Freshly returned from a trip to his home state of Oklahoma, Guy Tang (@guy_tang) has ripped off the bandage and found healing. A decade has passed since he set foot within the state’s borders. Growing up in Oklahoma, Tang relates how he constantly questioned his sexuality, his race and his identity. “For me, Oklahoma was a place of bad memories. I felt like I escaped it for the longest time; I didn’t want to go back there,” Tang says. But, like many others, the pandemic’s imposed downtime and stark daily reality led to self-reflection. “I realized that’s not fair [to think like that],” he asserts. “I’ve met so many people online—my #hairbesties—who give me so much love and respect, and many are from Oklahoma. I had to go there, maybe for closure, maybe to understand myself further.” The experience left Tang renewed. He visited his old beauty school, Jenks Beauty College, and met with its fresh-eyed students; he stopped by Armstrong McCall, a distributor of Tang’s wildly popular brand, #mydentity. He came to a cathartic understanding: “I realized that you can’t blame your roots. Instead, I can celebrate my roots. This is why I am who I am. It’s actually your past and your pain that give you power; they can become what give you purpose,” he says.
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Freshly returned from a trip to his home state of Oklahoma, Guy Tang (@guy_tang) has ripped off the bandage and found healing. A decade has passed since he set foot within the state’s borders. Growing up in Oklahoma, Tang relates how he constantly questioned his sexuality, his race and his identity. “For me, Oklahoma was a place of bad memories. I felt like I escaped it for the longest time; I didn’t want to go back there,” Tang says. But, like many others, the pandemic’s imposed downtime and stark daily reality led to self-reflection. “I realized that’s not fair [to think like that],” he asserts. “I’ve met so many people online—my #hairbesties—who give me so much love and respect, and many are from Oklahoma. I had to go there, maybe for closure, maybe to understand myself further.” The experience left Tang renewed. He visited his old beauty school, Jenks Beauty College, and met with its fresh-eyed students; he stopped by Armstrong McCall, a distributor of Tang’s wildly popular brand, #mydentity. He came to a cathartic understanding: “I realized that you can’t blame your roots. Instead, I can celebrate my roots. This is why I am who I am. It’s actually your past and your pain that give you power; they can become what give you purpose,” he says.
Guy Tang
The Unexpected Introvert
Tang’s past has turned him into a fighter. He fought to overcome his natural introversion—an introversion so extreme, he quit a high school job at fast food joint Arby’s after only three days. The problem: Management wanted him on the register, taking orders. “Many people wouldn’t think this now, but growing up, I couldn’t talk to people—I was too shy! I wanted to be the guy in the background, you know, frying the French fries,” Tang recounts. But he loved hair too much to let his introverted personality stand in the way. Being a hairdresser forces conversations with clients; he realized rather quickly one can’t hide behind the chair. “This job made me actually have to communicate one on one,” he says. “The connection I am able to create was always so important for me because it gave me confidence in myself and, in turn, me making my clients beautiful gave them confidence. So, in many ways, hair saved my life,” he says.
The Fight for Joy
That fighter instinct also propelled him into his quest to become a hairstylist. After expulsion from high school, Tang relentlessly pursued the required GED to start beauty school. Through three rounds of homeschooling, he managed to get his diploma, and yet the naysayers around him tried to plant doubt in his mind. “Everyone’s trying to tell you how to define your success. Your parents say, ‘Oh, you need to be a lawyer or a doctor. You can’t be a hairstylist … that’s unrealistic; you don’t make money in that,’” Tang reflects. “So many people believe success is based off of money. For me, success is not about money. Success is about being happy—maybe because I didn’t feel happy when I was younger. I fought my whole life to find happiness.” As a young stylist, when Tang finally left Oklahoma for Los Angeles in 2009, he had very little money—certainly not enough money to live comfortably with L.A.’s higher cost of living. “But in actuality, that was my happiest time,” he admits. “I always take happiness into account when I make decisions. I want to laugh; I want to smile. I want to create memories. And for me, that’s value. Honestly: You can’t take money to the grave with you,” he says pointedly.
