[image]
[title]
Franchesca Ramsey of Chescalocs (youtube.com/chescalocs)
Who she is: After a bad dye job caused most of her hair to break and fall out, Ramsey decided to ditch damaging, expensive perms and dreadlocked her tresses in February 2004. Though she’d often consult online loc community Get Up Dread Up (get-up-dread-up.livejournal.com) for styling tips and ideas, Ramsey noticed a few gaps in the information that was available on the Internet. “The forum is mostly Caucasian, and while I still learned a lot, there were things [the members] didn’t have the answers to or that we disagreed on because we have different hair textures,” she says. “It encouraged me to use my voice to talk about my own experience and what I had learned.” Ramsey also noticed a dearth in video content for natural hairstyling. So when she received an iMac with a built-in camera as a present for graduating from the Miami International University of Art & Design, it was just the catalyst the web-savvy graphic designer needed to create her first video in 2007.
About her channel: Initially, Ramsey posted a mix of hairstyle tutorials and comedy videos on youtube.com/chescaleigh, but as her audience grew, she found a need to divide her two interests into separate channels. Shortly after moving to New York City from Miami in 2009, Ramsey launched Chescalocs, which is almost exclusively dedicated to loc hairstyles. “I didn’t realize how versatile my hair is,” reflects the self-taught 28-year-old, who has earned nearly 22,000 subscribers for her entertaining, creative tutorials that range from how to fashion oversized buns, pipe-cleaner curls and twisted faux-hawks to the logistics of loc extensions and making an at-home deep-cleaning solution. “I don’t have to see a style on someone that has locs in order to come up with my own version,” notes Ramsey. To wit, she has successfully recreated Janelle Monáe’s signature pompadour and Karmin singer Amy Heidemann’s retro “suicide roll” for locs. But Ramsey doesn’t merely take pop-cultural cues for her videos, which she films and edits herself in her Queens abode. For her “Loc Stars” series, Ramsey features her favorite subscriber-posted hairstyles from her Facebook fan page (facebook.com/chescaleigh). “It’s kind of my way of saying, ‘Thank you for watching and inspiring me,’ ” she explains.
Go-to product: “I’m in constant rotation—I try a lot of stuff,” says Ramsey. “But one thing that I’ve been using for a long time is Jamaican Black Castor Oil (jamaicanblackcastoroil.com), which is a great moisturizer. It has made a really big difference in the thickness and fullness of my hair.”
Watch this now: One of Ramsey’s most-viewed videos is about a roller-free curling method called “loc knots,” in which dreds are folded in half and wrapped around themselves to form a short ’do. Eventually, they are unraveled to reveal springy coils. “The curls last a really long time and they kind of change the longer you wear them—they start to loosen—so it’s really three styles in one,” she says.
Advertising
You may also like
You may also like
Discover Time Out original video
Advertising