Woman Invents A Detangling Comb For Afro Hair In The Hope Of Inspiring Young Women To Become Engineers!

YourBlackWorld.net, By Ryan Steal, Posted May 16th 2022

A Black woman in the United Kingdom is leveraging her success to educate and empower young Black women. The woman, who invented a new comb for Afro hair, hopes that her invention will inspire other black women to become engineers.

The Nyfasi Deluxe Detangler, designed by Youmna Mouhamad, makes combing Afro hair easier and softer. According to the BBC, she came up with the brilliant idea for the comb while working on her Ph.D. in physics.

The Swansea-based inventor was working as a nanny at the time to help pay her studies. When her hair was washed and conditioned, the small girl she looked after cried out in anguish. She told the BBC, “The whole house would be full of tears.  I wanted her to have a better experience.”

Mouhamad changed her academic plans to pursue engineering at some stage. She said, “I shifted to engineering because I always had a desire to work on things that I can touch with my hands, and I love the process of taking an idea and actually creating something.”

The Royal Academy of Engineering awarded Mouhamad an entrepreneurial scholarship to help her develop the product. After developing a prototype, she organized a focus group for her novel comb, bringing together women and girls with Afro hair to check it out.

She admitted that her experiences as a Black woman pursuing science and technology were difficult at times.  She’d have wanted “to have been taught by a Black woman,” she says of having never had a Black teacher.

“When I was going through it, I thought it was me. I didn’t think it was the environment,” Mouhamad recounted. “But when I spoke to other [Black] students, it really got to me because it was like ‘oh my God, you know, it’s not you!’”

She shared, “I never had a single Black teacher. And that does a lot because of the simple fact of saying ‘if she can be there, so can I.’”

With the help of Professor Dylan Jones-Evans of the University of South Wales, Mouhamad is already mentoring others while getting her business off the ground.

Interested…check out the comb here.