When her career took her from New York City — which has one of the largest Dominican communities in the U.S. — to Los Angeles, the Afro-Latina had difficulty finding a hair salon that could work with her hair type, forcing her to wear her natural texture. But Mercado found a silver lining in the city's limited options: She learned to love her hair and began to show her curls off to her 1 million+ followers on Instagram . "It's been so good to finally be the real me and just myself in my natural state," she says.