Before the brand, before the shelf space, before the awards — there was a teenage girl standing in front of a mirror, doing everything the world told her to do to her hair, and frying it in the process.
Tracee Ellis Ross has described her teen hair years in her own words: she “tried everything under the sun” to make her hair do what she thought it should do — “and it was fried.” In another interview she went deeper on the era: pre-teen heat and relaxers, used, in her words, “to beat my hair into submission.”
Read that phrase again. Beat into submission. That’s not a styling routine. That’s a war — one a lot of women on this page declared on their own heads at exactly her age, with exactly her weapons: heat, chemicals, and the belief that the hair fighting back was the problem.
Around 10th grade, she left the heat behind and started the long education of learning her actual pattern — what her curls were, instead of what she’d been trying to force them to be.
The pitch she wrote in 2008 — and sat on for a decade
Here is the part of the story that separates a celebrity endorsement from a founder. When her show Girlfriends ended, Tracee Ellis Ross wrote her first pitch for the brand in 2008. Not 2018. Two thousand eight.
Her own summary of the road: “20 years of dreaming, 10 years in the making, 2 years working with chemists.” A decade between the pitch and the launch — years of meetings where the industry that had happily sold her generation the relaxers had to be convinced that curly, coily and tight-textured hair deserved formulas engineered for it, not adapted to it.
On September 9, 2019, Pattern Beauty finally launched: 7 formulas for curly, coily and tight-textured hair — textures 3b to 4c — sold through patternbeauty.com and Ulta.
The customer was her first
Notice whose problem the brand solves first. Not a market segment identified in a spreadsheet — a teenager who fried her hair trying to beat it into submission, and the grown woman who spent twenty years learning what that hair actually needed.
That’s why the launch landed the way it did on this page’s audience. Women who lived the same war recognized the founder instantly, because she’d published her battle history in her own words years before she had anything to sell them. The brand’s authority isn’t her fame. It’s the fried hair. It’s the submission she refused to keep demanding of herself.
Ten years is a long time to carry a pitch. But the girl who wrote it had already spent her teens learning the slower lesson the whole brand is built on: her hair was never the obstacle. It was the assignment.
Join the conversation
What did YOU use to “beat your hair into submission” as a teen — and do you remember the exact moment you stopped? And be honest: is there a pitch, a plan, a brand you’ve been carrying for 10 years the way she carried hers? Tell us below. 👇
Source note: Tracee Ellis Ross’s account of her teen hair — “tried everything under the sun” and “it was fried” — is from her Tonight Show interview as reported by Female First / Cover Media; her description of pre-teen heat and relaxers used “to beat my hair into submission,” leaving heat behind around 10th grade, and learning her pattern is from Refinery29 Unbothered (January 2023). The founding timeline — first pitch written in 2008 after Girlfriends ended, “20 years of dreaming, 10 years in the making, 2 years working with chemists,” and the September 9, 2019 launch with 7 formulas for curly, coily and tight-textured hair (3b to 4c) via patternbeauty.com and Ulta — is from W Magazine’s September 3, 2019 launch coverage quoting her announcement and Entertainment Tonight / WWD interviews of September 4, 2019. This article states her own reported words and launch facts; brand marketing claims are not presented as independently verified fact.
