent album What Are The Odds. pull from a variety of genres like Afro House, R&B, Funky House and more, Smith’s personality is its driving factor, and it’s this that has firmly established her strong relationship with fans and general music listeners. This couldn’t be more apparent when watching Smith deliver some top-notch vocals with ease before pointing out, waving to and blowing kisses at recognisable faces in the crowd.

Declaring “I’m proud to be from Walsall” while exiting the stage, this statement should hopefully instill the same pride into the crowd’s thoughts and feelings towards this West Midlands town too.

Spotify’s Hometown series continues with two more intimate performances scheduled throughout September by the likes of Nemzzz in Manchester and Beebadoobee in London.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

I didn’t start wearing braids because I wanted to follow a trend. I started wearing them after experiencing uncomfortable moments at work where I felt my Blackness was being used against me. I found myself being questioned every time I did my work, and over time, it made me question how I was being seen and how much of myself I felt safe to show.

Instead of allowing those experiences to make me hide a part of who I am, I decided to embrace the culture I am most proud of.

Being Black, for me, is strength, history and resilience. It is knowing that my power did not begin with me. It comes from the generations before me, from the people whose strength, survival and identity made it possible for me to stand proudly on my own.

That is when braids became more than a hairstyle to me. For me, braids represent who I am and what I am made of.

Every time I choose to braid my hair, I feel like I am making a statement without having to say a word. I am choosing to be visible. I am choosing to celebrate a part of myself that I will never again allow someone else to make me question.

There is something powerful about looking in the mirror and seeing yourself represented in the way you want to be seen.

For many Black women, hair carries a significance that goes far beyond beauty. It can hold memories, traditions, identity and self-expression. We change our hairstyles depending on how we feel, where we are going, what we want to express or simply because we want to see ourselves differently.

But braids carry something particularly powerful for me. They remind me that my identity has a history.

When I sit down to have my hair braided, I think about my ancestors and the strength they carried. I think about everything they had to overcome and the fact that their stories did not end with them. I am here because they were here.

My braids become a connection between who I am today and the ancestors whose strength lives within me.

There is also an artistry in braiding that deserves to be recognised. A braider is not simply doing hair. They are creating. Every section has to be precise. Every braid requires patience, skill and attention. Hours can go into creating a style that someone might see in a few seconds.

Today, braiders have become artists, entrepreneurs and creators in their own right. Through social media, their work can reach audiences far beyond their local communities, showing the creativity and skill behind a craft that has existed for generations.

The braid has become a language of its own.It can represent culture, confidence, femininity, creativity, individuality and resistance. It can tell people something about you before you have even spoken.

For me, the power of the braid is not simply in how it makes me look. It is in how it reminds me of who I am.

Someone else’s actions once made me question whether my Blackness was something I should make smaller.

I chose the opposite,I chose to make it visible and I chose to wear it proudly. Because my strength did not begin with me, and it will not end with me.

Black is power, Black is history, Black is who I am.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

It really is super cringe watching someone try too hard to fit into a city’s aesthetic.

Like for example, the person who lands in New York and immediately throws on a pair of timbs no matter the season, or the tourist in Tokyo who treats the entire city like an anime convention, leaning so heavily into a hyper-curated, pastel “kawaii” vibe that they look like a caricature of a culture they don’t actually understand.

When you dress strictly for your environment, you aren’t styling an outfit; you’re putting on a costume. You become a character playing a part based on what a Pinterest algorithm told you a specific zip code is supposed to look like. It feels forced because it is. True style isn’t about matching the scenery. It’s about staying true to yourself, regardless of where you happen to be standing.

A great example of actual authenticity would have to be Trinity on Season 8 of Love Island USA.

The villa in Fiji is an environment defined by a strict visual template, a setting designed to make everyone blend into a sun-soaked, tropical collective. But instead of succumbing to the standard island aesthetic, Trinity stepped out pairing rabbit tails with Timberland heel boots. In the middle of the South Pacific.

It was disruptive, visually striking, and authentic. At least to me. Trinity didn’t let the tropical backdrop dictate her identity or dictate what “belonged” on her feet; she brought her own aesthetic into theirs. Not to mention, she popped out in that one popular Triangl bikini from 2016. Very niche. When you dress with that level of self-trust, the environment naturally adapts to your energy, not the other way around.

