The African American beauty industry comprises cosmetic and hair product companies, beauty salons, and professional organizations engaged in the business of selling commercial beauty products and services to black women. A specialized African American beauty industry emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to segregation and because entrepreneurs, black and white, sought to build markets for products and services geared specifically toward African American women’s hair textures and skin tones. Initially, African American women dominated the product-manufacturing industry and used agent sales and other direct marketing techniques to distribute them. In conjunction with this, agents often trained through company programs to style black women’s hair, while other women received beauty training independently, leading to a proliferation of small beauty shops and home-based businesses in African American neighborhoods. Migration to urban areas and rising black consumerism in the early 20th century encouraged this trend, and generally led to greater demand for beauty products. This, along with the increasing use of print advertising and retail venues to market and distribute products, attracted significant numbers of white-owned companies to the industry by the 1920s and 1930s. By the beginning of World War II, white-owned companies controlled a large market share and continued to have a strong presence after the war, even as new black-owned companies emerged and African American beauty salons, beauty schools, and professional organizations enjoyed unprecedented growth and success in the same era. The industry adjusted to shifting beauty standards in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, offering products and services for Afros and other natural hairstyles while significantly curtailing the promotion of skin-lightening products. Into the 1980s and 1990s, black-owned product companies struggled to maintain independence as large national and multinational personal care corporations bought out many of the most prominent African American firms.
Before 1920
Until the late 19th century, most African American women, like white women in the United States, did their own hair at home; when they used hair or cosmetic products at all, they used homemade preparations more often than commercially produced products. During slavery, black women in the South used braiding, twisting, and wrapping techniques, many drawn from African traditions, as both decorative and practical means to care for and manage their hair. Several developments, including the growth of black populations in towns and cities, increasing numbers of African American women working for wages, and the broader proliferation of commercially produced and marketed beauty products in general by the late 19th century, contributed to the emergence of the African American beauty industry.
In the era of Jim Crow, African American entrepreneurs were able to carve out a space for themselves in spite of (and to a significant degree because of ) racial segregation and economic discrimination. This was particularly the case in personal care businesses including funeral homes, barber and beauty shops, and grooming/cosmetic product manufacturers. The early growth of the African American beauty industry is in part documented in African American newspapers, which often carried advertisements for products in these years. The advertising represented dozens of small, mostly mail order businesses whose stories do not survive in the historical record; a few, however, notably Overton Hygenic, Poro Company, and Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company, gained national success and widespread notoriety. Later, by the 1920s, Sara Washington’s Apex Company would also be founded. Annie Malone (founder of Poro) and Madam C. J. Walker were probably the most famous and successful marketers of hair and cosmetic products to black women at this time. This was due to their marketing strategy, which involved training black women to use a heated iron comb, oils, and pomades to straighten African American women’s hair, and employing these women as beauticians and sales agents across the country. Agents worked independently, paying the company for training and products, a business strategy that predated agent sales–based companies like Avon and Mary Kay Cosmetics.
In this period, hair straightening was a growing but quite controversial practice for African Americans, even in urban areas where it was most popular. Given this, black-owned companies like Poro and Walker downplayed straightening products and methods in newspaper advertising, stressing instead that their products improved hair health and promoted good grooming, and emphasizing their role in helping black women to gain financial independence as agents and hairdressers. These black-owned companies did not produce many cosmetic products, although they all sold face powders in darker shades. By the early part of the 20th century many of these black-owned companies did produce skin-bleaching creams, but they almost never advertised them, which many white-owned companies did at the same time, often using crude images such as a woman’s face split in half, one side black and one white.
1920 to World War II
During the 1920s and 1930s, new more sophisticated advertising techniques and the proliferation of chain stores transformed the African American beauty industry. Overall, using commercial hair and cosmetic products became more common for women across racial lines in this period, a trend that reflected a variety of changes in women’s lives, including urbanization, increasing participation in the waged workforce, and shorter hairstyles that required more professional care. The industry used sophisticated advertising that linked beauty and beauty products to female popularity, glamour, and romantic success. African American–owned beauty product companies expanded product lines and adopted the new advertising strategies as well, in part as a response to white-owned companies like Golden Brown and Plough’s, which placed extensive advertising in black publications, and in part due to a new emphasis on the retail sale of beauty products in drugstores and five-and-tens, which increased the need for brand recognition and introduced the pressure of side-by-side brand competition. Many white-owned companies portrayed themselves as black-owned in advertisements, a trend that would not have been as successful in a market dominated exclusively by agent sales. In spite of this, the service side of the African American beauty industry continued to grow and employ black women, a trend reflected in the proliferation of beauty colleges (both independent and company sponsored), as well as beauty salons in black neighborhoods.
Post-World War II to the Present
World War II brought a new wave of African American urban migration and economic growth that supported a booming African American beauty industry in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many new companies emerged, often white-owned, but significant exceptions to this included the Johnson Products Company and Supreme Beauty Product Company. All of the new companies advertised in newly started black magazines like Ebony and Hue, and most began to market, with increasing success into the 1960s, new products for chemically straightening hair (rather than using pressing combs and oil). African American beauty salons enjoyed widespread growth as neighborhood shops and as large, well-publicized beauty shops that employed dozens of beauticians in cities like New York, Chicago, and Detroit. Beauticians and product manufacturers worried, initially, about the popularity of Afros in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements, but were able to market products and services for caring for unstraightened hair.
By the late 1970s, and certainly by the 1980s, while other natural styles such as braids emerged, products and services for chemical straightening dominated the industry. Especially by the 1970s, several new companies emerged that claimed to be the first to produce cosmetics for African American skin tones, even though companies such as Madam C. J. Walker had advertised such products for decades. Articles on the subject in black magazines, from the 1940s into the 2000s, perennially complained about the lack of good foundations for darker skin tones, although recent authors acknowledge that the chemical technology (especially in the creation of sheer foundation bases) has improved significantly in recent years.
Non-African American ownership of African American beauty products continued to be a controversial issue into the 1990s and 2000s on a variety of fronts. In the 1990s, the entry of Asian and Asian American entrepreneurs into the business of manufacturing and marketing hair extensions and wigs for black women became increasingly commonplace. On a larger scale, national cosmetics and hair product companies such as L’Oréal and Revlon were buying out black-owned companies, sometimes keeping brand names and product lines, and at other times launching new product lines, using prominent African American celebrities as spokespeople.
Leave a Reply