Meechy Monroe, who achieved YouTube fame with hairstyle tutorials that empowered black women to embrace the natural hair movement and forgo harsh chemicals, died June 27 at a nursing home in Westmont, Ill. She was 32.

The cause was brain cancer, her mother, Patricia Moore, said.

Ms. Monroe was feeling unfulfilled in her marketing jobs, at PLS Financial Services and CareerBuilder.com, when she realized the key to her career success was atop her head.

A bad haircut in 2009 prompted her to cut off the tresses she had been perming from the age of 16 and to start over. She went online to research ideas for what she called her “transition,” and found inspiration in a web community of people who believed that black women should embrace the natural texture of their hair.

Many black women grow up with the notion that straight hair is healthy and easy to manage, while curly hair is messy and untamed and heavily braided hair is too ethnic, according to Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.