Right now, we are living in the era of the algorithmic aesthetic. Digital mood boards have fundamentally changed how we view clothing. Platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram aren’t even used for inspiration anymore. Everyone just copies and pastes. “Clean Girl,” “Mob Wife,” “Coquette.” We start dressing for the camera, for the saved folder, or to fit a neatly packaged title.

When we rely entirely on external validation to build an outfit, we stop asking ourselves what we actually like. We trade our intuitive individuality for a generic carbon copy of someone else’s feed.

Breaking free from the algorithm and regional expectations requires a conscious shift from looking outward to looking inward. It’s about building a wardrobe based on intuition rather than following what everybody else is doing. At the end of the day, fashion is meant to be an unfiltered extension of your unique perspective. You don’t need a Pinterest board to validate your choices.

You really just have to trust your instinct and show up exactly as yourself. After all, if you can wear Timbs in Fiji, you can wear anything anywhere.

We need to stop asking, “Does this fit the vibe of the place I’m going?” The only question that matters is whether the outfit actually represents you.

And no, I don’t mean wearing an Alo set to dinner either.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

Subscribe now

I think one of the biggest myths contemporary culture tells us about creativity is that originality means creating something untouched by anyone else. We are taught to imagine the artist as an isolated figure, standing apart from history, producing something entirely new from within themselves. But music has always resisted that idea. Long before sampling became a recognizable technique in modern production, people were borrowing, adapting, repeating, answering, and transforming what had come before. A rhythm would travel from one body to another. A melody would survive because somebody remembered it. A voice would become part of another voice. Music, perhaps more than almost any other form of art, has always understood that creation is rarely an act of beginning. More often, it is an act of continuation.

This is part of what makes sampling so fascinating to me. At its most powerful, sampling is not simply the act of taking something old and placing it inside something new. It is a way of changing our relationship with time. A fragment of a soul record, a drum break, a voice, a guitar line, a piece of percussion can be lifted from one historical moment and made to speak inside another. The past is not left behind. It is brought forward, altered, stretched, slowed, chopped, interrupted, repeated, and given another life. The sample becomes a kind of temporal bridge, allowing moments that were never supposed to meet to exist together. In that sense, sampling asks a strangely philosophical question: what does it mean for something to survive?

You can hear that question everywhere in Black music. The traditions that eventually fed into jazz, gospel, soul, funk, hip-hop, and countless other forms were never isolated from one another. They travelled through communities, churches, neighbourhoods, records, radio, migration, and memory. African rhythmic traditions travelled across the Atlantic through histories of forced displacement and survived conditions designed to fragment cultural continuity. Call and response, collective percussion, repetition, improvisation, and the relationship between music and social life did not disappear simply because the people carrying them were removed from the places where those traditions began. They changed shape. They found new environments. They became something else without ceasing to be connected to what came before.

That is why the history of the African diaspora can also be heard as a history of musical transformation. When people are displaced, memory does not always survive in complete form. Sometimes it survives in fragments. A rhythm. A phrase. A movement. A way of responding to another voice. A feeling that cannot easily be explained but can still be reproduced. Music became one of the places where those fragments could remain alive. It carried histories that could not always be written down, preserving forms of knowledge through sound, repetition, and collective participation. Sound carried civilization.

Sampling enters this history almost naturally. Hip-hop’s emergence was not a rejection of the past but a conversation with it. Producers searched through records and discovered sounds that could be rearranged into something that belonged to their own moment. The turntable, sampler, and drum machine became tools for excavation. What had once existed as a complete song could be broken apart and reorganized. A drummer from another generation could suddenly become part of a new beat. A singer who had been recorded decades earlier could appear to speak to an entirely different generation. The distance between past and present became strangely thin.

