We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Folahan Amudipe. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Folahan below.

Alright, Folahan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

The beginning of my content creator/ influencer journey was kind of an accident. Although I love my career now, I never intentionally came into the field with intention of making it my full time career. I went to UC Berkeley and majored in Political Economy with the full intention to work in the International Relations field. However, just a few months after graduating in 2018, my dad was diagnosed & later passed from stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. As an elder daughter, I sacrificed the dreams I had then to live at home and help manage the family business that puts a roof over our heads and puts my younger siblings through college. It was a really rough period in my life, but I turned to social media as an outlet of self expression. Through my grief, I found solace in helping others through sharing educational natural hair and travel tips. What was first a hobby and outlet in 2019/2020, turned into a part time hustle, and then into a full time career by 2022. It was a risk and I was always thank myself for because it brought me stability both emotionally & financially for myself and family. I am truly grateful for the community I have amassed who trusted in me to get me this far.

Folahan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Folahan (Fola) Amudipe aka @folahontas is a Los Angeles based beauty, travel, lifestyle, fashion digital creator & storyteller. She shows you a world through her lens while passionately bridging communities through her informed experiences.

As a dark skinned Black woman, she knows how difficult it is to see themselves in beauty, different countries, etc so she dedicated her platform to being an instrument of change. She’s cultivated a growing audience by helping to reimagine how curl friends see their hair more positively through simple healthy hair education, inspire both socially conscious, culturally enriching yet luxurious & stylish travel, all while guiding people (& herself) to discover the best versions of themselves.

Since carving out her corner of the internet in 2020 as the person to “put you on game”, she’s become the go-to resource for keeping it real in everything she does. Her goal & mission is to lift the veil of curiosity & expand people’s minds by sharing her lived experiences through the lens of a young Black millennial/Gen-Z woman.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The most rewarding aspect of being a creative is being able to shift the paradigm. As a creator with a focus of educational natural hair content, the main driver of my content was to help women with kinky coily hair reimagine our relationship with our hair. A lot of us share the same story of not being taught to love our hair type and curl pattern and as a result, have contrived notions of what it takes to have healthy hair as a Black woman. My aim is for us to learn healthier & simplified practices for hair care. Through my content, some of my followers have expressed how much I’ve helped them through their journey and I’m heart-warmed by that.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Honestly, the best advice I can give is to ask yourself these questions. “What are you passionate about? What do your friends & family ask you for advice on? What is a pain point you are solving? How will you put your own spin on it?” For me, those questions became easy to answer when I sat with myself to really introspect on what I can offer to the world and what kind of impact I’d like to have. I started out talking about natural hair because I had waist length coily dense hair and I would often get asked for advice and tips. The same happened with my travel content, I started studying abroad in college and found my love for travel as a result. Therefore, I quickly realized that those were the 2 things I was constantly asked about. So, instead of answering everyone one by one, I started to share it on YouTube, TikTok, & IG with detailed captions and explanations. I started to carve out my own little corner of the internet because I was going against the grain and debunking very popular myths. People appreciated my honesty and transparency and I started to grow from there.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: www.instagram.com/folahontas
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/folahontas
• Other: TikTok – www.tiktok.com/@folahontas

Image Credits
Personal Photo – @tayojr Tayo Kuku Jr