Tracee Ellis Ross’s hair is just as much a part of her signature style as her chameleonic closet. The actor and beauty entrepreneur treats her hair like a daily ritual, customizing it into Pinterest-worthy styles—geometric bobs! long and loose! bubble ponytails!—just as effortlessly as she does her clothes.
“One of the beauties of textured hair is that it can do anything,” Ross tells Vogue. “Textured hair can be curly, it can be straight, it can be Afro’d, it can be Bantu’d, it can be a roller set, it can be a wash-and-go. There’s versatility. That’s also part of being a human being—being able to choose different things at different times of your life.”
For summer, she decided to turn up the heat and lean into straight styling with one important caveat: curl preservation and hair health. Today her brand, Pattern Beauty, adds three new products the styling tool kit, launching the Vibrating Flat Iron, Blow Out Primer, and Detox Shampoo.
Ross recalls a phone call she made to her mother while attending boarding school. “Mom, my hair is dead,” she says she lamented. “I know that hair is dead follicles and that’s what hair is, but my hair is dead dead. I don’t think we can revive it.”
She says it was a pivotal moment in learning to love her hair—and wanting to nourish it. It’s almost a rite of passage in the natural-hair community to experience texture-compromising heat styling and to struggle to care for your hair without adequate products and tools. It’s in large part why she created Pattern in the first place.
“Being able to have tools to support you in doing [heat styling] responsibly and in a way that cares for how your hair actually grows authentically out of your head is something that I’m dedicated to with Pattern,” she explains.
In 2023, Pattern made its first foray into heat styling with the launch of its blow-dryer, followed by a curling iron in 2024. Now with its new flat iron, the styling suite is complete for safely silkening textured strands.
“The flatiron evolved out of this two-way conversation that we have with the Pattern customer and the curly, coily, and tight-textured masses that exist,” Ross says. “We really were trying to think about, What is it that we do with a flatiron on textured hair that causes more damage? It’s when you do multiple passes—when you have to really rip and pull at your hair. It’s often doing the chaser comb. And so the vibration is meant to lessen some of those things we do to think we’re going to get our hair straighter faster.”
The Vibrating Flat Iron is a 1.1-inch, ceramic-coated iron with 14 customizable settings that heats up to 450 degrees in 20-degree intervals. It produces 12,000 vibrations per minute to help strands glide more freely and reduce friction and tension that can damage the hair. The iron also features a cool tip guard at the end so you can safely hold it while styling, along with an auto-shut-off feature after 60 minutes.
But before even touching a heat tool, the sleekest and shiniest looks require a clean and hydrated base, especially when coming out of protective styles. That’s where Pattern’s new Detox Shampoo comes in to deeply cleanse the hair and scalp of all products and buildup without drying it out. It’s clinically proven to remove hard minerals and chlorine, providing a clean foundation for heat use.
“People underestimate how important it is to really prepare your hair for whatever style it is you’re about to do,” Ross explains. “The buildup of product often has people using more heat than they need. The Detox Shampoo strips product off your hair without stripping your hair of moisture.”
