She walked toward the makeup department, visibly upset. “I didn’t want to complain, you know? But, I just hoped my facial expression might give people a hint.” Lo and behold, someone noticed: The key makeup artist stopped mid-interview with a group of editors, grabbed her, and asked if she had had her hair done. When she nodded yes, he rolled his eyes. “It looks like you stuck your finger in an electrical socket.” He promptly marched her over to the lead hairstylist. What happened next was, unfortunately, another very typical backstage scene: “There were 20 hands on my head at once,” she says. “They were pulling my head this way and that with flat irons and blowdryers… I didn’t even know I had that much hair on my head. And, here we are, right before the show’s about to start, and all the other girls are laughing and talking to each other and taking pictures.” Thankfully, Brandee says, she’s a native New Yorker with a tough skin. “On shoots and at shows, people will make comments about my hair, and I’ll just shrug it off,” she says. “But, I’m beginning to realize that this isn’t conducive to fixing the problem.” Fixing it means examining it on more than one level — including from the perspective of professionalism. “If you’re hired for a job, you expect everyone to be on-point," Brandee says. "They show up, know what they’re doing, and stay focused. That’s why they’re working; that’s their specialty. So, to show up as a hairstylist and not know how to work with Black hair — how is that professional?” Session stylists, as they’re called, rarely get to work with textured hair. Brandee points out that, in a season of 60 fashion shows, she's often the one head of naturally curly hair a stylist deals with, and that’s about all the practice they get. I am friends with one such stylist, who receives phone calls asking if she “can do Black hair” prior to being confirmed for a job. Outside of session styling, in the salon world, there's also a lack of education. In fact, this phenomenon prompted Diane Bailey, a brand ambassador for SheaMoisture, to start a petition for a separate license for styling and braiding natural hair in the 1990s: She succeeded.