Editorial policy
Editorial guidelines
The standard every guide on this site is held to: who decides it, how we’re paid, and what we do when we get one wrong.
Most pages like this one list virtues nobody could argue with. We wrote the version you can actually check us against: what we refuse to publish, what we won’t accept as proof, and where the money comes from.
What “reviewed against our editorial guidelines” means
That line sits under the article and links here, so it ought to mean something. Five things were true before the page went live.
A named person wrote it. Kenneth or Kira Byrd. Not a byline pool, not a contractor writing under our name, not a house account. If a guide has a name on it, that person did the work and you can email them about it.
Every factual claim has a source, or the page admits it doesn’t. The research on textured hair is thin far more often than this industry lets on. When we hit one of those gaps, the guide says so right there in the paragraph. We don’t paper over it and sound confident anyway.
Product mentions say what kind of judgment they are. Did we actually use it, or did we judge it by the ingredient list? Those are two different claims, and we don’t dress the second one up as the first.
Nothing in it was paid for. No brand bought the mention, the position, the rating, or the link. That isn’t negotiable and it never has been.
Anything medical points you to a doctor. A hair site is the wrong place to diagnose a scalp. Saying so costs us the page view, and we say it anyway.
If you find an article that fails any of the five, that’s worth an email. See when we get it wrong.
How a guide gets made
Six steps, in this order, for every guide on the site.
It begins with a question somebody actually asked.
Search data, reader email, and the questions that keep coming back in the same words. We don’t publish a guide just because a keyword tool says the term gets traffic.
We find out what the evidence says, in that order.
Research first, opinion second. The ladder below is the order we go looking in. Sometimes the honest answer is “nobody has properly studied this,” and then that’s what the guide says.
Kira does it herself, wherever that’s possible.
She trained as a barber and a hairstylist. If a guide explains a technique, she’s done the technique. When a method turns out to be harder or slower than the internet claims, that goes in too.
One of us writes it, and the other reads it.
A two-person team can’t pretend to have an editing desk. What we can promise is that nobody here publishes their own work unread. Kenneth checks the research, Kira checks the hair.
It publishes with a name, a date, and the disclosure attached.
The byline tells you who wrote it, when we last updated it, and whether the page has affiliate links in it. We don’t bury any of that in the footer.
We go back to it.
Guides get revisited as the evidence changes or products get discontinued. The updated date moves when the content moves, and never just to look fresh.
What we count as evidence
Every hair site says it’s evidence-based. Almost none of them say what they’d accept as evidence. Here’s our order, strongest to weakest, and you can hold any article on this site against it.
Peer-reviewed research and dermatology bodies
Clinical studies, reviews that pool many studies at once, and guidance from professional dermatology groups. Where this exists, it settles the question and we cite it.
Journals like the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, the American Academy of Dermatology, and trials indexed on PubMed.
Cosmetic science and professional training
Textbooks on trichology, which is the study of hair and scalp, plus cosmetology texts, formulation science, and what licensed stylists are actually taught. It moves slower than research, and it’s far more specific to hair.
How ingredients work and interact, what barber and cosmetology programs teach, and published guidance from the chemists who formulate products.
Manufacturer and ingredient data
This tells you exactly what’s in the bottle. It tells you nothing about whether it works, and we don’t confuse the two.
INCI lists, the standard ingredient panel on the back of the bottle, plus Cosmetic Ingredient Review safety assessments, patent filings, and manufacturer spec sheets.
Practitioner and lived experience
Kira’s chair time, our own hair, and what readers tell us. This is how we decide what’s worth looking into. It’s not how we decide what’s true.
Hands-on results from a technique, patterns across reader email, what a stylist sees over and over.
Things that never carry a claim here
Every one of these gets used as proof somewhere in this industry every day. None of them proves anything, and no guide here gets to lean on one.
Tradition and “it has been done for centuries.” Testimonials and before-and-after photos. Influencer claims. Brand marketing copy. The fact that every other site ranking for the term says the same thing.
Here’s the part worth reading twice. For textured hair, that top rung is often empty. Far less has been studied than you’d assume, and the gap is well documented. When we go looking and find nothing, we tell you the evidence is thin and tell you what we’d do anyway. What we don’t do is promote something up from a lower rung to fill the hole. That’s where most of the confident-sounding hair advice on the internet comes from.
How we evaluate a product
Most of what this site earns is tied to products one way or another, so this is the part worth spelling out. Four things go into a recommendation.
We buy them
Most products in our guides were bought at retail with our own money. Those photos of half-used bottles on a bathroom counter are ours. A manufacturer’s product shot of a bottle nobody opened proves nothing.
We use them
On our own hair, over more than one wash day. A product can work the first time and leave buildup by the fourth. You only catch that by sticking with it.
We read the ingredient list
Protein load, buildup risk, whether the silicones rinse out, and how a formula behaves on low or high porosity hair. Porosity is how easily your hair takes in water and holds onto it. Much of what decides whether a product suits you is readable on the back of the bottle.
We read what other people found
A few hundred reviews will surface a problem we didn’t hit ourselves. That tells us something about consistency. It doesn’t prove the product works, and it sits on the context rung of the ladder above.
We haven’t personally used every product named in every guide. When a recommendation rests on the ingredient list instead of our own use, the guide says so. That’s the distinction the review badge commits to.
