Kellesia (Kelley) Sharay, also known as The Hair Nutritionist, has overcome a lifetime of challenges, from childhood trauma to physical and mental abuse. While she has not escaped from her circumstances unscathed, she bears the scars of these experiences as an example to others that your environment and circumstances do not define you and that you are indeed a seed that can emerge from the dirt as a beautiful bloom.

Born and raised in Atlanta, GA (Grady Baby!), Kelley and her family moved around so much, she cannot recall the names of all the different schools she attended. As a child, Kelley loved being active, was athletic and stayed outdoors for hours - picking flowers, catching lightning bugs and just enjoying nature in general.

She discovered her natural gift for doing hair at the age of 6 when she started doing her, and her older sister’s hair for school. She was so good at it, her natural talent continued to evolve over time. Before long she was doing hair for family, friends, classmates and neighbors. By her teenage years Kelley had a full roster of clients.

“By the time I was in high school, I could do pretty much anything, whether it was finger waves or high right low levels…”

Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, Kelley did not have a normal childhood experience. Due to her family being deeply involved in a cult for the vast majority of her life and moving around a lot, Kelley missed out on many of the typical teenage experiences because of the strict schedule they adhered to for the cult.

Buried in the Dirt

By the eighth grade, Kelley was informed by her family that they were to move again. But by that time, being from a broken family, a broken home, and abusive background, she had begun to rebel.

“I was basically trying to get a reaction, I was like, I don't want to go to school anymore...We were going to move again, and I was going from one high school where I was pretty much making A's and B's, and was told I was going to go to another school.”

With the loss of stability and the lack of parental guidance, she decided to drop out of high school in the 9th grade after having a rough start at yet another new school.

“So again, I'm moving, I'm losing friends, I'm not going to know anybody. It's just gonna be me, by myself, again. Every time I'm settled, it's time to go. I go to school and I'm just repeatedly harassed. And it made me very uncomfortable to go to school. So, at this point, I'm already dealing with the fact that I'm in another school, I don't know anybody, then I have to deal with being harassed.”

I told my mom I wasn't going back to school. And she was just like, okay, so she didn't care. I had a lot of people around me that did not care. And I didn't care. So, I didn't go to school.

As a high school dropout with only a partial 9th-grade education and a lack of support from her family, Kelley struggled to survive. At the age of 17 years old, without family support and an adequate education, Kelley tried to balance raising herself with finding employment to support herself with jobs at McDonald’s, temp agencies, telemarketing companies, and trying to avoid homelessness. She often had to rely on the kindness of friends and strangers to provide a safe space to sleep. Her unstable circumstances caused her to navigate some difficult situations, and at the age of 19, she became pregnant, which served as a pivotal moment for Kelley.

Of course, you don't go to school, you have no job. I'm getting into trouble. I’m fighting. Because I just don't have anybody that's there. Nobody could guide me. Nobody cared. So, by that time, my mother was just like, I'm getting ready to get married again. You know, I don't know what you're going to do… So, we went stay with a friend of hers, and then I was basically on my own. She was just like; I'm getting married and you're on your own.

You know, I didn't have that many relatives that had my back at that time. So, a lot of the places to lay my head had to do with strangers and just wherever I could. So, years and years and years of dysfunction. Trauma. Abuse. Rape. All of the above. At some point, I got pregnant. Me having my first son at the age of 19 was a turning point for me.

For the first time, Kelley found herself responsible for providing not only for herself but for another human being. This was truly her first experience with unconditional love. When her son would cry for her to comfort him, and wanted to be held and loved by her, she realized what she lacked in her own childhood and knew something had to change, not only for herself, but also for her son.

She began to seek education, but because she dropped out of high school early in the 9th grade, there was a lot of basic information Kelley was never exposed to. When she registered for GED classes, she realized she was extremely lacking in the necessary math skills.

“I had never seen some of the math. These different locations would offer GED classes to kind of see where you are in case you wanted to get your GED…Now, language wise, I would pass with flying colors. But when it came to the math, I would score so low, because I had never seen it before. Geometry was taught when you went to 10th grade. I didn't go to the tenth grade. When I would see all these letters attached to numbers…here we go again…downward spiral and depression would set in. And I'm just constantly thinking, there's no way I can do this. This is too hard.”

However, with the support of friends and customers serving as her cheerleaders, Kelley was encouraged and kept trying to strengthen her math skills, despite doubting herself and some failures along the way. She found free GED adult classes at various community and technical colleges and experienced yet another turning point in her life.

"When I took a GED pretest, I had a teacher pull me out of the classroom after he got the results of the test. He said, let me ask you a personal question, if you don't mind. Why didn't you get your GED before now? I gave him a quick scenario of me being out here on my own supporting myself, being homeless, things like that. I said that circumstances were the reason why I did not finish school.

He said, well, I'm asking you for a reason. You're scoring extremely high on the language arts and spelling parts of this test. So, he said, I suggest you go to some classes to get your math skills up. But I have no doubt that you will pass this test with flying colors, once you learn algebra and geometry. And so that's what made me decide to push to do math classes.”

Blossoming

With someone advocating for her education, and with another son, Kelley finally decided that she was going to get her GED. She had always focused on her children’s education and made sure they had tutors, but she felt a void because she never finished school or received her GED. She began taking a bunch of different math courses and then finally took the GED test again and passed it in 2008. By that time, she was in her late 30s. Finally feeling encouraged, in the years that followed, Kelley then pursued and obtained her Master Cosmetology Degree (2010) and a Marketing Degree (2014).

