In December 2017, Toriah Lachell gave birth to her son in Boston. She was seventeen years old. She had moved to the city eight months earlier, heavily pregnant, leaving St. Louis to be closer to the baby’s father as he began his NBA career with the Celtics.
Two weeks after delivering, she enrolled in cosmetology school.
That single decision tells you everything you need to know about who Toriah Lachell actually is.
Who Is Toriah Lachell
Toriah Nicole Lachell was born on February 20, 2000, in St. Louis, Missouri. She grew up with her mother Julie Gibbs and her stepfather John Gibbs, whom she has consistently credited as a major source of stability and direction in her life. Her biological father has never been part of her public story and she has kept those details private.
She attended McCluer North High School in Florissant, Missouri, where she played varsity soccer all four years and varsity softball. She described herself as never really being a girly girl growing up. Sports, music, friends. That was her world.
The High School Relationship
Toriah and Jayson Tatum grew up in the same area of Missouri but went to different schools. She was at McCluer North. He was at Chaminade College Preparatory School, a private Catholic school that produced one of the most highly recruited basketball players in the country.
They met as teenagers and dated from around 2014 to 2017. In 2015 Toriah appeared in a Sports Illustrated story wearing her prom dress alongside Jayson, one of the first times her name appeared in public print. By that point Jayson was already drawing national attention as a top-five recruit in the country.
They were a teenage couple navigating the beginning of extraordinary external pressure. Jayson left for Duke University in 2016. Long distance. Recruiting madness. The NBA Draft on the horizon.
The Decision That Changed Everything
Toriah became pregnant in late 2016 or early 2017. Jayson was nineteen. She was sixteen going on seventeen.
In a 2022 GQ profile Jayson was candid about his reaction. He said he was not ready. He said he did not know what to do. He said becoming a father at that age was not what he had planned.
Toriah was eight months pregnant when she moved from St. Louis to Boston. She did not know the city. She did not have her own established support network there. She went because it made sense for her son to be near his father as his father began the biggest chapter of his professional life.
Their son Jayson Christopher Tatum Jr., known universally as Deuce, was born in December 2017.
Fourteen days later Toriah was sitting in a cosmetology classroom.
What That Sequence Actually Means
Think about the arithmetic of that decision carefully.
She gave birth. She recovered. She arranged childcare for a two-week-old infant in a city she had recently moved to. And then she went to school.
She was not enrolled before the birth. She enrolled after. That means in those two weeks between delivery and first day of class she made the decision, found the program, sorted the logistics, and showed up.
That is not a story about luck or circumstance. That is a story about a specific kind of character that does not wait for conditions to be perfect before moving.
Building the Craft
Toriah graduated from cosmetology school in 2018 and began working as a curly hair specialist. Her entry point into the curl world was personal. She had spent years using relaxers on her own hair without understanding her natural texture. When she finally made the switch to natural, the transformation was significant enough that friends started asking her for help.
She pursued advanced certifications that very few stylists hold. DevaCurl cutting is a dry-cutting method designed specifically for curly hair that requires specialized training and technique. The Rezo Cut is a geometry-based cutting system developed by Nubia Suarez for curly and wavy hair. Cut It Kinky focuses specifically on tightly coiled textures. Together those three certifications represent a serious technical commitment to the curl space, not a general cosmetology license being applied loosely.
The Curl Bar Boston
Toriah opened The Curl Bar Boston and built it into one of the most respected curl-focused salons in the city. Her approach was different from the start. She was not just cutting and styling. She was teaching clients how to understand and manage their own hair between appointments.
Her education-first model built a loyal client base that kept coming back not just for the service but for the knowledge. Her professional Instagram accounts, @hairbytoriahlachell and @thecurlbarboston, document client transformations with the kind of before-and-after consistency that builds real trust online.
Trevor Noah visited The Curl Bar Boston for a haircut. That is the kind of client that finds you through reputation, not through advertising.
She also launched The Curl Bar Curl Course, an online education program teaching curl techniques to other stylists and clients. That move transformed her from a local salon owner into someone with a scalable business model.
Deuce Tatum and the NBA Sidelines
Jayson Tatum Jr., Deuce, has become one of the most recognizable children in professional basketball. He sits courtside at Celtics games regularly. He appears in commercials with his father. When Jayson won the NBA championship in June 2024 — the Celtics’ first title since 2008 — Deuce was on the court for the celebration. He was six years old, holding the trophy, surrounded by confetti.
Toriah raised that child. She managed the schedule, the school runs, the daily logistics of being a single parent while running a business, while her son’s father played at the highest level the sport offers and was photographed doing it in front of millions of people.
Jayson has consistently credited Toriah as a great co-parent. He has said their relationship as parents is good. That kind of post-relationship stability between two young people who went through something as intense as an unplanned pregnancy at seventeen, in the spotlight, does not happen without both parties choosing it deliberately.
What She Built on Her Own Terms
The search volume around Toriah Lachell exists almost entirely because of her connection to Jayson Tatum. That is the reality of how people find her name online.
But the story itself is the opposite of that framing. She moved to a new city at sixteen months pregnant. She enrolled in school two weeks after giving birth. She built a business from a personal hair journey into a certified technical specialty with a scalable education model. She raised a son who is healthy, happy, and by every visible account deeply loved.
None of that required Jayson Tatum’s career to make it happen. His career provided the initial reason people searched her name. Her own decisions are what gave them something worth reading about when they got there.
