For more of the Cut’s favorite fashion, beauty, and home finds, sign up for the weekly Cut Shop Newsletter.
Anastasia Hing MacKay’s earliest memories of her hair were with her mother, who regularly braided and trimmed her long hair. “I had a lot of hair,” says MacKay. On special occasions, she let her wear her hair out. “She took the braids out and it was all wavy,” she says. “That was my hair for my birthday.” Growing up in Amsterdam, she never saw Black women wearing their hair out. “The natural hair, that wasn’t a thing,” she said. “I didn’t see anyone with natural hair.”
Hing MacKay’s journey to discovering her natural curls involved trial, error, and $25 bottles of Shea Moisture products that were imported from the U.S. After using relaxers and straightening treatments as a teen, which left her hair destroyed, she was ready to try something new. Overwhelmed with the amount of products in the store and the lack of curly-hair representation she saw around her, she turned to YouTube videos from SunkissAlba to decode the hair-care process. “Amsterdam is very multicultural, but you must go to specific shops for curly-hair products,” she says. “The girls with curly hair in my class all used mousse and scrunched their hair.”
When she came to New York to model, people started to compliment her hair, especially when she wore it naturally. She quickly started getting booked for hair modeling. Then she had a moment with hot tools damaging her hair on set: “I was looking in the mirror while my makeup was being done and all I could hear was sizzling,” she said. She decided to get serious about her hair care and learn boundaries on set. “Sometimes you just have to tell people: ‘No, we are not doing that.’” During the pandemic, she wanted to create a product that allowed women with curly hair to care for it. Enter her company Lobie, which makes a peptide treatment mask with 123 amino acids (and is currently working on a shampoo and conditioner). Her focus now is to keep her hair as healthy as possible. She washes it once or twice a week, depending on her schedule, but when she was pregnant, she said she could go longer without washing it: “I don’t know how, but it was just always clean.” Now the busy mom balances work and self-care between her baby’s naps (“I have moments when I’m in the shower, then the monitor goes off and she’s, like, screaming. And I am like, ‘You’re supposed to do a two-hour nap, what happened?’”), and here’s her wash-day routine.
Her wash-day routine:
6 a.m.: Wash day is centered around my baby’s schedule. She wakes up; we play, we eat, I have my coffee. Then, her first nap is around 9 or 9:30; she has two naps daily. The first is two hours, and the second is an hour and a half.
9:30 a.m.: I start with shampoo; I’m testing my own shampoo and conditioner, but I also like the Vegamor hydration line and Oribe. Depending on how my hair feels, I’ll shampoo twice. I’ll apply the shampoo and really focus on scrubbing my scalp, rinse, and reapply focusing on my scalp again. I don’t like doing my hair. I just like things to be fast. I like things to be very simple, so I do everything in the shower.
9:36 a.m.: I add my conditioner to my hair, section it in two or four sections, and start detangling it. I use a Japanese brush called S-Heart-S. It’s focused on the scalp. I’ve tried so many brushes and I don’t know what it does, but it helps me and everyone I recommend it to. It makes things easy and fast. Then I let the conditioner sit for a little bit, maybe a couple of minutes, and I brush my teeth while it’s in. Is it weird that I brush my teeth in the shower? This is the time that I have for myself. I love the steaming hot heat on my body and my hair. Cold hair makes my hair brittle, so I never use cold water.
9:40 a.m.: I rinse my hair out, and while I’m in the shower, I’ll apply the Lobie Peptide Leave-In Mask and start braiding my hair. I finish up my shower, then I usually dry my hair with a microfiber towel from Amazon. Then I’ll add the Oribe scalp serum to my scalp and massage it in. My scalp is really dry. When I had time a couple of years ago I loved to do coconut oil and natural stuff, I’d let it sit there. But now I don’t have time to do all that.
9:50 a.m.: My regular routine is to let my hair air-dry — I usually part my hair in two braids, but she usually wakes up before I finish, so the rest of the routine becomes an evening thing. I’m picky about my hair ties, but I do like fabric hair ties without the elastic that I got in Amsterdam. I also wear headbands, and I get so many questions about it: I get the wide ones from CVS.
3:00 p.m.: I don’t like to do this routine when my hair is too wet, so I’ll let it air-dry until my daughter’s second nap. I take out the braids and go over my hair with the Dyson Supersonic and the comb attachment and the Innersense heat protectant.
3:30 p.m.: When my hair is still warm from the Dyson drying, I’ll part my hair into two braids and go to bed. It gets that wavy look.
3:45 p.m.: If I want a sleeker look, I’ll do my hair in waves. I use the CHI wave styler and I’ll use that when my hair is straight from the Dyson, this takes 30 to 45 minutes. My focus is always on keeping my hair as healthy as possible, and whenever I add heat or do a silk press, I use a heat protectant, like the Oribe heat-protectant spray. I don’t think it needs to be 400 or 450 degrees; the heat needs to be low. I like that mermaid-wave look a lot. It’s not straight, you can put it in a bun, and still sits the same. When you get a silk press you have a couple of days — it’s nice but it doesn’t last. With the wave wand, it can be a little messy and you can shake it out. I can go two weeks with that look and even if it gets a little messy, I don’t mind that look; it still, to me, looks good. For some reason, miraculously, that look always works and I’ve been putting all my curly-hair girls onto that wave.
10 p.m.: I sleep with a silk bonnet, which I buy from Amazon, and a Slip pillow case. If my hair is in curls, I’ll do a “pineapple” style with spiral hair ties, I also use them with my braids. I don’t always enjoy wash day. When I do it, I feel good after but the process sometimes for us, it’s just a little harder, more work. So I am happy when it is over.
On post-partum hair loss:
I embraced it. It’s a stage, where I don’t like to take too many supplements or pills in general. I had a little bit of hair loss at my edges but I didn’t feel like I needed to take anything; I know the stage will pass. I was trying not to do a lot of slick backs so the wavy look always covers the edges.
On how modeling changed her hair:
I was booked for a lot of hair jobs because people loved my hair. I said to myself, Now I have to look after my hair because I’m not going to get any jobs if my hair is ruined. With my first job, they ended up doing more to my hair than what they told me. My hair was quite long at the time, and they cut it to shoulder length. I think I was in shock, I was in a big city on a big set, and I had mixed feelings. After is when it hit me. It was a strange moment for me, and it kept happening. It was job after job — I have so many horror stories of my hair being damaged and people who don’t know how to work with your hair on set.
You learn as you go and you get older and say, “This is not okay.” I didn’t have a mentor or family in New York to tell me these things. Maybe six or seven years in, I built up that confidence for myself where I’d ask, “What are you going to do with my hair?” Or when I got that call sheet, I’d ask what they want from my hair. When I saw hot tools, I’d ask what heat protectant they were using, but this came over time.
