Mental health remains one of the most underdiscussed topics in the Black community. Despite Black Americans being 20 percent more likely to experience mental health challenges often rooted in racial, systemic and generational trauma only about 25 percent seek professional treatment, compared to nearly 40 percent of white Americans who do the same.
In the absence of accessible care, many Black women have found other ways to tend to their wellbeing. Beauty rituals, in particular, have long served as a form of therapy a consistent, culturally grounded space to decompress, reconnect and restore. But wellness, as these four beauty experts make clear, does not begin and end in the salon chair. It happens in the quiet, unglamorous, everyday moments that no one else sees.
In honor of Women’s History Month, four Black beauty founders and professionals share the mental health practices they return to again and again and the wisdom they have gathered along the way.
Dija Ayodele, founder of Black Skin Directory
For Ayodele, wellness started early, watching her mother settle into the salon chair and leave looking, as she describes it, ten feet taller. The community inside that space the laughter, the shared cultural understanding, the collective exhale left a lasting impression on what care could look and feel like.
Today, her approach to mental wellness is rooted in simplicity. She lives near a nature reserve and takes regular solo walks with no music and no podcasts just silence and her own thoughts. She describes it as a reset, a way to find clarity before returning to the demands of entrepreneurship, motherhood and marriage.
She also points to intentional body care as a meaningful ritual. After a shower, she takes her time moisturizing not rushing through it, but treating it as an act of restoration. Washing and caring for her hair serves a similar purpose. And sleep, she notes, has become increasingly non-negotiable as she has gotten older, something she actively protects because of its direct effect on her mental state.
Her advice to other women is to start small and build gradually a concept she refers to as habit stacking. Beginning with something as simple as five minutes of focused self-care each day and adding to it over time is, she argues, more sustainable than attempting a sweeping lifestyle overhaul.
Mamy Mbaye, co-founder of SLIQ
For Mbaye, her wellness routine functions as a daily check-in. She pays attention to whether she is keeping up with her skincare, making it to yoga class or finding time to journal because when those things fall away, she has learned to recognize it as a sign that something deeper needs attention.
Yoga has become central to her routine, particularly because she works from home and can easily spend long stretches at her desk without moving. Finding a Black-owned studio made the practice feel more welcoming and sustainable from the start.
Her wash day routine has undergone a similar transformation. What was once a source of anxiety has become a grounding weekly ritual after she streamlined her products and process. It is now one of the practices she points to as something that helps her feel prepared and confident for the week ahead.
The biggest lesson she has taken from years of building these habits is to be gentle with herself. Early on, she treated wellness goals like items on a to-do list and was hard on herself when she fell short. The shift toward self-compassion, she says, changed everything.
Pekela Riley, founder of True + Pure Texture and Salon PK
Riley traces her relationship with wellness back to a childhood memory that was equal parts painful and clarifying. A classmate’s comment about her braided ponytail stung at the time, but she credits that moment with shaping the work she now does: building products and spaces that celebrate textured hair in all its forms and affirm self-worth from the inside out.
Her current wellness practices center on morning walks as a form of moving meditation, regular vacations and staycations built into her calendar like non-negotiable appointments, spa days as a deliberate practice of softening, and what she calls present moment divine downloads pausing to journal, breathe or simply be still when inspiration or emotion rises to the surface.
The most important lesson she has learned, she says, is to stop measuring her decisions against how others might handle her circumstances. Most people, she points out, have not lived her specific experiences. Trusting her own inner knowing has become the foundation of her wellbeing.
Tomi Talabi, founder of Black Beauty Club
Talabi, who was born in Nigeria and now splits her time between Lagos and beyond, traces her earliest wellness memory to watching her mother lace up her sneakers at sunrise to run through the neighborhood an unusual sight at the time that quietly planted a seed.
She lives with acute depression, something she describes as a long road to acceptance given the cultural stigma around mental health that can exist in Nigerian communities. On days when the heaviness sets in, she reaches for movement. A spontaneous living room dance break or a jog around the block, she says, literally lifts the fog.
Her wellness toolkit is unpretentious and accessible: random dance breaks with no choreography, easy neighborhood walks with earbuds in, morning jogs when energy allows and music afrobeats and Bollywood playing throughout her home as a near-constant mood lifter.
Her advice to other Black women is to skip the grand commitments entirely and start with just stepping outside for a few minutes. That small action, she says, is the only spark needed to begin.
The common thread
Across all four women, the message is consistent: mental wellness does not require grand gestures or expensive routines. It lives in the repetition of small, intentional acts the walk, the wash, the music, the quiet. What matters most is simply showing up for yourself, consistently, in whatever way you can.
