Why Tracee Ellis Ross Took on the Curl-Care Industry
The actor, executive producer, and new beauty entrepreneur makes her long list of accomplishments look seamless, even simple. But the road to creating her own hair-care line was neither short nor easy. For our latest digital cover story, the Pattern founder opens up about what it took to get here — and why bringing her perspective into the industry was so important.
Tracee Ellis Ross is having a very good week. In fact, the week I speak to Ellis Ross could easily be considered the best week of her life — heck, it could be considered the best week of my life, and I just watched it all happen through her Instagram.
The actor, producer, and beauty entrepreneur just launched her new hair-care line, Pattern. When the line, which focuses on products for individuals with 3B to 4C curl patterns, hit virtual and physical shelves earlier this fall, most of it sold out right away. The rush even surprised Ellis Ross, who had worried about stocking too much. A few days later, to coincide with the launch, she hosted a party in New York, then flew back to Los Angeles to host another party at the Underground Museum, where Tracee spoke and introduced the Pattern Manifesta, which is a poem she wrote about black beauty. Guests were moved to tears.
It was a week full of success and beauty and appreciation from people — real customers who had actually bought and used the products — who wanted to tell her how excited they were to have a product that finally represented their community. She got the validation that Pattern was accomplishing what she had hoped it would: "filling an unmet need for people with beautiful, gravity-defying hair that hadn't been supported."
But, she explains, that isn't even the best part, which coincidentally unfolded hours before we connect on the phone in September.
"Today," she begins dramatically via speakerphone as she zooms through Los Angeles traffic on her way home, "was the first day I brought my travel-size [bottles of Pattern] to the gym to wash my hair. I sat them in the shower at the gym and was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy. Those are my products in the shower at the gym. This is bananas.' And I left there with popping curls. I mean, come on," she exclaims with an excitement that makes me worried about distracted driving. "That's the stuff that dreams are made of. But it's not a dream anymore — it's reality!"
According to Ellis Ross, it only took a couple of hours for Pattern products to sell out online and at the 1,200-plus Ulta Beauty stores where it was stocked. Getting the products to those shelves, on the other hand, took about a decade. Part of the delay, Ellis Ross explains in a slightly apologetic tone, is that she was doing more than trying to just make quality products — it was about contributing to culture.
"It was about actually expanding the paradigm and allowing us to see ourselves in all of our beauty," she tells me. "To have our beauty reflected back to us in imagery and in narrative that was about who we are, and our legacy and our power."
Ellis Ross recalls her own childhood: watching television — Wonder Woman, Cagney & Lacey — and thinking that those characters' hair, "bouncing and behaving straight and silky hair," was the hair she was supposed to have. Eventually she began to embrace her natural hair, learning to unlock its maximum, enviable beauty. But as an adult with her dream hair, she still didn't see enough representation onscreen, or on the shelves of beauty stores, so she set out to make that change. "It was a long journey to get this to happen — one that required a lot of patience, and persistence, and perseverance, and keeping my eye on the prize."
Ellis Ross made her first hair-care pitch to an undisclosed party in 2008, right when her hit tv show Girlfriends ended its eight-season run. The products she pitched then ended up being exactly what people can buy today: a variety of conditioners, shampoo that cleaned hair but didn't strip it until it was squeaky, and the dream leave-in conditioner.
At the time, Ellis Ross was known for her career as a comedic actor. While not quite mainstream, she was still pretty damn famous as lawyer Joan on Girlfriends. Then came Black-ish, where she cemented her place on television's A-list with her highly lauded portrayal of Rainbow "Bow" Johnson. At this point, creating a beauty line seemed like an easy sell. Still, though, the young star kept butting up against gatekeepers who didn't see her vision — or her worth.
She tells me of a meeting in which a potential investor asked, "Why do you think you, as an actress, can develop a hair-care line?" and continued interrogating Ellis Ross until she was nearly in tears. But with her incredible hair and her megastardom to harness, and the cheeky, energetic, aspirational-yet-real Instagram presence, who wouldn't want Tracee Ellis Ross to create whatever she wants?
