The Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s fostered a “black is beautiful” ethos and a new silhouette and symbol: the afro. Yet mainstream pressure to have straight hair persisted, and when we went natural for Angela Davis-style afros in the mid-70s, my grandmother stopped speaking to my mother, my sister, and me for weeks.
Despite black hair becoming an increasingly politicized issue, many black consumers continued to use relaxers and began to complain that the harshness of caustic soda-based relaxers caused scalp burns and thinning and breakage of hair. In 1975, the Federal Trade Commission required Johnson & Johnson to include warning labels on its caustic soda-based products. By the mid-1980s, many manufacturers had removed sodium hydroxide from their relaxer ingredient lists; most replaced it with calcium hydroxide, a milder chemical. Products were labeled “caustic-free,” and companies added marketing terms such as “gentle,” “natural,” “healthy,” “nutritious,” and “conditioning.” In 1979, Revlon, the first non-black company to target the lucrative black hair care market, introduced a relaxer cream called Realistic. Positioning itself as superior to black-owned companies, it advertised its product as “the first hair relaxer worthy of the Revlon name.”
In 1998, Carson Products bought Johnson Products for $70 million, and in 2000, French cosmetics company L’Oreal bought Carson. L’Oreal also bought Softsheen, paying an estimated $370 million for the two companies and absorbing 20 percent of the black hair-care market. The industry boomed, and the kits themselves — decorated with pastels, flowers, butterflies and photos of smiling model girls with their hair draped over shiny black sheets — became aspirational objects, selling chemically straightened hair to a new generation.
James Todd grew up during that boom, and remembers experiencing a rite of passage as a black girl at age 8: getting her hair straightened for the first time. Sitting in a salon chair in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1987, with her head covered in thick, sticky white hair, she imagined the long, straight hair her family had seen her with. Her scalp started to heat up. As she squirmed, she remembers her mother saying, “Stay still. This is what it’s supposed to feel like.” That night, as she brushed her hair, handfuls of it fell out.
After all, some of the young models became mini-celebrities as the faces of advertisements for Pretty and Silky, Beautiful Beginnings, Just for Me, etc. Relaxers for kids Decades later, we find out that they never used such products themselves, or long ago stopped using chemical hair straightening and instead straightened their hair with heat. Many black women straighten their hair with heat, whether it be blow-drying, straightening irons, or pressing their hair in a salon or at home with equipment more advanced than the hot combs my grandmother used. But when their hair gets wet (during a wash, during a rainstorm, in the pool, after strenuous exercise, etc.), it reverts to its natural state. My mother didn’t learn to swim until she was in her 70s because she wasn’t allowed to get her hair wet as a child. The hair would “revert” and my grandmother would have to start the time-consuming straightening process all over again.