editorial standards · how we work
How we research, write, and verify
Third Culture Haus covers braids — the styles, the braiders, and the people who wear them. San Francisco is where we started, not where we stop. We’re transparent about how our stories are made because trust is the point — here’s exactly how we work.
Real data is the spine
Every salon, price, rating, and neighborhood on this site comes from first-party sources — public business listings (Google Places, OpenStreetMap) and the salons’ own published information — not invented examples. When a number can change (a price, opening hours, a rating), it’s tied to a real source and reviewed before it goes live. We don’t publish fictional salons, fabricated quotes, or made-up statistics.
How we use AI
We use AI to help research and draft our journal articles — and we say so plainly. An AI model produces a first draft grounded in real, current web sources we retrieve for each piece. AI makes our small team faster; it does not decide what gets published.
Every story passes a human review gate
Nothing an AI writes is published automatically. Before a story goes live, a human editor:
- checks every factual claim against primary sources;
- verifies each cited link actually says what we attribute to it;
- separates timeless guidance from time-sensitive claims;
- edits for accuracy, originality, and a real point of view.
Published articles carry the name of the editor who reviewed them and the date of that review. If a piece can’t clear this bar, it isn’t published.
Corrections
We fix mistakes. If you spot an error — a closed salon, a stale price, a claim that doesn’t hold up — tell us and we’ll correct it and note meaningful changes. We update older guides when the facts change, rather than re-dating them to look fresh.
Where we cover
We go city by city, and we only claim the ground we’ve actually covered. San Francisco and the East Bay are live: every braider on the map has been sourced and reviewed one at a time. New York, Atlanta and Los Angeles are next. A city appears on the map when its braiders have been through the same process — never as a placeholder, and never auto-filled from a scrape.
Why this site exists
To be the most useful, accurate guide to getting your braids done in the city you’re in — for the person searching, not for a search engine. Everything above is in service of that.