“I love my hair because it’s a reflection of my soul. It’s dense, it’s kinky, it’s soft, it’s textured, it’s difficult, it’s easy and it’s fun. That’s why I love my hair.”
— Tracee Ellis Ross
I dwell in communities on and offline saturated with images of glorified crowns from colorful beauties of the global majority. These images seep into the crevices of my cranium and set a flame hair aspirations that can hardly be achieved with a brew of potions promising pretty. The over concentration of hair hustlers pushing beauty in a bottle has left me weak in my knees. It’s hard to “Just Say No”.
In my community, Korean beauty shop owners are the biggest distributors of trafficking transactional pretty to African American women. Heads up! — African American women spend an estimated $7.5 billion annually on beauty products. For which, the Korean beauty dealers monopolize the supply chain in communities of color.
Today, outside my community I pace back and forth in the aisles of one of my favorite mashup Halloween beauty shops to find the grease that will outdo this mundane mop to a magical mane. Looking for the perfect hair care product can be scary — because every label is a masterpiece of trickery. Ignoring this knowledge, I believe the flowery words of every tonic that promises my locks will blossom from weeds to Pocahontas lengths. Because of this masquerade marketing, I buy the placebo Pocahontas tonic and use it for several days to discover my hair hasn’t grown an inch. Instead, I have uncontrollable itchiness for days on end. Circle, circle, dot, dot — now, I need a hair product junkie shot.
Bewitched by smoke and mirrors, I am mourning yet another potion pushing-up-daisies in the hair product graveyard labeled “the bottom of my closet.”
I am now slouched on my sofa watching YouTube videos while simultaneously scrolling the ‘Gram to coax my latest labeled disappointment. I am lured once again by the representations, reviews, and raves about products promising pretty pictured tresses. I closely observe each Beauty reppin’ a side of the beauty shop aisle. I ponder, “Which side of the aisle do I represent”? Probably all, I muse. My hair product junkie habits are messy, irrational and hard to bottle up.
Here are the Hair Product Junkie personality tribal traits I brush-up against on my hair product exploration (scratch that) acquisition journey.
12 Personality Traits of the Obsessed Hair Product Junkie
- Miss. Black Market — This Beauty only buys B L A C K.
- Miss. Budget Friendly — This Beauty is price sensitive and buys products that are easy on the pocketbook.
- Miss. ‘cone Free — This confused Beauty doesn’t mess with products that have ‘cones but will use other products with ingredients that coat the hair strands and don’t easily wash off with water.
- Miss. On the ground — This Beauty cops products that are locally stacked on convenient store shelves.
- Miss. Free Loader — This Beauty product acquisition tactic is based on reaching the purchase quota to obtain free shipping.
- Miss. Ingredient Identified — This Beauty buys products like she orders her meals. It can’t have this, this, and that.
- Miss. Naturally, Organic — This Beauty demands every product she buys be environmentally friendly and made with easily pronounced ingredients that are between 1 to 3 syllables, each.
- The Kitchen Chemist — This Beauty buys primary products to master mix hair libations to intoxicate the dullest strands back to liveliness.
- The Follower Influenced — This Beauty buys products based on her favorite social media personality. It doesn’t matter if they don’t share the same hair type.
- The On-Sale ‘Couponer’ — This Beauty picks up products only on sale or with a coupon code. She scours the internet for a coupon code and feverishly tries multiple codes before one works to complete her online purchase.
- Miss. Better Bulk-up — To protect from production delays in the kitchen supply hair care chain, this Beauty buys products in bulk. Because her favorite boutique hair care mixologist is frequently out-of-stock of the top-selling items she enjoys.
- Miss. Eye Candy — This distracted non-woke ‘Beauty school drop-out’ buys products based on imagery.
After spending six hours on the internet, I identify three products to conduct an investigative discovery to the product’s mysteries. I start by identifying the ingredients of each of the products. This time I will outsmart myself and I will not be bamboozled by the brands. These bombastic claims are weaponized marketing. With this knowledge — Why not create a computer program to differentiate the product ingredients among the three product choices I’m eyeing? Genius. I start writing the program and I am interrupted midway by thoughts of hair product junkie brilliance. “Why not, also associate each ingredient’s benefit and apply a ranking system based on the value attribution of the benefit? The value attribution is to give a higher rank to the natural ingredients and the ‘cone-less ingredients when compared to the other ingredients”. This is when I stopped and came to my senses. I navigate to the website to make my online purchase. My buying decision was based on the imagery, the coupon code I found after a two-hour search on the internet and the free shipping I received after having to buy $500 worth of products.
“Hi, I am Rochelle and I am hair product junkie”.
Read my other written work.
- 3 times when having ‘dirty’ breath is good for those around you
- Green juice, the accidental poop and how to get a guy to like you
Until the next time – I adore you for reading my blog,