Few artists embodied this excavation more profoundly than J Dilla. On Donuts, his sampling feels less like quotation than archaeology. In “Time: The Donut of the Heart”, he takes the Jackson 5’s “All I Do Is Think of You” and turns its warmth into something hazier, as though the memory of the original were being heard through another room. In “Don’t Cry”, a fragment of The Escorts’ “I Can’t Stand (To See You Cry)” is chopped and rearranged until the source becomes inseparable from Dilla’s own emotional world. On “Lightworks”, he reaches even further outward, taking Raymond Scott’s strange electronic composition and making it speak through hip-hop. The records remain inside the beats, but they no longer exist exactly as they did before. Dilla does not simply preserve them. He changes the conditions under which they can be remembered. His genius was not only in finding the fragment, but in understanding that a fragment could contain an entire emotional history.

There is something deeply human about taking a fragment of the past and refusing to let it remain where you found it. We do this with photographs, stories, family sayings, clothing, recipes, gestures, and language. We inherit things and then change them, sometimes consciously, sometimes without realizing it. The diaspora has always lived inside this tension between inheritance and transformation. What survives is rarely untouched. It arrives altered by distance, trauma, geography, time, and the people who carry it. Perhaps that is why sampling feels so culturally significant. It does not pretend that inheritance means preservation without change. Instead, it acknowledges that survival often requires transformation.

The idea becomes even more interesting when we look at how African and diasporic sounds continue to travel today. Rhythms move between continents with extraordinary speed. Hip-hop travelled across the world and became local without ceasing to be global. House music found new forms in South Africa. Amapiano emerged from South African townships and travelled far beyond them. Afrobeats absorbed influences from across Africa and the diaspora while becoming one of the most globally recognizable contemporary sounds. We hear this vividly in London clubs and the UK underground, where diaspora youth collapse geographic distance by blending these sounds into the local soundscape. None of these movements represent a simple transfer from one place to another. They are acts of reinterpretation. Sound arrives somewhere new and is changed by the people who receive it.

This is perhaps where the mythology of the isolated artist begins to fall apart. Creativity is often presented as individual genius, as though the artist produces something entirely alone, and originality can be measured by how far they stand from everyone else. But music tells a different story. A beat contains other beats. A voice carries other voices. A genre contains histories. A song can contain an entire geography of influence. The artist is not necessarily the beginning of the chain. They are one point within it.

Sampling makes that visible. It reveals the layers beneath the finished work and forces us to acknowledge that culture is built through accumulation. One generation leaves something behind. Another generation finds it, changes it, and leaves something else behind. The process continues. This does not diminish creativity. If anything, it makes creativity more extraordinary. To inherit something and make it speak differently is its own form of invention.

There is also something politically significant about this kind of remembering. For communities whose histories have been interrupted, erased, distorted or displaced, recovering fragments can become an act of refusal. The sample says that something existed before the present moment. It insists that the past is not dead simply because its original context has disappeared. It allows forgotten sounds to re-enter public life. In that sense, sampling can be understood as a radical form of Black memory, a refusal to accept disappearance as the final outcome of history.

Perhaps this is why music can feel so strangely personal even when we cannot explain why. A rhythm can move through the body before the mind understands it. A voice can create recognition without explanation. Something in us responds to patterns that may have existed long before we arrived. This is not necessarily about genetic memory or some mystical inheritance. It is about cultural memory, the accumulated presence of sounds, gestures, stories, and forms that have travelled through generations and environments. We inherit more than we know we inherit.

And perhaps that is the deeper meaning of sampling. It is a philosophy of inheritance disguised as a production technique. It asks us to reconsider what it means to create, to remember, and to belong. The sample is never exactly what it was, but neither is it entirely new. It exists between identities, between moments, between places. It carries the trace of another time while becoming part of the present. Diaspora becomes audible.

When I listen to music built this way, I do not only hear production. I hear a conversation. I hear people who lived before us speaking through people who are alive now. I hear the distance between continents becoming smaller for a moment. I hear fragments finding each other again. And perhaps that is one of the most beautiful things music can do. It can remind us that history is not only something written in books or preserved in monuments. Sometimes it survives in a beat, in a melody, in the texture of a voice, waiting for somebody else to recognise it and carry it forward.

The past does not always return in the form we expect. Sometimes it arrives distorted, fragmented, slowed down, repeated, or buried inside something that sounds entirely new. But if we listen closely enough, we can hear something older insisting softly through the machinery of the present, not simply that the past belongs to us, but that we belong to something that came before us, and that what survives through us may yet become somebody else’s inheritance.

