The Black woman-owned brand both asks and answers the simple question of how to make braiding a sustainable practice.
Rebundle Reimagines Black Hair Care for Our Current Climate Crisis
In the early days of the New York lockdown, with coffee whipped to soft peaks and The Great British Baking Show cued to stave off the pervading anxiety, I took on the project of teaching myself to braid using synthetic hair. When salons shuttered in the effort to stave off climbing COVID cases, I was cut off from styles like box braids, feed-ins, and Senegalese twists. I’d been doing my own hair for years at this point, but braids and other styles that required added synthetic hair were missing from my skill set.
I trained my fingers to smooth and tuck my coils into neat plaits and swelled with satisfaction at the finished, if imperfect, looks. This was coupled with actually swollen fingers and an irritated, itchy scalp. I’d always prided myself on not being tender headed or difficult to braid, but now there was no stylist to take into account, only me and my sincere discomfort. I began searching for an answer to why my scalp was so inflamed. On the other end of that research was Rebundle, a company that provides customers with a plant-based braiding-hair alternative to the usual Kanekalon found on beauty-supply shelves. Founded by Ciara Imani May in 2019, Rebundle not only provides a biodegradable product made from banana fibers but also makes a point to recycle traditional braiding hair, which is just heated fine plastic fibers strung to look like natural hair strands.
It was the recycling question that first inspired May. “In the beginning stages when I was getting started, that’s what I was trying to figure out how to do: I’m gonna continue to wear my braids, so what do I do with the hair afterward?” May says over the phone. “And when I couldn’t find anything to solve that problem, it was really important to me to maintain [the recycling option] because I knew that there was still a really big need.” Customers box up their used synthetic hair and ship it to Rebundle. Once the hair is received, it’s sorted by brand or type of plastic, prepared for shredding, and then repurposed into new products like lawn and garden tools.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Arimeta Diop
