Behind The Lens With Le coil

If you are ever in need of natural hairstyle ideas, or simply a bit of inspiration to help you along your natural hair journey the le coil website – lecoil.tumblr.com is definitely the place to go. le coil features tons of photos and artwork of natural hair, showcasing all types of hairstyles from loose styles like fros and puffs, to twists and locs. Likewise, the styles featured on le coil aren’t your typical ‘everyday’ hairstyles. Browsing through the bold, colorful pages of le coil you will also find the most unique styles on all textures of hair.

“le coil started off very simply as a little natural hair mood board, but has quickly turned into a full blown art/editorial project. Being natural myself, I’d been frequenting a lot of delightful blogs and message boards, but not much in the way of diverse examples of hairstyles,” explains Jamala, le coil’s founder & editor-in-chief.

Jamala, who is also the creator of the blog Miss Modular – wanted to start a natural hair site with, “a similar loose, image-centric format full of inspirational finds” and hence le coil was born. She says she keeps the site running with the help of benevolent contributors and friends. One can measure the popularity of le coil by it’s Facebook page which consists of over 2,480 fans.

“Sometimes it seems like half the battle of being a coilie is feeling like you’re not being represented in the same fun and artful way that other groups are, so from the beginning it was really essential to me that the photos be really bright, stylish and modern. Also, I want to make sure that there’s a strong representation of diversity among black women, whether it be with their hair texture, skin color, body type, profession or personal style. Overall, I’ve tried to maintain a design-forward, editorial approach while still letting things organically fall into place.”

Behind the le coil Photos:

Jamala is also the photographer responsible for most of the beautiful and inspirational photos featured on le coil. “I’ve been natural for about 9 years now, but since I was initially interested in finding cool inspiration from other ladies, I’ve yet to run a photo of myself. Many of my friends have been featured on the site though,” stated Jamala.

I try to maintain a balance of found images and our own original street style photography (photos taken by myself or contributors always have the little black le coil bar at the bottom of it). My own web junkie scouring leads me to a lot of great finds that are sourced everywhere from fellow bloggers to Flickr, to fabulous leads from friends and fans.

As for the submission of personal shots, I post them on a very limited basis. I’m incredibly grateful to those who are generous enough to share their photos, but I’m admittedly very selective to the (sometimes insane) point where I’ve even opted not to post photos that I’ve taken, for whatever reason….usually some sort of camera FAIL.

The Future of le coil:

There are tons of ideas brewing. One of the plans for the near future is to re-design again to help accommodate bigger photo features and add social networking elements. I’d also like to plan some cool events and maybe work on a way to bring le coil to the print world, whether it be in book or magazine form. Honestly, I’ve been bowled over by the enthusiastic response from visitors and I’m endlessly appreciative of all the amazing support. Whatever the future holds, I always plan to focus on the original objective of keeping people inspired.

More Info on Le coil:

Le coil Website – lecoil.tumblr.com
Facebook – facebook.com/lecoil
Twitter – twitter.com/lecoil