Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Portrait: Elena Gharbigi, Photos: Retailers

On the Beauty Group, a Facebook community co-founded by the Cut and the Strategist, people chat all day long about the products they love — the ones so good they’ll make you hit that little “auto-refill” box at checkout. Below, we asked one of our favorite beauty pros to share her own selections.

Actress Shalita Grant, whose latest role transformed her into Bay Area mommy blogger Sherry Conrad in You’s third season, has had a journey with her hair. For her first three seasons as Sonja Percy on NCIS: New Orleans, Grant wore her hair in a ponytail, which required her to straighten her hair almost daily. Looking back, she says, “I didn’t realize what the hair maintenance of a series regular entailed.”

To try to protect her hair in later seasons, Grant tried extensions. Only when she filmed an underwater scene and had to go into chlorinated water for weeks on end did she cut the extensions out and realize they had caused a bald spot.

“When I came back for the fourth season, that’s the infamous ‘helmet-head wig’ I was wearing. At that point, I was like, I don’t give a fuck. I know why I’m doing this. I’m gonna look like this. It is what it is. And it was humiliating.”

When she left the show, Grant was still dealing with the damage — both outwardly and inwardly. “I had to heal a lot in order to move forward,” she says. “I did that work and then I was like, Now I want to heal my hair.”

She turned to her kitchen, where she concocted her patent-pending Henna Mud Masque, which combines henna lawsonia, aloe vera, and fenugreek to strengthen naturally kinky, coily, type 4 …….

Source: https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/shalita-grant-you-netflix-four-naturals-hair.html