The Hair Addict: Everything You Need To Know About The Biggest “Natural Hair” Community in Egypt!
The Hair Addict group, created by Doaa Gawish has started a natural hair movement since 2016 that thousands of girls embraced and flaunted. It is an avid community with guides that can aid any girl to get the natural curls, waves or even straight strands, on display. With the amount of positivity and mere tricks with various products and natural oils, you will realize that your options are endless. The Hair Addict harnessed more than 50K followers on Instagram and 145k on Facebook, with their “The Indian Recipe” serum that is available on their group page. They decided to take it to the next level and organized the “Natural Hair Fest” on the 1st of this September.
This one of a kind festival, planned by Liberty Event Planning, set to be a revenue for many hair product providers, and speakers like the talented Actress Ingie Abou Zeid, in addition to the inspirational cancer survivor Yasmine Yousry, and the Hostess and the curly diva behind beautynbounce, Hadeer Al Mallah.
With that being said, we decided to find out about all the awesomeness, so here is our Q&A with the Founder Doaa Gawish and the team.
What was the main inspiration to start the Hair Addict group?
When The Hair Addict started, it didn’t solely aim to tackle hair care issues. Our goal was to promote self-love and to make it become second-nature to our audience. We want all women to love themselves enough to invest the time and the energy needed to care for their beauty in a sustainable healthy way. We also want them to love themselves enough to stand their ground and embrace their natural hair.
Unfortunately, we are raised in a society where women are often denied the right to invest the time needed to have a healthy hair care routine and as a result, they often resort to quick fixes such as chemical relaxing treatments, which have plenty of long-term negative effects. Moreover, this same society appreciates only one type of beauty that’s rarely attributed to natural hair. This automatically makes most of these women opt to achieve this desired standard of beauty and try to change the nature of their hair via heat, chemicals’ loaded products, etc….
The Hair Addict aims to challenge all these norms and to encourage women to understand that they are worthy of the time needed to care for their hair in a healthy, sustainable way via using natural remedies, organic or low chemicals products (examples of which can be found on the Suvarna website), eating healthily & working out. Most importantly, we want all women to love themselves enough to embrace their beautiful, natural hair whether it is curly, wavy or straight.
Did you expect the group to attract this amount of traffic?
The message that The Hair Addict was spreading was almost entirely new to the society to the extent that we were surprised by the number of people who joined us and cheered us on, especially in 2017, where our community has grown massively in terms of the number of followers. We then have decided to expand by having a Facebook page and another one on Instagram to deliver our message to as many people as possible.
Why is it that one of the main discussions on your platform is Natural Growth Hair remedies? How did you get to that?
One of the most frequently discussed topics on The Hair Addict group was hair growth, and although the concept of oiling was already famous with us Egyptians, we started digging deeper and introduced a series of articles to our audience explaining the benefits of oiling for the scalp and listed the benefits of different oils and how they should be used. With that knowledge, our community members started mixing their own recipes and sharing the results they got by doing so.
What are your current favorite hair products?
In The Hair Addict we always encourage experimenting with products all the time, as what works for some hair might not work for the others, and what suits our hair well now might not stay the same over time especially for those transitioning to natural hair where the hair texture changes drastically until it’s restored to its naturally healthy state.
Who is the muse/role model for The Hair Addicts?
Our role model is every woman or girl out there who stood their natural ground and loved themselves the way they are. Because in fact, they inspire everyone around them and encourage one another to do the same and they’re one of the big reasons why the movement is successful and still expanding.
If Doaa would choose an international and national celebrity to be the “Hair Addict” ambassador, who would it be?
After the natural movement sparked up in the region, we have had famous celebrities and influencers join in and going through the transformation themselves, and they would be the perfect ambassadors for The Hair Addict as they prove that being natural and under the spotlight can go together really well. A few examples are Nesma Mahgoub the Singer, Ingi Abouzeid the Actress and Drama Therapist, Yasmin Yousri, the Lifestyle Blogger, and the Fashion Designer Nada Akram.
The Natural Hair Fest is the first of its kind to be held in Egypt, what was the reaction of your audience?
the event was a success to the extent that everyone asked us to do it on bi-annually verses the initially planned annual basis. It was an all-inclusive event where every one of both genders was welcomed to join even if they weren’t exactly natural or heat-free. We also made sure that the fest had various sponsors and exhibitors who sold products that go along with our message, and the speeches given on stage were tailored to answer all the frequently asked questions by our community.
Will we be expecting another Natural Hair Fest?
After the great success that we have witnessed for The Natural Hair Fest, we will do it again next April and then it will be making it annually.
Is there a hair secret that wasn’t shared with The Hair Addict audience?
All the tips that we know have been shared already. However, as we go, we learn new things as we always research for validity and then share with everyone in the form of short articles. We also learn new things from our followers and members of our group.
What future plans does the Hair Addict have?
Our long-term plan is to keep on spreading our message until there is no stigma around the natural hair in the Middle East and Africa. We want girls and women to believe that they’re flawless the way they are and to face no societal pressure when they stand their natural ground. We are very optimistic about it because we now have a lot of followers from African, Arab, and Middle Eastern countries.
