"It’s not like there aren’t a ton of options for white hair"
April 14, 2017 4:48 AM   Subscribe

 
Great, now we're colonizing hair products. This super sucks.
posted by palomar at 5:59 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is an excellently written article. Full stop. I do, tentatively, want to bring up that I think there's a part in this that's been overlooked. Without a doubt it's bullshit that these companies are changing formulas so that they work better on white hair (aka work less well for ethnic* hair). But it's naive to think that these companies just randomly started to think "with the way our world is changing, people are going to identify less and less with the color of their skin." overnight.

I don't think "let's have white people use natural hair products" is coming from above, as the article frames it. There's been a slow boil of "natural product" interest among curly white people, and the pinterest-obsessed. There's also been a huge boom for the "no shampoo" line of thought, DevaCurl products saw a %6,000 increase in revenue from the company's inception to 2001, and that was before this shit exploded everywhere in like 2012 and was on elle and everything. (DevaCurl is a line of curly-centric hair products, created by Lorraine Massey, a white woman.) Another resource that was born from grassroots frustration at the lack of focus on curly hair in the salon industry is Naturallycurly.com, also founded by white women.

The difference, though, is that it's really, really easy to see that both of these companies, who are absolute pillars with white people who care about curly hair, do not at all shy away from black hair. Looking at the contributors page at NaturallyCurly.com, there are a lot of dark-skinned, obviously black women with 3c/4c hair. DevaCurl also predominantly features black women in all aspects of their marketing and information.

What I'm getting at here is that, instead of these companies just weakening their product for the sake of "inclusivity", what's happening is that they've noticed that there's a market for women of all colors who want and need natural hair products, so they're being vultures as usual and trying to capitalize on movements that have been born from the ground up based on community's needs, and a celebration of diversity. And, to try and get in on the booming industry, they're throwing black women under the bus.

Of course this is a fucking shit show, it's L'Oreal. It's the fucking beauty industry. Large companies don't give a shit about the people they're trying to sell to. This is such a fucking shame. This is absolutely an area where we have such an amazing opportunity to highlight and embrace differences. I know that sounds corny as fuck, but it's true. Not even just for kumbaya feels-in order for these products to be useful and actually do their damn job, we need to feature our differences and address them that way. But instead of having something great where we can make women feel confident in the features that define them, we have to have some Corporate Branded idea of an anti-black future.

Anyway obviously I'm fucking pissed and have strong feelings, because the curly hair section of the beauty-sphere was one of the few (and first) fucking places that I actually saw openly embracing diversity, not as a homogeneous blob of ethnic ambiguity, but diversity as a group of individuals with individual needs. You can be pro-black and be inclusive, god fucking dammit. Fuck these people.
posted by FirstMateKate at 6:24 AM on April 14, 2017 [24 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. I had noticed the change in formulation of the Shea Moisture product I used to favor, but had just dismissed it as a general decrease in quality, and it's pretty demoralizing to realize that this is what's behind the change. DIY is starting to look good to me.
posted by emumimic at 6:24 AM on April 14, 2017


I'm curious about whether the attempt here is to attract white consumers or to attract consumers who don't fit neatly into the white/black divide that seems to exist in haircare aisles. Either way, it's deeply shitty, but trying to appeal to white people seems like a particularly dumb move. It can't be a good idea to sacrifice your core customer base to try to appeal to people who already have a ton of choices. On the other hand, my sense is that there actually may be a big, growing population of mixed and/or none-of-the-above consumers who are genuinely underserved in the current drugstore beauty product marketplace.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:48 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


The thing about naturally curly haired women of all ethnicity using the products, which is seemingly what spurred them to start catering to white women to capture more of the market share, is that changing the formula will drive the naturally curly haired women away.
posted by palomar at 6:54 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


I can believe that there's a market for a lighter formula. But if I can get mega-hold mousse, super-hold mousse, regular-hold mousse, and soft and loose mousse, all from the same product line, I really can't see why they couldn't add a separate, lighter formula, rather than changing the existing one.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:59 AM on April 14, 2017 [21 favorites]


I did not realize Carol's Daughter was sold.

I came across this other company while looking for shampoo bars for my son on the spectrum because he doesn't like the feel of viscous liquids in his hands, but Soultanicals is a natural hair line created by a WOC and still a WOC owned business. They're slowly moving into the Target market place, but still mainly sell through their website. Very nice ladies.
posted by 80 Cats in a Dog Suit at 7:20 AM on April 14, 2017


I can believe that there's a market for a lighter formula. But if I can get mega-hold mousse, super-hold mousse, regular-hold mousse, and soft and loose mousse, all from the same product line, I really can't see why they couldn't add a separate, lighter formula, rather than changing the existing one.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:59 AM on April 14 [3 favorites −] Favorite added! [!]


They don't care about black women, and especially not black women with dark skin and coiled hair.
posted by FirstMateKate at 7:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]


As a mother of a white child with curly hair, who these shifts are supposed to "help," I say PLEASE STOP CHANGING THINGS! This is not what we whiteys who are purchasing curly products meant for WOC want either! I want the original richer formula, please, and I will adapt it by adding water or another product if I need to. I think the original was better quality.

I have about 14 hair products for my daughter now that I've tried and I am always working on figuring out what will work best. When the formula changes, I have to start all over. I have wasted so much money and time on this already, just trying to keep up.

Why not just have the curl types for each product listed? Is it a shelf space issue to have too many formulations? It would make everything so much easier to see the 3A-C products listed.
posted by rmless at 8:07 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Well count me as a white woman with thin, fine hair somewhere on the curly spectrum that's been using Carol's Daughter and somewhat mystified that it's fantastic for my hair. I didn't know it was sold and honestly I'll be looking for another brand; I don't need to support this.
posted by jeweled accumulation at 8:44 AM on April 14, 2017


After reading the first couple of comments, I figured out this isn't about white hair because old, but Whites' hair. From the title, I had thought I was going to get info on how to keep my white hair from looking like dull dead straw but I guess not.
posted by MovableBookLady at 12:53 PM on April 14, 2017


Mixed-race with 2C/3A hair, and yes, I had noticed something was off about Carol's Daughter recently and stopped using it.

So on the way to "expanding the market" for the product, they decided to go with the usual shitty and cheap ingredients, because, hey, no one would be able to tell the difference, right? Well, I'd notice because there was a reason (unrelated to brand name and package design) that I was using the original Carol's Daughter formulation and not Unilever Generic Hair Product 2Xb in the pink bottle with sodium lauryl sulfate and alcohol in it!
posted by droplet at 1:13 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


Well, it's good (for certain values of good) to have an explanation for why Shea Moisture seems to have quadrupled its shelf space at my local Target. Unfortunately, this is America of the zero sum game and I really should have guessed that this meant Black women would be losing out.

It's really hard to find curly hair products that don't have silicone or other parabens or SLS or other sulfates or propylene glycol. I was pretty excited to find Shea Moisture's curl cream (the one mentioned in the article) because I have no problem crossing the aisle for hair products and it met all my needs.

Unfortunately, I'm 100% not okay with Being Part of the Problem so I'm not going to be buying any more Shea Moisture stuff. What a shitty, lose-lose (with more of the lose being on Black women because hey look it's shitty systemic racism again!) situation.
posted by librarylis at 10:18 AM on April 15, 2017


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