Toriah Lachell: The Real Story Built on Curls and Quiet Grit

Two weeks. That’s how long she waited after giving birth before walking into cosmetology school. She was seventeen years old, living in a city she didn’t grow up in, with a newborn at home and a future she was already refusing to leave to chance. Nobody was watching. Nobody was writing about her. The cameras were all pointed at the father of her child, who was busy becoming one of the Boston Celtics’ most electric young players. Toriah Lachell just got up and went to class.

That detail — two weeks postpartum, cosmetology school, no fanfare — tells you everything about who she is.

Quick Facts

Detail	Information
Full Name	Toriah Lachell Mimms
Date of Birth	February 21, 2000 (some sources cite Feb. 6 or 20 — exact date unconfirmed)
Birthplace	St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Current Residence	Somerville, Boston, Massachusetts
Ethnicity	African-American
Mother	Julie Gibbs
Stepfather	John Gibbs
High School	McCluer North High School, Florissant, Missouri
Occupation	Licensed Hairstylist, Curl Specialist, Entrepreneur
Business	The Curl Bar Boston (founded 2021)
Son	Jayson “Deuce” Tatum Jr. (born December 2017)
Ex-Partner	Jayson Tatum (NBA, Boston Celtics)
Net Worth (Estimate)	$500K–$2 million (sources vary; not publicly confirmed)
Instagram	@hairbytoriahlachell / @thecurlbarboston

Where She Came From

St. Louis, Missouri is a city that grows people who are used to being underestimated. That’s the ground Toriah Lachell came up from. She was born and raised there, the daughter of Julie Gibbs, in a household shaped by a stepfather named John Gibbs who stepped into the role her biological father never filled. She kept her original last name — Lachell, not Gibbs — a small but deliberate act of self-definition that her family respected without complaint.

She attended McCluer North High School in Florissant, a suburb just outside St. Louis. She didn’t describe herself as a “girly girl” — she played varsity soccer every year of high school and ran with a softball team for four seasons. Those sports built something in her: a tolerance for early mornings, a preference for teamwork over spotlight, a refusal to be the weakest person in any room she entered.

Somewhere between those practice fields and the school hallways, she also started paying attention to hair. Not in a frivolous way. In a personal way. She’d spent years applying relaxers to her own natural curls because nobody had taught her differently. The decision to eventually stop — to learn what her hair actually needed — became one of the most consequential choices of her young life, though she couldn’t have known it then.

Her biological father has never been a public part of her story, and she’s never invited the question. John Gibbs is the father in her narrative. That’s where the discussion ends.

The Turning Point

It was 2017. Jayson Tatum had just been selected third overall in the NBA Draft by the Boston Celtics. He was nineteen years old, stepping into a city hungry for a young star, about to earn more in a single season than most people see in a lifetime. And somewhere in all of that momentum, he learned that Toriah Lachell — his girlfriend from back in St. Louis — was pregnant.

Tatum later admitted publicly that the news terrified him. He was a teenager about to begin his professional career, with no roadmap for how fatherhood and basketball and the NBA were supposed to coexist. Toriah was seventeen. She packed up and moved to Boston at eight months pregnant, not because she had nowhere else to go, but because she wanted their son to have both his parents present. That choice required her to leave her hometown, her family, and every familiar thing she knew.

Jayson Christopher Tatum Jr. — Deuce, as everyone came to call him — was born in December 2017. He was small and loud and already famous by association. Two weeks later, his mother enrolled in cosmetology school. She didn’t wait for permission, financial security, or optimal timing. She just went.

That decision was the axis on which the rest of her life turned.

Career Rise: From Chair to Owner

She didn’t spend long as a student before her instincts took over. Toriah had spent years before cosmetology school quietly teaching herself — watching YouTube tutorials about curly hair, practicing techniques on her own head, helping friends who trusted her hands more than they trusted a stranger’s. By the time she got formal training, she already had an intuition for texture that most stylists take years to develop.

She graduated and built her technical credentials methodically. She became a DevaCurl Certified Stylist, completed the Cut It Kinky program, and earned her Rezo Cut certification — three distinct philosophies for working with curly and textured hair, each with its own approach to assessment, cutting, and client education. These weren’t certificates she collected for their visual appeal. They were the architecture of a specialty.