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There are footballers who define eras through trophies. There are footballers who define them through statistics. Then there is Mario Balotelli.

Who somehow managed to define an era without ever fully belonging to it.

The conversation around Balotelli has always been strangely incomplete. It oscillates between two lazy extremes: wasted talent or misunderstood genius. The first turns him into a cautionary tale. The second into a romantic martyr. Both flatten a figure who was always operating on several frequencies at once.

Balotelli wasn’t simply a striker, he was one of the first footballers to understand, perhaps instinctively rather than strategically, that modern football wasn’t only about performance anymore. It was becoming culture. Identity. Fashion.

Long before footballers became luxury ambassadors, podcast guests, magazine covers, and front row fixtures at Paris Fashion Week, Mario Balotelli was accidentally inventing that language.

The problem was simple: nobody knew how to read him.

Football Before Image

To understand Balotelli, you have to remember what football looked like around 2010.

Cristiano Ronaldo represented perfection, Lionel Messi represented humility, Wayne Rooney represented grit, Steven Gerrard represented loyalty.

Football identities were carefully packaged archetypes.

Even the rebellious players. the Zlatans, the Cassanos, the Gattusos, still belonged to recognizable traditions. Their masculinity was legible. Their rebellion had familiar rules, but Balotelli refused every script.

One week he would score one of the most technically perfect goals imaginable. The next week he’d collect a ridiculous red card. The following week he’d buy a Vespa because he felt like it. Then he’d give thousands of euros to strangers. Then he’d set fireworks off in his bathroom. Then he’d casually arrive at training in camouflage trousers, oversized headphones and a confidence that belonged more to a rap artist than an Italian striker.

The media interpreted inconsistency. Culture was witnessing the birth of something new.

Dressing Like Nobody Else

Football has always had style.

George Best had it. The Milan players of the late eighties had it.

David Beckham professionalized it, but Beckham’s fashion was aspirational, beautiful, polished and commercial.

Balotelli’s wasn’t. It was chaotic. Sometimes terrible, sometimes incredible, but always unmistakably his.

Designer belts with tracksuits, camouflage, leather, snapbacks, diamond earrings, sleeve tattoos, mohawks that became recognizable silhouettes.

Nothing was minimal and nothing apologized.

Years before football fully embraced streetwear, Balotelli already looked like somebody who spent equal amounts of time between football training, Milan clubs, and backstage at a fashion show.

Today, none of this feels radical.

Jules Koundé arrives dressed like an avant-garde stylist, Héctor Bellerín speaks the language of fashion editors, Memphis Depay moves seamlessly between football and music, Paul Pogba turned hairstyles into weekly headlines, but Balotelli existed before football had developed a vocabulary for players who wanted to build identities beyond ninety minutes.

He wasn’t dressing for magazines, he was simply dressing like Mario, and Ironically, authenticity has become luxury.

Before Football Became Luxury Culture

The explosion of football’s relationship with fashion is often attributed to the late 2010s.

The arrival of Virgil Abloh and the rise of Off-White.

Luxury collaborations, players attending runway shows. Jacquemus inviting footballers. Louis Vuitton campaigns. Football becoming culturally adjacent to hip-hop, but Balotelli had already crossed those borders years earlier.

Not through calculated branding, but through pure instinct. He understood something that football institutions didn’t: footballers no longer lived exclusively inside stadiums, they lived inside culture.

Their hairstyles mattered, their Instagram mattered, their music mattered, their clothes mattered. The tunnel was becoming a runway before anyone started calling it one.

“Why Always Me?”

Perhaps no football image summarizes internet culture better than Balotelli lifting his shirt after scoring against Manchester United.

Underneath:

WHY ALWAYS ME?

The phrase became a meme, a joke, a headline.

But it also became one of football’s earliest examples of personal branding without branding.

Today players launch documentaries explaining themselves, they post Notes App statements, they curate emotional vulnerability.

Balotelli condensed an entire relationship with media into three words and it worked because ambiguity travels further than certainty.

Nobody knew exactly what he meant. Everyone projected something onto it.

