ST. LOUIS (KMOV.com) — Black hair care is big, it’s a more than $2 billion industry. As more women have started going natural in the last decade or so, those journeys now have a big following on social media.

For a lot of women, it’s a change that doesn’t come easy. There’s a stigma that natural hair is unprofessional but millions of women across the country are still choosing to embrace their natural beauty.

Lauren Brewer is a registered nurse in St. Louis. For years, she’d straightened her natural hair but in February she got on board with the Natural Hair Movement.

“It’s been one of the most freeing journeys for me, just embracing who I am, just really starting to love me for who God created me to be,” Brewer said.

She did what’s called the “big chop”, where she cut off all her hair, ridding her scalp of years of damage.

“I sat down in the chair and then I saw the scissors, and I almost started crying, and I was okay, and then the clippers came,” Brewer recalled. “I just remember looking in the mirror and seeing a woman I have never seen before,” she said.

However, that instant boost of self-confidence was followed by an overwhelming feeling of doubt.

“Just thinking about how people would look at you, what they would say, is this a professional look?” Brewer said.

That’s a question black women and men have asked themselves for decades, and one Tendai Morris, a natural hair hairstylist in St. Louis, coaches her clients through.

“I have definitely heard of professional women who have been paralyzingly afraid to go to work with their natural hair,” Morris said.

But where does that fear come from?

To find out, News 4 went to Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (SIUE) and talked to Makesha Harris Lee, the Assistant Director in the Office of Retention and Student Success. She researches stereotypes and stigmas black women face when it comes to their personal and professional lives.

Harris Lee found a lot of women with same feelings of doubt and fear. She told News 4 many women spent more time thinking about how they’re going to wear their hair than actually preparing for the job interview.

“If I go for this position, are they going to accept me as I am? Should I slick it back, should I straighten it?” she said.

Harris Lee said this movement away from chemicals and heat, and toward being who you are, started long before the natural hair trend took off online.

“A lot of the elaborate hairstyles that we see today, you saw those in Africa. The weave, the cornrows, the extensions, the bantu knots, none of this is new,” Harris Lee said.

When Africans were first enslaved, their hair was seen as a language tool, so their heads were shaved. The thing about hair is, it grows back.

Now, in new climates, without the treatments and tools to care for their hair, the slaves were laced with shame and just started to cover their heads with rags. 

Meanwhile, free blacks started to get creative, proudly wearing elaborate hair styles dawned with feathers and jewels, but that was called a distraction.

In Louisiana in the 1700s ,the Tignon Law required black women to cover their hair. In this era, headwraps were born.

Once slaves were freed and looking for work, they started to feel the pressure to conform to European hairstyles, which is when the black hair care industry boom begins.

Annie Malone is one of the first African American women to become a millionaire. She found roots outside St. Louis in Metropolis, Illinois, and developed an entire black hair care industry that’s still celebrated today.

“Annie Malone was really about natural health, even though she was a chemist, and she created these products, she was really about taking care of yourself from the inside,” Pat Washington, the Vice President of Development at the Annie Malone Foundation, said.

In the mid-1900s, the My Black is Beautiful movement came around. So while many were wearing Afros to show pride in being black, Harris Lee said it was also viewed as a threat.

“[Afros] were also part of the Black Panther Party uniform that they wore…it was looked at as being militant, and being angry, and that movement died very quickly because people were being fired,” said Harris Lee.

Read: St. Louis woman changing the way women wear their curls

Notably, journalist Melba Tolliver was fired covering Trisha Nixon’s wedding for wearing her Afro in 1971.

On the other hand, white actress Bo Derek wore her hair in cornrows with beads in the 1979 movie “10,” which sparked an outrage in the black community.

“Here we are getting fired for wearing the same hairstyle but you wear it and it’s, ‘Oh she’s so beautiful,” Harris Lee said.

A year later, black model, singer and actress Grace Jones had a clap back. She started sporting a flat top.

“When you see this picture, the way she’s sitting, it’s like I dare you, I dare you to try this,” said Harris Lee.

From that point, you started to see more black hairstyles featured in movies and magazines. Just this year, New York and California made it illegal to discriminate because of hairstyles. In many ways, this is a movement back to natural and it’s hit a point where it’s freeing all women.

“It’s actually allowed other women to embrace their texture, because literally, texture is everywhere. It’s not just Black women, mixed women, Hispanic women, it’s literally everywhere,” Tendai Morris, the owner of Healthy Hair Solutions said.

It’s a movement that’s teaching future generations that there’s a special power in embracing who you are, and not being afraid to show it.

“I’ve learned that I am beautiful. I’ve learned that I’m grateful because I’m different and God created me with different strands,” Brewer said.

It’s that confidence that powers the pride in being who ever we are.

“My Black is Beautiful faded out because we were doing it for others, the Natural Hair Movement will stick around because we are doing it for ourselves,” Harris Lee said.