Growing up in Kelseyville (Lake County) — a small town an hour north of Calistoga — Brittany Barnes recalls driving four hours round trip every other week to get her hair done in Richmond.
“A Black hair salon is like Black church,” she says. “It’s a whole community there.”
With GoodBody, her new salon in Uptown Oakland that caters to women with textured tresses, Barnes aims to capture that familial atmosphere. “Is it a bit more elevated? Yeah,” she says. “But it hasn’t lost that sense of community, making people feel seen and beautiful and accepted.”
Barnes, 30, has no formal background in cosmetology or business; she earned a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism in 2015. Her foray into entrepreneurship is decidedly personal.
Now that she and husband Harrison Barnes have resettled in Northern California — he’s a forward with the Sacramento Kings who previously played for the Golden State Warriors and Dallas Mavericks — she’s launched the full-service salon she always wished she’d had, complete with a chic retail area stocked with products from the likes of Mizani and Amika.
While appointments can be as short as an hour for a wash and go, which starts at $48, Barnes notes that for Black women, spending six to eight hours at the salon is not uncommon. So creating a modern, luxe space was a priority.
To execute her vision, Barnes enlisted husband-and-wife team Ben and Susan Work of San Francisco architectural design firm Homework. They gave the salon peacock-green and salmon-hued walls, along with honey-gold velvet drapes. Curves and arches are a recurring theme, lending softness and flow to the linear space.
A sinuous bench is topped with a blush velvet cushion, and the stylists’ stations include LED strips recessed behind pill-shaped mirrors, casting a flattering glow on clients seated in the golden tobacco leather swivel chairs.
“Ninety percent of the Black women, when they walk in, are surprised that the space was created for them,” says Barnes. “Because people don’t create beautiful spaces for Black women. And that’s what GoodBody is.”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What prompted you to open GoodBody?
A: I kept asking myself: Why is it that for women with silky and straighter hair textures, there’s so much diversity in hair care and beauty? You can go to Supercuts or Drybar or the luxury salon up the way. Whatever you want, you can find. But that wasn’t the case for women of color, specifically textured-hair women and Black women.
Black women are the largest spenders in the hair care industry, and there was a really huge gap in that market. I started to think about what a beautifully curated space for deeply textured hair could be. As in, not only do you walk in and see people who look like you and products made for you, but it’s also an experience.
Q: How is the GoodBody experience distinctive?
A: With GoodBody, we’re positioning textured and Black hair care as self-care. I want it to not just feel like a place where you’re getting your hair done, but a place where you’re like, “Oh yeah, I could be here for a few hours and feel really good about it.”
Self-care looks different for everyone. Sometimes it’s having a conversation the whole time you’re getting your hair done with your stylist, and sometimes it’s not. Maybe it’s your only two-hour period away from your kids and your family, and you want some quiet — to just relax in a spa-like environment. The goal for GoodBody is to create a space that allows you to experience the self-care that you want to experience.
Q: Why did you choose Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood?
A: We’re on this amazing block with other Black women-owned businesses — Tanya Holland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen and Sherri McMullen’s McMullen boutique. And right behind me is Sweet July, which is Ayesha Curry’s shop that’s opening soon.
Last summer I was in the area and got to talking with Tanya and Sherri about my concept for a salon. They said, “You need to be here.” They connected me to the landlord that day, and within the week I was looking at what’s now GoodBody.
Q: What services do you offer?
A: One thing that irritated me about textured hair care: I just wanted to go to one place for everything. But I had my blowout person from this salon, my braid girl who does my hair at her house, my weave person who works at this other salon. The plan for GoodBody was that it’s a one-stop shop. If you want braids, your natural hairstyle, a blowout, a wig, a weave, clip-in extensions — we can do it all here.
Everyone (on staff) specializes in deeply textured hair. Textured hair comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes — in curls and coils and kinks and waves, and a mixture of all of them. So many times, I’ve walked into a salon and didn’t see anyone who looked like me or who had hair that looked like mine and felt almost intimidated about how to move forward in that space. It was really important to me that no matter what texture their hair, everyone saw a little bit of themselves in GoodBody.
Q: In late September, the U.S. House of Representatives followed California’s lead and passed the CROWN Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural hair), which makes race-based hair discrimination illegal. It’s now awaiting Senate approval. What are your thoughts on the legislation?
A: It’s great that people hopefully will not be discriminated against for wearing their hair the way it grows out of their head or however they’d like to wear it. But it should kind of open our eyes. The things that everyone else enjoys without thinking much about, Black people have had to really work hard for — something as simple as wearing your hair.
Anh-Minh Le is a freelance writer. Email: Culture@sfchronicle.com
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