American Beauty: Our Hair, Ourselves

August 18, 2016 7:27 AM

Candacy Taylor spent seven years studying American beauty shop culture. Her 20,000-mile journey among salons catering to African-American, Appalachian, Cajun, Dominican, Gullah, Jamaican, Japanese, Orthodox Jewish, Lumbee Indian, Pakistani, and LGBT communities led her to this conclusion: "[R]ace matters, you know? And more specifically it's about hair texture....Practically every ethnicity has developed a specialized product or procedure to change their hair texture, and as a result, beauty shop culture is a window into contemporary understandings about race, segregation, and integration." Transcript [txt doc] of her 2014 lecture, from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Taylor's talk is a fascinating window into what can be loaded, highly-charged topics that aren't always easy or comfortable to discuss: "I think that that's really what we need to be doing as a culture, is to stop shaming and stop making people feel bad for being curious, to open up that conversation and the dialog about race, and to offer the safe, non-judgmental place to talk about these things. And if we can start with hair, then it leads to the other real issues, the other deeper, seemingly more important issues."

More: Taylor's multimedia project, Beauty Shop Culture: Letting Our Hair Down in American Salons.

posted by MonkeyToes (5 comments total)

Thanks so much for this, MonkeyToes. I've believed this to be true but until now it wasn't really done to say so. Even big brands like L'Oreal are waking up to this fact, they've just opened a research unit in South Africa to cater to the continent's very different needs. In 2016!
posted by infini at 8:08 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

OMGAWD I LOVE
posted by whimsicalnymph at 9:58 AM on August 18, 2016

Excellent lecture.
posted by Bob Regular at 10:23 AM on August 18, 2016

Thank you. So interesting. And a very good lecture.
posted by severiina at 12:28 PM on August 18, 2016

This reminds me of artist Sonya Clark's Hair Craft project.
posted by apricot at 6:30 PM on August 18, 2016