Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?: African American Women and Their Struggles with Beauty, Body Image, and Hair

Hair as Race: Why “Good Hair” May Be Bad for Black Females

“…U.S. racial hierarchies celebrate a single standard of beauty-a standard that devalues and excludes African hair textures, compelling Black females to fit into Eurocentric beauty standards that actually work against them (Arogundade, 2000;Gaskins, 1997; P. C. Taylor, 1999). Consequently, although hair is an important beauty determinant for American females in general (Gottschall, 2008;Weitz, 2004), the connection of hair to female beauty intersects with race and gender, placing a particular burden on Black females whose natural hair textures and lengths are low on the beauty continuum (Badillo, 2001;Patton, 2006;White, 2005). Good and bad hair perceptions illustrate Black females' internalization of White supremacy, and their everyday struggles to fit Black hair into White beauty standards.…”

Social Media and the Cultural Ideology of Beauty Among Young Black Women in South Africa

“…Hair is both a marker of race and beauty, and it is tied to biological, political and historical processes (Patton 2006). In South Africa, many black women have embraced the global trend of wearing weaves made from synthetic or natural human hair (Oyedemi 2016), which is associated with class and a Western notion of beautiful hair.…”

“…Beauty is not a stagnant and rigid concept, as what was regarded as "beautiful" in a previous era, or by a specific group, may not be regarded as so in the current epoch or by other groups (Patton 2006;Wolf 1991). Considering the diversity in human bodies, a generic notion of beauty is flawed, and when a specific ideal of beauty is propagated as ideology, it often discriminates against those who do not conform to certain body types.…”

“…In South Africa, following international trends, celebrities have taken to social media to communicate their beauty ideologies to their often young fans. As a result, social media inform and sometimes dictate the ideal definition of beauty (Patton 2006). Many local celebrities also tacitly dictate beauty trends on social media platforms through their postings and comments about body types and body augmentation that they consider beautiful.…”

Multimodal Texts from Around the World

“…Questioning the sale and use of skin-bleaching cosmetic products in urban Ghana, Pierre (2008) situates the practice within the local and global ideologies and processes of racialisation. 1 Patton (2006) examines the effects of the white standards of beauty on the identities and self-perceptions of African women. Explaining the racialisation process among young women from Ecuador, De Casanova (2004) posits and critically examines their perceptions of beauty with the glaringly visible and dominating Westernised representations.…”