“You know, when I first took it, I scored low on the math, and I was like, forget it. So, I just waited 10 more years. I just didn't do anything with it because I was having to deal with depression. You get told you're not going to be something long enough; you begin to think that way. You get told that you’re stupid, you begin to think that way…So, when I first took that test, and my scores on math were so low, I was like, I can't do it and years went by before I tried it again.”

However, as a young adult struggling to raise herself and make a life for herself, and eventually her children, Kelley realized more hard truths about her upbringing. And with this realization, she fell into a deep depression.

“I realized that literally my whole childhood, teenage, early adulthood, all of those things were built on a lie. I was formed and raised in an organization that was built on a lie. So, when I found out all of that was a lie, it literally sent me into a downward spiral. I was already depressed because I did not have a normal childhood like a lot of people did. You know, I could not participate in activities and things that normal children participated in – cheerleading and track. I was already dealing with the emotional roller coasters of life anyway. So that being said, when I found out what I was raised in, the teaching, that such a major part of my life was a lie…the depression got very bad, it was worse than ever. And I did not want to do anything. I didn't want to go anywhere. I was just sitting around in a very dark state and I knew it was an unhealthy, dark place.”

Full Bloom

Eventually, Kelley found gardening to be a great form of therapy for coping with her family trauma, helping her to emerge from that dark place. She was always attracted to healthy and homegrown foods and would visit different farms and farmer’s markets. She started experimenting with flowers and submerged herself in gardening.

She began by planting a few flowers outside her home. Kelley admits that she planted for beauty at first, but then she would see how the different seedlings that she would put in the ground would emerge and become this full-grown plant and was in awe of them, and of the process, and she began to plant more.

At that time, her youngest son had begun attending a local private school that was focused on agriculture. Kelley was so amazed to see the kids growing food in their own little gardens, that when she dropped her son off at school, if she didn’t have anything else to do, she would stay and participate in the planting because she loved the outdoor environment.

“I kind of just started with a little bitty tomato plant because I was trying to copy what I saw the teacher teaching the kids there. That's how I started gardening, from a little bitty tomato plant, to see if I could I actually do this? If I can grow a tomato, that was a challenge. I'm like, can I do this? You know, like, wow, yeah, and that's how I started.”

Kelley would spend hours outside, losing herself in the experience of gardening. She saw the plant growth cycle as a metaphor for her life and her journey to overcome her trauma. She closely identified with the plants as something that was once buried, but emerged from the dirt as a beautiful bloom.

“I would go out to garden and realize I was outside for almost 16 hours. And I felt amazing! I loved having my hands in that dirt. It made me feel alive. I put something in the ground so small, and saw it emerge through the dirt just with my care… I just saw myself in everything I put in the ground.”

“And I looked at the dirt as the dirt that was placed on me, through my childhood growing up…friends, family, whoever, but I could just see a plant, and then fruits and vegetables, emerge from the dirt with care, watering, nourishing, keeping the weeds away… I began to see my life in everything I put in the ground.”

Bearing Fruit

As Kelley healed and addressed her childhood issues, she was able to evolve and is still evolving, into the best version of herself. She has been fortunate to make a living doing something she’s naturally gifted at – doing hair, for more than 30 years. She continues to nurture not only her clients, but their hair as well. She is so focused on hair health, from the inside out, that she became The Hair Nutritionist. She believes in treating the hair as you would treat the body.

“Because I pay attention to nutrition and things that I eat, put in my body, I pay attention to what I put on my client’s hair, I pay attention to what I put on my hair, all of the above.

You can have a beautiful head of hair, but if your diet is not right, you're in trouble, because if you're not drinking enough water and not intaking enough green vegetables, that literally can affect the hair itself. Your hair will tell you the story. It starts from the inside. But you definitely have to pay attention to the outside as well.”

She has decided to combine her passion for helping clients nurture their hair with her passion for gardening by launching the Shemmer & Shyne line of all-natural, plant based hair care products. In all of her years of styling hair, Kelley has always mixed different products together to obtain the desired effect.

“At this point in my life, I can look at someone's hair like, hmm, I need to mix up this hydrating shampoo with that one, to get this result that’s just phenomenal…So when I started mixing up things, and I would see the effect… I could feel the hair was exactly what it needed to be… stronger, more shine to it, more body. So, I started kind of playing around with mixing up different products that I had. And I went on to experiment with things that I ate (natural products), because I was doing research.

For example, if they need a little bit more moisture and a little bit more shine, I'll grab some honey out of the cabinet. And then I may put that in the conditioner and then after I'm done with it…whoa! So it was working for me. Quite well.”

Quickly becoming an avid gardener, Kelley had 11 gardens with over 76 different varieties of fruits and vegetables. She was planting almost every herb that she cooked with, from rosemary to echinacea, basil to chamomile. Being a researcher, she started doing more reading about hair and was surprised that a lot of the herbs that she was growing were also good for the hair.

As she became more educated on the science of hair and the products that she used, clients would ask for her opinions of certain products and request that she mix custom products for them. As more of her clients made requests for her special concoctions, they encouraged her to sell the products, and Shemmer & Shyne was born.

“If somebody was like, my hair gets dry, I would remember the things that I read about and make them something to take home with them. And then when they would make another appointment with me, they'd be like, oh my gosh, can I have some more of that? That was really amazing! My hair was softer or stopped breaking.

A couple of my clients were like; you need to sell this because I was giving it to them for free. And they were like no, this is some good stuff. I gave it to my friend. I used it on my child. So, I started thinking like, Yeah, this might be an idea. So that's pretty much how it started.”