Chris-Tia Donaldson, the brilliant natural hair care pioneer who helped revolutionize the way Black women looked at their hair through her Thank God It’s Natural (TGIN) corporation, has passed away. She was 42.
As of Tuesday, Nov. 16, 2021, no official cause of death has been given. However, the company posted a heartfelt tribute to Donaldson featuring a quote from her 2019 book, This is Only a Test: What Breast Cancer Taught Me About Faith, Love, Hair and Business.
“Cancer is just one storm. It didn’t define me,” it reads. “You don’t have to let it define you.”
TGIN finance and human resources manager and Donaldson’s niece confirmed Donaldson’s death through an announcement via Donaldson’s Instagram page.
“TGIN and the TGIN Foundation has lost a leader and a visionary and the world has lost a selfless and beautiful human being,” said Singleton in a video tribute. “Chris-Tia lived a life of service and was a force to be reckoned with inside and outside of the beauty community. Through her passion and purpose, she redefined beauty and created a community of women empowerment teaching us the importance of advocating for ourselves, especially our health. The entire TGIN family mourns the tremendous loss. No words can adequately express that sadness or the love we have for her.”
Donaldson changed history when she chose to leave her lucrative Fortune 500 career, replete with complex business transactions involving technology and open-source code, and parlayed her brilliance into the upliftment and beautification of Black women’s natural hair.
Donaldson, who earned honors in economics as well as a law degree from Harvard University, became a coil and coiff connoisseur who forever transformed the narrative. Once seen as an abomination that warranted mockery and ridicule, Black women’s hair under Donaldson’s warm embrace became tantamount to a royal crown that was to be worn with swag and distinction.
Donaldson even wrote a book about her empowering epiphany, Thank God I’m Natural: The Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Maintaining Natural Hair, in the summer of 2009 that helped women carefully cultivate and curate their kinks and coils in wondrous ways that had never been done before.
In 2013, Donaldson began formulating products in the kitchen with the help of her family. Just two years later, Donaldson graduated with honors again — this time to a nationally-influential company that quickly earned seven-figure returns in 2015.
Unfortunately, later that same year, Donaldson was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was just 36 years old.
Though the malady became a theme for the remainder of her remarkable life, it fails to define her indelible legacy.
A multitude of admirers and faithful users of TGIN products paid homage to this transcendent visionary. Beauty blogger Afrobella said on IG: “Chris-Tia was such an inspiration and always a delight whenever we saw each other … Her legacy will live forever.”
Allthemoorecurls added: “Her story, where it all started with her selling hair products out of her car, she truly was an inspiration. She accomplished so much. Her products are amazing.”
