Yahoo Sports Engineer creates 'genius' TikTok filter to address common hairstyling issue: 'I did not expect it to get this attention'
When Konnie Wells would braid hair on the weekends, she would always struggle with getting the middle part just right. Sometimes she’d even make her clients do their own part, to avoid being blamed for a crooked one.
“Braiding hair can be time-consuming, so I wanted to figure out a way to reduce time,” she told In The Know by Yahoo. Wells also works as a mechanical engineer, so she also wanted to figure out a way to incorporate her engineering skills with her hairstyling talent.
That’s the origin behind “the middle part filter,” a TikTok filter Wells created that has now been viewed 7.2 million times. Wells built out a feature that allows the user to ensure that if they follow the filter’s line, they’ll have a perfectly straight hair part.
“It took about two days to create and get the first iteration uploaded,” she explained. “Then it took two more days to figure out how to improve it. The hardest part was getting it down to the correct file size for filters.”
Wells also wanted to make it easier for users to see if the filter’s line was straight, so she added a bright green color indicator that would let users know if they were turning their head too far one way.
On May 22, she uploaded a TikTok breaking down her design process. The comment section exploded with comments like “lifesaver,” “genius,” “icon” and “Black excellence.” Viewers loved that Wells used Black models to demonstrate how the filter worked, and a lot of people expressed all-caps excitement for her next project of building braid parting filters.
Wells was glad that users noticed she was only using Black models, because it was intentional. She used her brother to model the first iteration of the middle part filter and then experimented with TikTok’s avatars to practice on them too.
“TikTok has avatars of diverse backgrounds that you can practice the filters on before you release them,” she explained. “So I did test it out on each one and made revisions to make it work for all of them.”
The interest and reactions to her design surprised her. She called her account her “secret TikTok” and laughed that now all of her family members and friends had found it.
“I only thought Black TikTok would see the filter,” she said. “I did not expect it to get this attention at all.”
Wells’s filter tapped into a movement that’s already been bubbling on YouTube for the last couple of years. Hair tutorials have always been around, but they can seem daunting or overly complicated. When an editor, Jazmine Hughes, wrote about doing her own braids for the first time in The New York Times Magazine, she talked about hair being a “steady proxy for [her] anxieties” and braiding it “with the same enthusiasm as brushing my teeth or filing expenses.”
In a Refinery29 article about learning how to braid her own hair, one reporter, Christine Ochefu, wrote that the process helped her better understand her natural hair. She watched YouTube tutorials on braiding and called the finished result “an empowering point in coming to learn about and, most importantly, love my natural hair.” A Teen Vogue writer, Alisha Acquaye, called the moment she learned how to braid her own hair a “little liberation that translates into a bigger expression of beauty and risk-taking.”
This is why Wells’s filter is so successful.
“The response has been amazing. It’s great seeing how many people find it useful,” she said. “I love seeing people interested in STEM and how we can incorporate it to fit our interests.”
This is the second filter Wells has built, too. Inspired by Beyoncé’s Mugler bee helmet, Wells learned how to create a filter less than two weeks before making her hair part filters.
The bee helmet filter and the middle part filter have both been viewed over 145 million times — but the part filter is Wells’s favorite.
“I never did braids because parting is so overwhelming and hard for me!” one commenter wrote on Wells’s video. “I’m excited to try some now.”
“where was this filter when I did my own locs,” another said, with a crying emoji.
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