For a period, she worked as a stylist, built a client base, and refined her method. The Curl Bar Boston opened in 2021, in Somerville, Massachusetts. From day one, it operated on a philosophy her own hair journey had made non-negotiable: clients don’t just leave with a style, they leave understanding how to maintain it. Consultations cover porosity, density, weather, gym habits, time constraints. The salon became known in the Boston curl community as the kind of place where nobody makes you feel bad about your hair.

She expanded beyond the chair too. The Curl Bar Curl Course brought her method to people who couldn’t sit in her salon, an online education offering that took her philosophy national. She also started training stylists and cosmetology students, offering private instruction in curl assessment, detoxing, shaping, and even photographing finished work. Trevor Noah reportedly visited her salon — a detail that circulated online and confirmed what her regular clients already knew: the woman behind The Curl Bar was genuinely good.

She built the whole thing without a famous last name, without a reality show, without a PR team. She built it with her hands.

Personal Life: Co-Parenting, Privacy, and Raising Deuce

Toriah and Jayson Tatum ended their relationship not long after their son was born. The exact circumstances have never been publicly detailed, and neither of them has made it a performance. Some early reports speculated about cheating, but nothing was confirmed, and Toriah has never addressed it publicly. What’s documented is simpler: they were very young, navigating enormous life changes simultaneously, and they chose to stop being a couple while committing to be present parents.

It worked. Deuce became a fixture at Boston Celtics games, the small boy courtside with his famous father becoming one of the NBA’s most charming recurring images. He earned his nickname before he could spell it. Fans recognized him. Broadcasters mentioned him. He became, in his own right, a minor celebrity who belonged to Boston in the way his father did — openly, loudly, with joy.

Toriah doesn’t appear in most of those courtside photos. That’s by design. She built her professional life in Boston, moved into Somerville, and set up The Curl Bar. She raised her son and ran her business and kept the details of her days mostly to herself. Her Instagram accounts, @hairbytoriahlachell and @thecurlbarboston, are almost entirely professional — before-and-after shots, curl education, client results. The personal life she lives doesn’t show up there, and she clearly prefers it that way.

She described herself once as a homebody, primarily an introvert who can be extroverted when the work requires it. She rates Tupac among her favorite artists. She says she could spend hours in the candle and notebook aisles of Home Goods. Her favorite color is light pink — something reflected in every third image on The Curl Bar’s Instagram page. She doesn’t romanticize herself online. She just works, and lets the work speak.

Since her split from Tatum, no public relationship has been reported. She hasn’t announced one, hinted at one, or used social media to perform one. If she’s dating anyone, it’s genuinely her business and she intends to keep it that way.

Controversies: What the Internet Got Wrong

Let’s be direct about what the public record actually contains. The only “controversy” attached to Toriah Lachell is the circumstances of her pregnancy and the breakup — and neither of those things is a controversy by any honest measure. She was a teenager in a relationship with another teenager, and they decided to separate. That’s a human experience, not a scandal.

The speculation about the reasons for their split — cheating rumors that circulated in NBA fan communities — was never substantiated by either party. Toriah has not made any public statements about it. Jayson Tatum has not either. These rumors exist only in the comment sections and gossip blogs that fill the internet with noise, and they should be treated accordingly: as unconfirmed, unfair, and largely irrelevant to who she actually is.

Some online profiles have published conflicting information about her birth date, her heritage, and even her career details. One source incorrectly described her as the mother of Angela Aguilar — that’s from an entirely different person’s profile and reflects the unreliability of low-quality celebrity content farms. Toriah Lachell’s story is specific and documented. The noise around it is not.

After Jayson Tatum moved on and began a relationship with Ella Mai, a British singer, some attention circled back to Toriah. She didn’t engage with it. She posted a client’s curls and kept working.

She’s never been the story she’s been made out to be. The real story is the salon.

Where She Is Right Now

As of 2026, Toriah Lachell lives in the Boston area and runs The Curl Bar Boston out of Somerville, Massachusetts. Her son Deuce is eight years old, growing up between two parents who’ve managed to keep their co-parenting arrangement functional and quiet — no courtroom drama, no social media wars, no public grievances.

Her business has expanded steadily since its 2021 opening. The Curl Bar Curl Course continues to serve clients beyond the physical salon, and her stylist training program means her methods are now being practiced by others who learned directly from her. She’s building an infrastructure, not just a chair.

Her net worth is estimated across various sources at somewhere between $500,000 and $2 million. The wide range reflects the difficulty of verifying private business revenue, and Toriah hasn’t confirmed any number publicly. What’s clear is that her income is her own — generated by her skills, her business model, and her reputation in the Boston natural hair community, not by anyone else’s contract or salary.