Breaking In
When breaking into the forefront of the hair industry, Tang’s resoluteness again welled up to push him through. At the time, Tang was a social media pioneer, one of the few using YouTube, Facebook and Instagram for hair, whether sharing a view into his life as an Asian hairdresser or haircolor tutorials. As he gained popularity, those who had a more traditional trajectory to platform educating often dismissed Tang and the new guard of social media influencers, believing—whether wrongly or rightly—that this new crop had skipped the line. Tang, however, paid his dues. “A lot of people think I just came out of nowhere and then became this influencer; that’s not the case. I was an educator for seven years for another hair company; I did all the hair sweeping backstage. I learned to be an educator and present myself properly with knowledge and understanding of the product—and also the politics of it all,” he confides. Tang fought this chilly reception, but he doesn’t necessarily fault the industry for its slowness to accept influencers. “I think a lot of influencers back then got trapped and didn’t understand the politics of the hair business, and that it’s not all personal,” he says. Inherent to being a successful influencer is the person’s perceived authenticity and cult of personality; as such, influencers sometimes balked at being fed what to say from a brand—even when they were being paid by the brand to speak. “It’s social media culture versus traditional media culture; there was a clash in the beginning of not understanding one another. The two groups didn’t know how to merge together,” Tang explains. Times have changed, however; what Tang toiled through a decade ago and forged for those who followed is now common practice. Influencers better understand the mechanisms of working with brands, and traditional educators increasingly use online tools to reach a broader audience.
Share and Share Alike
If there’s one thing Tang has contributed to the industry, it’s a culture of sharing—in his case, quite freely. Rather than hoarding techniques and formulas to himself or waiting to be paid by a company to share, he broadcast his knowledge to everyone with online access—free of charge. Yet, he feels this openness came with consequences. “Sharing was empowering because you’re able to change the hair industry and show people that we can all be confident in our formulas and not feel insecure. Plus, when you share, you help people create better hair and haircolor,” he explains, lamenting, “But there’s consequences—being taken advantage of by others and them not knowing your value.” He traces his own issues with this back to his desire to find happiness in hair; freely sharing everything gave him joy, but sometimes at his own expense.
A True Identity
Enter #mydentity, Tang’s own color and product line. “Oh man, #mydentity came at the right time for me. In so many ways, #mydentity saved my life as well,” he says. When Tang was initially approached to do a color line, he didn’t feel aligned with the pitch. It all came back to authenticity: He wanted to create what he would use—and the initial idea presented to him dismissed what he uses in favor of what “sells.” “I said, ‘If we’re going to do this, I want to go in being confident with it, loving it and caring about it,’” he says. “I want to give the brand a soundtrack, a heartbeat, and create a culture within the brand. It should be founded on a community sharing, uniting people and having that culture of confidence and knowing who you are.” That’s where the #mydentity name comes into play. “It’s about knowing who you are and having that courage, because I struggled with my identity my whole life in terms of my sexuality and race. We all have identity struggles growing up,” he says. “#mydentity is about being able to be yourself and celebrating yourself as a hairstylist from whatever your cultural background is. It’s about empowering you.” If that sounds heavy, it is—but Tang’s online #hairbesties community tend to share their professional and personal struggles, as does Tang, who is often an open book online. The hashtag in #mydentity is an ode to his online roots and community, his products a love letter to his #hairbesties.
If You Normalize It, They Will Come
In Tang’s earlier days, circa 2009, a bit of toning gone wrong started his obsession with muted pastel tones. “It was kind of accidental beauty. I remember using some violet toner that turned pink on the hair. And I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, her hair is pink. It’s not supposed to be pink. But … I like it. I’m not supposed to like it, but I do,’” he laughs, adding, “It was a gentle pink.” Thinking he needed to correct the hue, he began layering demipermanent color over the top, glaze after glaze, until it became a “mystical” mauve-y pink. “My client loved it. I remember her saying, ‘I didn’t even know this is what I wanted or needed.’ That was the start; I posted the results and then people started to request it. I thought, ‘We’re gonna start embracing these tones that we’re not supposed to embrace and work with them.’ You learn as you go, you know?”
So, no surprise here that #mydentity’s first launch in 2017 debuted hues like glistening Rose Gold, Dusty Lavender and Silver Smoke—staples of Tang’s color creations. “We set the standard for those types of shades; that’s cool. When you’re one of the first to do something and you set the standard, you normalize it—that’s the most important thing,” he says.
