Carolina Contreras, founder and CEO of Miss Rizos, intends to provide people ease and joy with her new products developed for curly and Afro-textured hair.
"I knew, I knew, that what we had was unique." "And I knew there was an empty kind of shelf, both online and in stores, just waiting for this thing to happen," she explained.
Contreras' Dominican-American goods will be available at the beauty retailer Sephora. It's part of Sephora's 2022 Accelerate brand incubator program, which aims to mentor and develop aspiring beauty entrepreneurs.
Contreras sees her Miss Rizos products as more than just hair care. She rose to prominence through her natural hair blog, Miss Rizos, as well as her social media presence and a few of hair salons she owned.
Miss Rizos – rizos means curls in Spanish — was founded in 2011. Contreras decided to spend time in the Dominican Republic, where she was born, after graduating from college.
She wanted to understand what it meant to be Black in the Dominican diaspora; it wasn't an issue that was freely discussed in the community, she added. A two-month excursion developed into a ten-year journey.
The routine blowouts to straighten her hair did not last in the Dominican Republic, and deciding between enjoying a beach day and keeping her hair straight became a hardship.
The whole point of returning to her home country was to learn more about her Afro Latino heritage, but she was avoiding the one thing that would bring her closer to them - her hair.
Contreras stated that two college professors contacted her when she was at the beach one day. They advised her to cease sunbathing before her skin turned too black. Contreras was well aware of the widespread problem of colorism in her home country. She told them she didn't mind going darker, among other things, but what they later told her seemed like a slap in the face.
"You talk about embracing your blackness, yet you relax your hair," they stated.
That served as a wake-up call for Contreras. She realized she wasn't straightening her hair because she wanted to, but because it was the only thing she knew. Her mother relaxed her hair from an early age. When her natural hair started growing in and money wasn't an issue, she'd use a hair relaxer. Straight hair became the ideal definition of beauty over time.
Following the lecturers' suggestions, she proceeded to cut her hair and learnt to style it in its natural, curly state. She discovered her mission as she became more in touch with her Blackness.
