Kenneth Byrd is an author, a business executive, and the co-founder of Curl Centric, a website about curly, coily, kinky, and wavy hair care. He runs the business, checks the research behind its guides, and builds its free tools.
Outside Curl Centric, he is an operations executive, and he serves on the board of Oasis Counseling for Women and Children in Birmingham, Alabama.
Curl Centric’s work is cited by
Guides published on Curl Centric
950+Publishing about textured hair since
2008
Kenneth Byrd
Co-founder and Managing Partner, Curl Centric
Kira knows hair. Kenneth runs everything else: the business, the numbers, the research, and the software. They started teaching natural hair care together in 2008, first as Natural Hair Community. The site has been Curl Centric since 2013.
When a Curl Centric guide says how fast hair grows or what porosity means, Kenneth is usually the one who checked whether it’s true. He reads the studies, and when the research is thin, the guide says so.
Starts publishing about textured hair care with Kira, under the name Natural Hair Community.
Natural Hair Community becomes Curl Centric. The name is a registered trademark the following year.
Joins the board of Oasis Counseling for Women and Children.
Publishes Boys Are Curly Too with Kira.
Named to the Birmingham Business Journal’s Top 40 Under 40.
Curl Centric’s hair typing system becomes the first listed reference in a paper in the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology.
Completes three years of executive education at the Wharton School.
Receives the Anne Bruno LaRussa Visionary Award. Curl Centric launches its Curl Science podcast, and he and Kira publish The Big Curly Kids Coloring and Activity Book.
“Kira handles hair. I handle everything else.”
Kenneth and Kira make coloring books for kids with curly hair.
64 coloring pages and 45 activities for kids ages 4 to 8, starring girls and boys with curly, coily, kinky, and wavy hair. It brings the coloring pages from the two earlier books together with new mazes, word searches, and wash day cards.
Free tools on Curl Centric. No sign-up needed.
Kenneth has spent his career in leadership roles at financial services companies, and today he leads a large operations organization. The Birmingham Business Journal named him to its Top 40 Under 40 in 2020.
He has served on the board of Oasis Counseling for Women and Children since 2014, including terms as board chair and treasurer, and spent five years on the executive leadership team of the March of Dimes. In 2026, Oasis gave him the Anne Bruno LaRussa Visionary Award.
Before Curl Centric, he wrote freelance for the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald.
Outside pages about Kenneth and his work.
These are the outside sources that point to Curl Centric’s research. Six of them cite the same page, the Hair Type Chart.
Kenneth Byrd is an author, a business executive, and the co-founder of Curl Centric, a website about curly, coily, kinky, and wavy hair care. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980 and grew up in nearby McCalla.
He handles the business, the research, and the software. He checks claims against published studies before a guide goes live, and he builds the site’s free tools, like its hair calculators.
No. His wife and co-founder, Kira Byrd, is the trained barber and hairstylist. Kenneth’s side is the research and the tools.
Boys Are Curly Too (2015) and The Big Curly Kids Coloring and Activity Book (2026), both written with Kira Byrd.
Yes. The operations executive on LinkedIn, the writer at Digital Insurance, and the author on Amazon are all the same Kenneth Byrd, from Birmingham, Alabama.
Email him at kenneth@curlcentric.com.