As the years went by and her career grew, she kept pitching her line — yet still she heard varying iterations of the same who-do-you-think-you-are refrain: If people wanted her hair, maybe she should consider a wig line? Or perhaps a TV show about hair? Or maybe she could write a book about hair? Or be the face of a beauty company that perhaps didn't share her mission? But develop a whole line from the chemicals up? Know your lane, Tracee.
What the people who were casting doubt didn't realize is that she — just like the countless other women of color who couldn't trust hairstylists to know what they knew — Ellis Ross had become a hair expert. As a teenager, she made the decision to give up the weekly blowouts that kept her hair Charlie Angel's flowy (read: white-woman waves). From that point on, Ellis Ross devoted herself to learning her curl pattern and playing chemist and cocktail master with products until she got the healthiest hair possible. Without a doubt, she became beyond qualified.
She never let setbacks derail her entirely. Waiting only helped increase the odds of her success, she explains: "With each no, with each disappointment, I gained a whole new arsenal of information and knowledge." Ellis Ross discovered more about her hair, and her community's hair; about the factories and manufacturers; and about the statistics on the buying power of black women (a 2017 Nielsen study projected that spending among black consumers would hit $1.5 trillion by 2021). And finally, she resolved to develop her line herself.
Ellis Ross sat with chemists, worked on formulas, researched pumps. She tested every version of the products on herself. "More than that, I got to get clearer and clearer in my language about what I actually and specifically wanted this brand to be," she recalls.
Just like all momentous decisions about hair, it's never really about the hair. Breakup haircuts, the decision to go natural, the decision to straighten one's curly hair, dye jobs, extensions — the journey from one style to another ultimately reveals a goal, or a personality shift, or a desire, or a secret. It's self-actualization through hair.
The work Ellis Ross is doing with her hair products is representative of her larger goals, she explains. "I'm moving into a position where I'm the one creating content and story that fills a void of areas that I have always longed to be represented and seen."
Recently, Ellis Ross has been taking more control of her career. She's both star and executive producer on the recently announced Daria spin-off, Jodie, which explores the adult life of the show's sole black female character. Her Black-ish role as Bow was the first time she'd played a mixed woman — her Girlfriends character was black — and Ellis Ross has been excited to finally explore her own heritage through a new project: Mixed-ish, a spin-off of ABC's hit Black-ish, focusing on the upbringing of the well-known and beloved character Bow and her siblings as they come of age as mixed-race kids in the 1980s.
Ellis Ross doesn't appear on the show, but she's all over it: She's the executive producer and provides a voiceover. What's more, the nuanced exploration of racial identity draws heavily on her experiences as a mixed-race teenager. (Ellis Ross is the daughter of legendary singer Diana Ross and music executive Robert Ellis Silberstein.) The show is a heartwarming sitcom that does real untangling of identity politics — and of course, everyone's hair looks juicy, hydrated, and healthy, as is Ellis Ross's mission.
It might sound hokey to bring it back to her hair-care mission — but it's an undeniable part of her big picture and her entire body of work. "Pattern is an extension of a story that I've always told through all the characters that I've played," she tells me.
The third episode of Mixed-ish is a perfect example of the throughline. In "Let Your Hair Down," Bow begins a hair journey that mimics Ellis Ross's own: She realizes her natural hair doesn't match white beauty standards, developing hair shame, straightens her hair, and eventually makes her way back to her own curls.
At the end of that journey is the real meaning of it all, she says. "It's about taking up space. It's about being who you are and being supported in that and being loved for that. For that exact thing that is who you are."
This digital cover story is part of "See Yourself, See Each Other," our series on celebrating individuality in beauty produced in partnership with Ulta Beauty. To read more inspiring stories of women embracing their unique differences, check out the entire campaign here.
Photographer and Videographer: Carissa Gallo. Hair: Nai'vasha. Makeup Artist: Matin. Stylist: Yashua Simmons.
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Originally Appeared on Allure
