‘Beauty Is Pain’ Was A Lie — How The Black Beauty Industry Told Us We Were ‘Tender Headed’ And Sold Us Toxic Hair
There’s a quiet gaslighting happening within the Black Beauty industry and an interesting reason we continued to sit through it. The post ‘Beauty Is Pain’ Was A Lie — How The Black Beauty Industry Told Us We Were ‘Tender Headed’ And Sold Us Toxic Hair appeared first on MadameNoire.
Black News 
If you have ever left a braiding salon with your edges pulled so tight you could not fully close your eyes, or gone home with a scalp so irritated you spent the first three nights of a fresh install wincing every time your head touched a pillow, you already know the experience this story is about. There’s a quiet gaslighting happening within the Black Beauty industry and an interesting reason we continued to sit through it.
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If you ever mentioned that pain to the person sitting next to you in the chair, chances are she looked at you and said some version of the same thing we have all heard:
“Girl, beauty is pain. You will get used to it.”
We accepted that. For years, most of us just accepted the thought that we had to endure some level of pain to look beautiful.
The itching, the redness, the bumps along the hairline, the scabs that showed up by day two of a fresh set of braids, we treated all of it as an unavoidable tax on wearing our hair the way our culture has worn it for generations. Nobody in the beauty industry was asking why. Nobody was suggesting that the problem might not be our scalps, but what was being put on them. The message delivered to Black women — quietly and consistently — was that discomfort was simply part of the process.
“Keep your head still.”
“Stop being tender-headed.”
“It will be worth it when it is done.”
That is not beauty culture. That is gaslighting with a rattail comb and some grease.
The post ‘Beauty Is Pain’ Was A Lie — How The Black Beauty Industry Told Us We Were ‘Tender Headed’ And Sold Us Toxic Hair appeared first on MadameNoire.
