Dawn Myers typically wears her hair in a big, bold afro. Anyone with an afro knows that wash days—the ritual of cleansing and styling textured hair—can be grueling. They demand extensive detangling, multiple products, careful styling, and, above all, time.
About eight years ago, while watching Shark Tank, Myers saw a pitch for a curly hair product. It got her thinking about the hair tools already on the market—blow dryers, curling irons, and other devices designed to straighten and chemically alter naturally curly hair. None of them, she realized, addressed the real pain point: the sheer time and effort required to care for textured hair. For Myers herself, washing and styling takes roughly an hour and 20 minutes. "Things that straighten and change the chemistry of our naturally curly hair," she told TechCrunch. That gap—a lack of hardware built specifically for textured hair—had long been overlooked in the beauty tech space. It’s a complex, expensive, and underserved market.
Myers traces the neglect back centuries. "If you think back to slavery, we were mandated to cover our hair. That's where do-rags come from. You had to cover your hair. Why? Because our hair was seen as ugly and unkempt and unacceptable," she said. Later came hot combs, chemical relaxers, and flat irons—all tools that straighten textured hair. "It's only been the past 15 years or so where women of color and Black women in particular and, quite frankly, white women as well have really felt comfortable exposing their naturally curly hair and really just embracing it."
Inspired, Myers grabbed a legal pad and sketched out a business idea shortly after that Shark Tank episode aired. She then headed to Ace Hardware and CVS to cobble together a "Frankenstein-looking prototype."
That prototype eventually became Richualist, the company behind Mint—a hair tool that detangles, conditions, applies gel, and styles in a single stroke using refillable product pods. It even features warming technology to gently heat the product before application.
"We get that styling time down to about seven to 10 minutes," Myers said. "It's a massive game changer for the customer really stressed out by wash day." The device, which also comes in a travel size, helps make hair healthier by reducing shedding and breakage by up to 70%, since users no longer need to tug endlessly on their strands during washing and styling.
Myers built Mint in collaboration with materials science company Dow. An early prototype caught Dow's attention during a startup accelerator program. "It just so happens that Dow had identified this white space recently as well, and they were starting a textured hair care unit," she said. "So they ended up collaborating with us and giving us a lot of engineering help and manufacturing guidance."