The idea that subtle pastel haircolor had to be normalized might be hard for Gen Z to grasp—even our collective memory can forget that just a few short years ago, pastel haircolor was truly gasp-worthy. But perhaps due to its wearability and pro formulation, muted pastels became mainstream more quickly. “When you have rose-gold hair, society thinks it looks more natural, and you’re able to have fun and still wear it to work,” Tang reasons. Hot-pink hair, not so much. So, the fighter in him again sought to normalize not only the new muted hues, but also how to create them. “People had never seen anything like these new muted shades, so they also asked how I did it. It takes multiple color layerings to achieve the right result, so you have to normalize the steps for hair pros: normalizing pre-toning, and that sometimes these colors can take six, seven, 12 hours to create, depending on how long the client’s hair is and the corrective work you have to do. For years, beauty pros have been trained to be like a machine and do two to three clients at once to maximize money. This way of working, you can’t concentrate on one client; you get burnt out. But I wanted to normalize one-on-one coloring; you have to retrain the way you work with these types of colors,” he reasons.
The Process, the Heartbreak
With #mydentity, Tang seeks to move the needle of what’s possible. “I wanted a chemistry-driven product with a specific pH that can seal the cuticle. I wanted conditioning formulas and certain colors,” he says, ticking down his wish list. As with most things in life, not every wish was feasible. “I tried to push the boundaries as much as I can and still work within what can be done and how many SKUs I can have,” he says. Just last month, #mydentity launched two new vibrant rose-gold direct dyes, Loverboy and Heartbreaker, that were initially set to launch four years ago, but had failed multiple “stability tests” (see “Stability, Baby” on page 35). Each test failure broke Tang’s heart. “I created videos, a photo shoot, a story around these colors—and then at the last minute, it didn’t happen,” he laments. Then, the pandemic struck, and Tang was able to slow down and really concentrate on the formulation for a successful launch. He’s happy to finally bring the two dyes to market, but a small part of him is sad #mydentity wasn’t the first to introduce these innovations to the industry. “Because we took too darn long, it feels like every company already has a similar shade in this category. But, you know what? It’s okay. Here we are,” Tang says.
It’s the Journey For Him
Setbacks are not foreign to this fighter, and Tang won’t give up advocating for what he wants—ever. He has changed the goalposts of his career as his path evolves, from garnering success as a platform artist and educator to creating a color and styling line to even being on a reality show (Netflix’s Bling Empire), but a common thread remains throughout: to simply be happy. “That has always been a goal and still is a goal,” he says. As for his legacy, one could say he has already left an indelible mark on the industry. Tang’s a pioneer of hair on social media; of creating a sharing culture of techniques and formulas; of normalizing new approaches to hair behind the chair; of societal acceptance of muted pastel haircolors. But when you ask him about the legacy he wants to leave, Tang says he just wants to enjoy the journey. “Whatever legacy happens from this journey, I want it to happen organically. People forget the journey is part of the process, and that it’s probably the most amazing experience—with its good and its bad,” he says. “And that gives you a story, as well as purpose. People always try to fast-forward to the ending. But you’ve got to live and persevere through this journey.” Spoken like a true fighter.
Stability, Baby
Ever wonder how a haircolor makes it to market? It’s a laborious process wrought with joy and heartache, as Guy Tang knows all to well. Here, he explains the process of creating #mydentity haircolors, including the part that produces the most grief, stability testing.
Multiple Versions: Determining what you want is the first step. Then, “after you work with the chemists, they create several versions (sometimes six!) of one color,” he says.
Test, Test, Test: Then, you test each version on “models, hair swatches, everything!” Tang exclaims.
Compare and Contrast: At this point, you pick your favorite version and approve it. “I tend to approve two, one that I love and one as a backup plan—just in case,” he says.
Three Months: The product sits through “stability” for three months in different temperatures. “The color has to be able to stand and not shift for three months through hot, cold and humid temperatures,” he says. If it passes, then the color can launch! If not, the dye…well…dies.
Lesson Learned: “This is why where you store your color is important,” Tang advises, noting temperature changes can shift your haircolor formula, making color results unpredictable. “Don’t store your color in front of the sun. Don’t store your color in front of an open window. Don’t leave your color in your car!” he warns.
Tang displays his work on his Instagram page (@guy_tang), which currently boasts more than 2.2 million followers.
A sampling of Tang’s #mydentity styling products!