How we make money
Three sources, all disclosed. Everything here is free to read, and something has to pay for eighteen years of it.
What money can buy
That’s the entire list.
What no amount of money buys
Display advertising. The ads you see are placed by Mediavine, our ad management partner. They run a programmatic auction, which means advertisers bid on audiences rather than on articles. We don’t know which brand will show up next to a guide, we can’t sell anyone a sentence inside one, and no advertiser has ever talked to us about what a page says. Kira and I are the editorial team. Mediavine is the advertising team. In a company this size that’s the strongest separation there is, because the advertising side isn’t in the building at all.
Affiliate links. Some product links earn us a small commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. Every post with them says so in the byline, above the article instead of buried under it. The commission doesn’t change based on what we say about the product, and a product doesn’t get into a guide because it has an affiliate program. Several of the things we recommend most often pay us nothing.
Things we make and sell. Two children’s books, a curly kids coloring book and a story book, plus t-shirts. They’re on Amazon, and we earn on every sale. None of it competes with anything we review, which is worth saying plainly: a t-shirt isn’t a leave-in conditioner. If that ever changes and we sell something in a category we write about, it gets labeled as ours everywhere it appears, and it’s held to the same standard as everything else on this page. It doesn’t get a place in a roundup for being ours.
What we have never done. Sponsored posts, paid guest posts, paid link placement, and pay-to-play spots in roundups. Those offers arrive most weeks. If that ever changes, it’ll be labeled on the page as an advertisement, and this paragraph will change with it.
How we use AI
Kenneth builds software for a living, so the honest answer is that we use it. Here’s exactly where.
What it does here
Reads research faster than two people can. Drafts first-pass outlines. Handles the structured data behind the tools: the 248-term dictionary, the calculator math, the product database. That work is mostly consistency across hundreds of entries, and doing it by hand would be slower and less accurate.
What it doesn’t do
Publish. Every guide here is written and reviewed by Kenneth or Kira, and nothing goes out that neither of us has read. An AI draft is a starting point one of us then has to be willing to put a name on.
Photographs
Every image on this site is either a photo we took or a stock photo we paid to license. We don’t use AI-generated pictures of hair. This niche is full of synthetic 4C that doesn’t match any real head of hair, and a made-up texture is its own kind of bad information.
Why we say so at all
Because “we never use AI” is the easy sentence. It’s also unverifiable, and half the sites printing it aren’t telling the truth. The accurate version is more useful to you than the flattering one.
When we get it wrong
Eighteen years and more than 950 guides. Some of them are wrong, and the ones we hear about get fixed. Here’s what happens after you send the email.
Where it goes
One address, admin@curlcentric.com, read by Kenneth or Kira. There’s no ticket queue and no support tier between you and the people who wrote the thing.
What helps
The page, the sentence, and what’s wrong with it. A source helps but isn’t required. “This contradicts what my dermatologist told me” is a perfectly good reason for us to go look again.
What we do with it
We go back to the original source, not just to the sentence. If the claim is wrong, it changes. If the source turns out to be weaker than we thought, we soften the claim or pull it instead of defending it, and the article gets a new updated date.
When we disagree
Sometimes what you flag is a judgment call rather than a factual error. If we’re keeping something, we’ll tell you that and tell you why. We won’t leave the email unanswered and hope you forget.
What we won’t do
Quietly delete an article to make a mistake disappear. If a guide was wrong enough to pull, that’s worth saying out loud instead of hiding behind a 404.
Where our advice stops
We’re not doctors, and this isn’t a salon. Curl Centric doesn’t diagnose anything. There’s a line where the right answer is a dermatologist, not a routine.
Inflammation, tenderness, or pain in your scalp.
Patchy or sudden hair loss, or shedding that changes abruptly. If it keeps happening, or you’re not sure whether it’s normal shedding, that’s a doctor’s problem and not ours.
Bald patches that look shiny or scarred, which can mean the follicle is gone.
Anything on a child’s scalp that looks infected.
Hair changes that start alongside a new medication, a pregnancy, or an illness.
Sending you to a doctor costs us the page view, and it’s still the right answer. Nothing here is medical advice, and no guide on this site should be a reason to put off seeing someone who can actually look at your scalp.
Who writes and reviews all of this
Two people, both named, both reachable. Each page below spells out what that person is actually qualified to say, which is the part of a byline that usually goes missing.
Editorial and hair
Kira Byrd
Trained barber, hairstylist, and natural hair educator, and the one who has done the technique before it gets written up. She’s also a certified fraud examiner, which comes with a professional code of ethics: get enough evidence to have a reasonable basis before you give an opinion, and turn down work where there’s a conflict of interest. Much of this page is that code applied to hair.
Read Kira’s page →
Research and review
Kenneth Byrd
Runs the business, the research, and the tools. MBA and executive education at Wharton, a long career leading operations, and the one who reads the study before a claim gets published here. He also decides what this page says, so if you disagree with something on it, he’s the one to argue with.
Read Kenneth’s page →Found something wrong?
A correction is cheaper than a reputation, so we’d rather hear it from you than not hear it at all.
We last reviewed this policy on August 19, 2026. It covers everything we publish at curlcentric.com: articles, tools, the dictionary, the calculators, and email. We update it when the way we work changes, not on a schedule. A policy rewritten every quarter to look maintained is doing the opposite of what this page is for.