Lines like Tracee Ellis Ross’s Pattern Beauty and Flawless by Gabrielle Union are offering customers more choices than ever — and helping to remake the industry at large.
Lisa Price, who launched the pioneering natural hair care line Carol’s Daughter in 1993, didn’t set out with the explicit goal to create products for natural hair. “At the time I just knew what was on my head, and the people to whom I had access,” she told me over Zoom recently from her home office in Brooklyn, her hair styled in a cascade of voluminous curls on one side and partly shaved on the other. She also knew that Black women looked mainly, at that time, to their own kitchens for hair care solutions (coconut oil to prevent breakage, ginger for scalp health) and that they needed more dedicated products than could be found on the few shelves — if any — hidden away at the back of drugstores that constituted the “ethnic hair” section.
T’s Beauty & Luxury Issue
A history of modern beauty in four chapters.
Chapter 1: On the rise of strong “oriental” fragrances that reflected the political and cultural landscapes of their time, the 1980s.
Chapter 2: On ’90s-era advances in weaves, wigs and other Black hairstyles that ushered in a new age of self-expression.
Chapter 3: On botanical oils, a simple fact of life in much of the world that, here in the West, began to take on an almost religious aura in the 2000s.
Chapter 4: On men wearing makeup, a practice with a long history, but one that has really taken off in the last decade.
Price wanted to provide options for Black women beyond the chemical straighteners and heavy pomades, produced by companies like Johnson Products and Soft Sheen, that had dominated the market in the 1970s and ’80s — and also to share knowledge and stories about natural hair. To develop her line, she consulted the Black hair stylists she knew in New York, and before her products became available in stores, she sent mail-order catalogs to potential customers that included personal accounts of her own hair care experiences. The brand grew partly through word of mouth (in the early days, customers would show up at Price’s Brooklyn stoop late at night asking about her products, which were for many years homemade). She opened a storefront in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1999, and Carol’s Daughter became one of the first widely available beauty lines that catered to a range of different natural hair types and textures.
In the early 2000s, however, mass retailers weren’t interested in taking a chance on natural hair care products that they believed couldn’t compete with the steady demand for chemical straighteners; according to a study by Boston University, roughly 90 percent of Black women were still chemically straightening their hair at the time, with products that cost around $10. But Price wanted to make Carol’s Daughter “prestige,” she told me. The brand’s conditioner, for example, cost around $18. She was advised that customers who shopped at mass retailers wouldn’t buy something in that price range that wasn’t a relaxer. Still, in 2002, Price appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and gained enough prominence to circumvent the mass retail route. She opened a flagship store in 2005, on 125th Street in Harlem, where she could curate her own displays and set her own prices. Then, around 2007, the natural-hair movement began to resurface and stores started to pay attention. By 2010, Target was carrying what it called “multicultural” hair care brands like Shea Moisture and Miss Jessie’s, the latter of which sold a $60 “curly pudding” that Black women did indeed buy.
Since then, the natural hair care industry has boomed, with brands now numbering in the thousands. In early April, I booked an appointment in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with my braider, Kalela Murphy, a Black woman who specializes in working natural hair — or hair that has not been chemically straightened with either relaxers or texturizers — into styles like locs, twist sets and cornrows. By the time I’d made my way to the salon, I’d already spent the hours I periodically do to get my hair as moisturized and detangled as Murphy needs to style it. And while I sat in her chair, cloaked in a plastic apron, our conversation turned from the soap opera on the television to the products her clients are using. “They keep talking about butters and masks, and all these oils,” she said, rolling her eyes and clicking her tongue. “Ten, 11 or 12 steps to a hair routine. I tell them they don’t need all that.” But the fact that Black women now have choices, as Price had hoped, is something to celebrate. “It feels good to not be rare,” she told me.
The actress Tracee Ellis Ross, who launched the hair care brand Pattern Beauty in 2019, spoke at length with me about the role that social media has played in expanding the industry. “Black women have created a legacy of hair tales and experiences,” she said over speaker phone from her home in Los Angeles, where she was in the middle of braiding sections of her own hair (she said, with a laugh, that she was grateful we weren’t using video). “This is a vast, deep, wide and beautiful mass of people. All of that has been a part of this shift.” She believes that vlogging has become a democratizing vehicle for Black women to share their points of view, celebrate their crowns and connect directly with the makers that play an integral role in their self-care. On Pattern Beauty’s Instagram, followers can watch Ross demonstrate aspects of her hair care routine, using the brand’s aloe vera-infused Hydration Shampoo or oil-rich Styling Cream. It was her own experience of having four or five different curl patterns that prompted her to offer four varieties of conditioner, ranging from light to intensive, that each suit a different texture.
The digitization of the Black hair care industry has also led to the proliferation of new terms for identifying various types and textures of natural hair. In online articles and video tutorials, I’ve seen curls referred to as 3A (stretchy spirals) or 4C (tight coils), and words like “porosity” and “pineapple” (the loose, high ponytail that minimizes curl disruption when you sleep) used alongside mainstay vocabulary like “edges” and “kitchen” — all of these terms more expressive and precise than the reductive euphemisms such as “ethnic” and “coarse” seen in drugstore aisles of old. To me, this expanded, inclusive language indicates that more of us are being heard and therefore served. When I come across the phrase “baby hairs” or a prideful usage of “kinky,” I feel the relief that one experiences when, after straining for months to learn a foreign language, one finally meets someone who speaks the same mother tongue.
It’s no surprise that Black consumers — who, according to Nielsen, were responsible for over 85 percent of the spending in the American “ethnic hair and beauty aids” market in 2019, almost $55 million in total — want brands that feel familiar and inspire trust, especially when it comes to something as personal as hair. And while a number of large Black hair care companies, including Shea Moisture, Cantu and now Carol’s Daughter (which was bought by L’Oréal in 2014), are operated by white-owned corporations, the majority of the brands that make up the new wave of natural hair care lines are Black-owned.