She’s twenty-five years old. She has more career ahead of her than behind her.

Conclusion

Here’s the thing about Toriah Lachell’s legacy: it started at seventeen, in the middle of a difficult year, with a decision that nobody required her to make. Cosmetology school two weeks after giving birth wasn’t an inspiring Instagram caption. It was a practical choice made by someone who’d decided her life was going to be built on her own work, full stop.

She could have let the gravitational pull of Jayson Tatum’s fame define her. A lot of people in her position do. They become the ex, the baby mama, the tabloid sidebar. Instead, she opened a salon that fills with Boston clients who’ve never watched a Celtics game and wouldn’t recognize the name Tatum if you said it. They know The Curl Bar because someone whose curls looked amazing told them about it.

She also gave her son something specific and rare: a mother whose success doesn’t depend on who his father is. Deuce watches both his parents work. His father plays in arenas. His mother runs a business. Both things are true simultaneously, and he sees both.

The curl community she’s building in Boston — through her salon, her courses, her stylist training — is creating something she once desperately needed herself: a place where people with natural hair feel genuinely understood. She spent her own teenage years not knowing how to handle her curls, using products that worked against her hair rather than with it. She filled that gap in her own life and then opened a door so others didn’t have to figure it out alone.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Toriah Lachell

1. Who is Toriah Lachell? She’s a licensed cosmetologist, certified curl specialist, and entrepreneur based in Somerville, Massachusetts. She’s the founder of The Curl Bar Boston and the mother of Jayson Tatum Jr., better known as Deuce.

2. How did Toriah Lachell become publicly known? She and NBA player Jayson Tatum dated during their high school years in St. Louis. Their son’s birth in December 2017 during Tatum’s rookie season drew public attention to her name, though she’s built an independent career since.

3. When was Toriah Lachell born? Sources disagree. The most commonly cited date is February 21, 2000, though some sources list February 6 or February 20. Her exact birth date has not been publicly confirmed by Toriah herself.

4. What is The Curl Bar Boston? It’s a curly and natural hair salon located in Somerville, Massachusetts, which Toriah founded in 2021. The salon specializes in curly and textured hair through personalized consultations, dry curly cuts, hydration services, and client education.

5. What certifications does Toriah Lachell hold? She’s a DevaCurl Certified Stylist, a Cut It Kinky alumna, and a Rezo Cut certified stylist — three distinct credentials in curly and textured hair technique.

6. How did her personal hair journey lead to her career? She spent her teenage years using relaxers without knowing how to care for her natural curls. After connecting with a friend who embraced her natural hair, she began learning through tutorials and personal practice, which eventually led to cosmetology school and her professional specialty.

7. Are Toriah Lachell and Jayson Tatum still together? No. They separated shortly after their son was born in December 2017. They’ve maintained a co-parenting relationship without public conflict. Neither has confirmed the specific reasons for their breakup.

8. What is Toriah Lachell’s net worth? Estimates range from $500,000 to $2 million depending on the source. She hasn’t publicly confirmed any figure. Her income comes from The Curl Bar Boston, her online Curl Course, and stylist training services.

9. When did Toriah start cosmetology school? Approximately two weeks after giving birth to her son in December 2017. She enrolled in cosmetology school in Boston at seventeen years old and graduated in 2018.

10. Does Toriah Lachell train other stylists? Yes. Her salon offers private training for stylists and cosmetology students, covering curl assessment, detox treatments, shaping techniques, and photographing finished work. She also runs workshops for organizations interested in natural hair education.

11. What is Toriah Lachell’s relationship status now? She has not publicly disclosed any romantic relationship since her breakup with Jayson Tatum. She keeps her personal life private and has not discussed dating on social media.

12. Where does Toriah Lachell live? She lives in the Somerville area of Boston, Massachusetts, where The Curl Bar Boston is also located.

13. What are Toriah’s social media handles? Her professional accounts are @hairbytoriahlachell and @thecurlbarboston on Instagram. Both accounts focus primarily on her salon work, client results, and curl education rather than personal content.

14. Does Toriah have any other children? No confirmed public information indicates she has any children other than Jayson Tatum Jr. (Deuce).

15. What are Toriah Lachell’s future plans? Based on publicly available information, she’s focused on expanding The Curl Bar Boston, growing her online curl course offerings, and potentially launching her own line of hair care products. Her long-term goal appears to be building a recognized name in the natural hair care education space.