By Andrea Williams

Everybody you know has a blog: your girlfriend who styles your hair every Thursday, your niece who’s only in the tenth grade and even her third period math teacher. But back in 2006, when Patrice Yursik first took to the web with her online journal of sorts, blogging wasn’t exactly tres chic.

The former journalist was encouraged by an internet-savvy friend to share her opinions with the world, and he prodded her to come up with an under-the-radar topic that would attract eager readers. Her short list? Natural hair tips and trends, makeup for black women and plus-sized beauty. She purchased her domain name on August 13; two days later she published her first post.

Now Yursik is more commonly known as Afrobella – the super fly chick with the super fly natural and one of the web’s top beauty blogs, black or otherwise. She flits about the country on one exciting assignment after another – interviewing celebs on the Academy Awards red carpet, working with chemists to perfect her very own MAC Lipglass shade – all the while keeping her 32,000-plus Twitter followers abreast of the latest and greatest in natural beauty and fashion.

Yursik has come a long way from her days as the calendar editor of a Miami newspaper, but she credits that real-life journalistic experience as the training ground for her blog.

“The challenge was that it was a weekly newspaper, and you just had to write as much as you can, and edit as much as you can and turn in perfect copy every week,” she says. “So it was a good preparation for building my own blog. It showed me that I can write a variety of different topics and interview anybody.”

Unfortunately, while the position helped her develop the chops she would need to consistently churn out creative, reader-friendly content for Afrobella.com, it also proved to be the catalyst that forced her to commit to her budding brand full-time.

While she was working, Yursik was able to juggle her online duties with her daily 9-5 responsibilities, jetting off to record segments for NPR’s News and Notes Blogger’s Roundtable on her lunch break and posting to her site in the evenings. Everything was smooth sailing until she was offered the opportunity of a lifetime to attend an event in D.C. held in honor of Barak Obama’s Presidential Inauguration.

About This Episode

Hair care is a hot topic, and can sometimes be a daunting and confusing task. What are some safe haircare products we can use on our child? What’s the youngest age a child can get a perm? How do you communicate positive beauty and hair messages to your daughter? In this episode, our featured guest is Patrice Yursik of Afrobella.com, and she will share her thoughts on child hair care best practices.

About Patrice Yursik

Founder of Afrobella®. According to some, she’s the Godmother of Brown Beauty Blogging.

Trinidadian-born writer Patrice Grell Yursik created Afrobella.comto fill a void and to celebrate the inner and outer beauty of women all shades of beautiful. Her award-winning blog shines a loving light on natural hair and the wonderfully wide range of gorgeous skin tones and sizes women come in.

Afrobella has been featured in Essence, Ebony, Glamour, the Trinidad Guardian, and Fast Company. Patrice has contributed her writing to Essence, Newsweek.com, and Ebony.com. She has been featured in advertising campaigns for haircare brand Cream of Nature and cosmetics brand Lancome, and hosted events for brands including Huetiful and Carol’s Daughter. Afrobella recently partnered with MAC Cosmetics to create her own custom lipglass called “All Of My Purple Life,” part of the Bloggers’ Obsession collection (which debuted on June 21,2011, and sold out in a week).

She was the natural hair blogger at AOL’s Black Voices and was one of the first writers for Vogue Italia’s Vogue Black online, and contributed the weekly Natural Hair Diary feature to Essence.com. Currently Afrobella contributes to xoJane.com. Afrobella was recently listed as one of Ebony Magazine’s Power 100, and has won more than ten online awards, including inclusion to the Black Weblog Awards Hall of Fame.

About Karyn Parsons

Karyn Parsons is best known as the character “Hilary Banks” on the long-running television show, “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” Today she is a wife and mother of two. Parsons is also the Founder and President of the Sweet Blackberry foundation after being inspired by the true tale of a determined slave and the remarkable lengths he travelled to find his freedom.  While growing up, Parsons’ mother, a librarian in the Black Resource Center of a library in South Central Los Angeles, would share stories of African-American accomplishment with her daughter.  A mother and activist, Karyn created Sweet Blackberry to use the power of stories to inspire youth. Follow her on Twitter @Karyn_Parsons.

Want More Mommy In Chief? Watch these episodes:

Super blogger, Afrobella lived out every gurlie girl’s dream recently when she partnered with MAC to create “All of My Purple Life”. The color and name are an obvious nod to Prince. And we just so happen to love both!

Afrobella says she consulted other MAC chemists of color to ensure that this shade of purple was ideal for a woman with darker skin tones.

Check out Afrobella sporting the color in a recent photoshoot and watch the video of its release here.

If you love it, you can purchase it for six weeks only, at MACCosmetics.com

(Black Enterprise) — For Patrice Yursik, having natural hair is more than a fad, it’s about embracing her God-given curls and understanding that it’s just as beautiful as any other form of tresses. Longing to see a reflection of herself in mainstream media, the Chicago-based blogger took matters into her own hands and created Afrobella.com, a blog that celebrates women who are “all shades of beautiful,” and reviews products for natural hair.  Since launching in 2006, Afrobella.com has won several Black Weblog Awards—including Best Niche Blog, Best Culture Blog, Best Writing in a Blog, and Best Style and Fashion. Now, Yursik’s achievements are being recognized by BlackEnterprise.com as part of our first annual Black Blogger Month. Here, she discusses her journey to loving her natural tresses and the business of blogging about beauty.

I started blogging because…I started noticing a void in the representation of women who look like me in magazines and online. There weren’t any natural hair blogs to speak of at that time. So I wanted to write about natural hair and also kind of depict the fact that just because you have natural hair, doesn’t mean you’re wearing clothes that you made yourself out of hemp and make-up made from natural pigments. Women who are natural can also be glamorous.

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Who is this woman that sent Justin Bieber fans into an angered tizzy last night? If you haven’t been up on your new artist game lately, you might have missed Madame Spalding. Not only did this 26 year old bassist/jazz singer perform at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in 2009 she also honored Prince this past summer at his BET tribute. But, as with anyone, there’s a back story to her rise to Grammy earning career. Here are five things you didn’t know about Esperanza Spalding.

Some subtle accents will be stealing the spring spotlight from some of your favorite fashions.  Accessories can help individualize a popular look or tie together pieces that would otherwise appear conflicted.  For those of us who fear to take a ride on the fashion forward expressway, accessories can provide a way to take a different style for a test drive.  Take a peek at 8 pieces that are guaranteed to help take your outfit from fabulous to fierce this spring.

Ask any woman going through the “transition” and she’ll tell you it takes patience and confidence to make the “BC” or big chop. Sing “I Am Not My Hair” all you want, but for many women, hair is a symbol of their personality and womanhood. To cut it off is the ultimate middle finger to Western society’s ridiculous definitions of beauty.

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