Last year, when the actress Gabrielle Union relaunched her hair care line, Flawless by Gabrielle Union, with her business partner, Larry Sims, a celebrity stylist and her best friend of two decades, “we wanted to keep it FUBU top to bottom,” she told me on a recent Zoom call from Los Angeles, using the acronym for “for us, by us.” An earlier iteration of the brand, which she founded in 2017, was rooted in a business arrangement, Union said, whereby she was an owner in name only and afforded little creative control. After reclaiming her company, she felt she could fully direct her energies toward creating products for Black people in need of hair regrowth and repair (she had experienced significant thinning herself in 2017 after multiple rounds of IVF). On the day we spoke, Union wore her hair in a high bun — in preparation for a wedding scene for a movie she was shooting later that day — that Sims, her stylist for the production, had set with Flawless’s Three-Minute Restoring Conditioner and Repairing Edge Control. “We are doing outreach to HBCUs, to Black scientists and Black chemists,” Union explained, “to try to create a pipeline, not just for us, but for the hair care industry at large.”
Some beauty founders, though, believe that the notion that only Black-owned brands should create products for Black customers helps perpetuate the marginalization of natural hair care. True inclusivity, they say, would mean that every hair company, regardless of its owner, would offer products for a range of different types and textures. Nancy Twine, the founder of the clean beauty brand Briogeo, believes that until diversity, inclusion and equity are the status quo, she and other leaders will have to keep pressuring the industry’s gatekeepers, many of them non-Black, to make representation ubiquitous. Still, a Black hair care company “could have a white founder,” she told me. “I am all about ‘for us by us.’ I think that is beautiful and excellent. But if we really want equity, the ones who don’t look like us or don’t have our hair texture” and are in power, she continued, will also need to “bridge the gap.”
For Vernon François, a celebrity hair stylist and the founder of an eponymous hair care line, the need for representation has felt especially acute since he became a father. “Encouraging hair love and acceptance, genuinely knowing that what you were born with is good enough,” François wrote in an email, “all these things are gifts that directly affect your self-confidence, which is linked to achieving greatness and happiness in life.” He has imparted the knowledge he began acquiring at 14 — when he first started working in a salon, in London — to his 3-year-old daughter, who can now detangle her own hair and loves seeing her father’s products in Sally Beauty. But François wants to expand inclusivity in other ways, too. “Everyone has a hair journey,” he said. “The stories of male and nonbinary hair journeys exist too, they are out there, but often there is a divide in what is spoken about in the mainstream beauty space.”
Last summer, amid the hellscape of police killings of Black people and the publicized brutality against multiracial protest efforts, calls were made to “Buy Black” as a good-faith investment in Black communities. François was eager to remind people, though, that a campaign encouraging what often amounted to glorified one-time donations did little to help Black folks and Black queer folks sustain their businesses in the long term. It was with this in mind that last fall Union launched her brand’s Lift as We Climb initiative, a year-round signal boost for Black-owned businesses and organizations. “When we eat, we want everyone else to eat,” she told me, “and that’s our thing.” She also emphasized Flawless’s mission to make buying Black a realistic standard for consumers of all economic backgrounds. What sense would it make, she asked, to price the Black community out of Black hair care products? She is among the many Black hair care founders who are not simply pushing for inclusivity and diversity, but also reimagining the very structure of the industry at large.
It was with her community in mind, too, that Maeva Heim decided to launch her hair care line, Bread Beauty Supply, ahead of schedule last summer. In July, working with Sephora, she released a limited-edition collection of products, the proceeds from which benefited racial justice causes. Heim, who is based in Australia, was grateful for the resulting offers for media opportunities and brand partnerships, which coincided with the upsurge in the Buy Black movement. But she was also skeptical: Was her brand being uplifted because she’s a Black founder or because it was worthy of attention on its own merits? Bread is, in fact, unique, in that it speaks to customers with low-key hair care routines and discourages customers from putting, as Heim joked recently over Zoom, “40,000 different products on every day.” (She wore only a touch of the brand’s best-selling Everyday Gloss Hair Oil, which adds a silky sheen to hair of all textures.) Heim is now preparing to bring the brand to countries beyond the U.S. — a clear indication of its success — but for many Black founders, ebbs and flows of attention corresponding to current events are an enduring reality.
Charlotte Mensah, a celebrity hairstylist who was born in Accra, Ghana, and moved to London as a preteen, launched her eponymous product line in 2016, with the goal of showing Black people, especially African people, that we have been consistently remarkable for millenniums. When we spoke in April, she told me that among her priorities for her brand was sourcing its hero ingredient, Manketti oil, from Africa, where it is made from the nuts of Mongongo trees. Her luxurious packaging, too, which dresses her sustainable glass bottles in the patterns of Kente cloth, worn by Ghanaian kings and queens, is designed to honor and uplift African history. But while it was her heritage — and the countless Black people throughout the centuries who have lent their instincts and creativity, as well as their blood, sweat and tears, to the ends of justice, art and beautification — that “drove me to getting my formulas so perfect,” Mensah said, in her salon, her oil reaches into the scalps and follicles of every person who sits in her chair. “A European girl with curly hair could use it. A Greek woman with massive, really frizzy hair could use it too,” she said. “And a woman with tight, tight African hair, she could use it.”
Caring for our hair has always been about more than practical maintenance: It is an act of healing, repair and compassion. And in the industry that has grown around this age-old ritual, as in all sectors of society, pulling up the most marginalized tends to lead to collective liberation.
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Brands Reimagining Natural Hair Care - The New York Times"
Post a Comment