That’s internet culture before social media fully matured.

Blackness Inside Italian Football

It would also be intellectually dishonest to discuss Balotelli without discussing race.

Not because race explains every headline surrounding him, but because pretending it played no role would ignore the reality of Italian football.

Born in Palermo to Ghanaian parents and adopted by an Italian family, Balotelli spent much of his career being treated as simultaneously too Italian and not Italian enough.

Monkey chants followed him across stadiums, bananas were thrown onto pitches.

Commentators repeatedly described him through language rarely applied to white players exhibiting similar behavior.

He became emotional, explosive, “difficult”, temperamental. Football has always romanticized rebellious white genius.

Eric Cantona became philosophy, Paul Gascoigne became tragedy. George Best became mythology, Balotelli was too often reduced to spectacle.

The double standard never entirely disappeared.

The Internet Loved Him Before Football Did

Perhaps Balotelli’s greatest cultural achievement happened accidentally. He became infinitely remixable through GIFs, memes, reaction images, Tumblr edits and Twitter jokes. TikTok compilations years later.

His facial expressions became language, his unpredictability became content before “content” became a profession.

Football has produced countless legends, but very few became internet folklore.

Balotelli did. Not because he tried, because unpredictability survives algorithms, consistency doesn’t.

The Fashion of Contradiction

Fashion has always loved contradiction.

Luxury mixed with sportswear, tailoring with trainers, vintage beside futurism etc.

Balotelli embodied contradiction before it became aesthetic currency.

He looked intimidating then donated money to homeless people. He appeared arrogant then displayed remarkable generosity. He behaved recklessly then spoke with surprising emotional intelligence.

He projected hardness, yet seemed unusually sensitive to criticism.

Like many cultural icons, he resisted coherent narratives. The fashion world celebrates people who cannot be easily categorized, but football rarely does.

The Prototype We Didn’t Recognize

Looking backwards, Balotelli appears less like an exception and more like a prototype.

Today’s footballer isn’t simply an athlete. He’s simultaneously:

A luxury consumer, a media company, a fashion client, a creative collaborator, a music enthusiast, an internet personality, a walking archive of visual references.

Balotelli lived that reality before institutions had adapted to it.

He wasn’t ahead tactically, he was ahead culturally!

History tends to confuse those two things.

Beyond Potential

Every Balotelli conversation eventually arrives at the same destination.

“What if?” What if he’d been more disciplined? What if Mourinho had handled him differently? What if Manchester City had kept him longer? What if Milan had worked out? These are football questions. Culture asks different ones.

What remains after the goals are forgotten? Why does his image still circulate? Why do fashion moodboards still feature him? Why do young creatives born after his peak still reference him? Because cultural influence obeys different mathematics than sporting achievement.

Some players collect trophies, others collect lore.

Balotelli accumulated something stranger: he became a symbol of transition between football and fashion, athlete and celebrity, stadium and internet, performance and identity.

Perhaps Mario Balotelli wasn’t football’s greatest unfulfilled talent.

Perhaps he was football’s first postmodern footballer, a player who instinctively understood that, in the twenty first century, ninety minutes would never again be enough to explain who an athlete could become.

That may not have won him the Ballon d’Or, but it quietly changed the culture surrounding the game.

If you are interested in becoming a GUAP contributor and telling stories that matter to the culture we want to hear from you. We commission emerging writers, journalists and video creators every month to cover the people, communities and moments our audience needs to discover. Your subject. Your voice. No brief.

For more information/submit a story - click here.

Consider becoming a paid subscriber and gain access to:

• The full GUAP Daily: five deep-dive articles/video essays written by and for the culture, a week straight to your inbox, Monday to Friday.

• The Sunday opportunities newsletter - jobs, freelance roles, commissions, casting calls and industry openings every week

• Monthly online events - masterclasses, workshops, live interviews and community gatherings ran by OURPPLS.

• Discounts/Perks from our community partners including Tunecore,

For only £6 a month (price of a coffee) you get access to the opportunities, the knowledge and the community that keeps you close to the culture. Whether you are building something or you just care about what is happening - this is where you want to be. And every membership puts money directly into the hands of the writers and creators telling the stories that actually matter.

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