Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel slams practice of wig wearing as idolatrous and immodest.
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Yitzhak Yosef slammed the practice of married women using wigs to cover their hair as idolatrous and immodest during a lecture on Sunday.
Jewish law requires married women to cover their hair. Traditionally, religious Ashkenazi women have used wigs for this purpose, while Sephardic and Mizrahi women favored scarves.
However, in recent years, the practice of wearing wigs has become more popular in the Sephardic and Mizrahi communities.
“Once, there wasn’t this [custom] for Sephardim,” said Yosef. “They [other rabbis] have turned this debate into one about personal opinion.”
“Because… most of the women who wear headscarves are Mizrahi. ‘To be Haredi, you have to wear a wig.’ What nonsense!”
Yosef’s main objection to wigs stems from the source of the hair. The vast majority of human hair wigs available in Israel come from India.
According to investigations by Yosef and other prominent rabbis, most of the hair is obtained from the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple in Andhra Pradesh.
Each year, millions of female pilgrims come to the temple to cut their hair as an offering to the Hindu deity Vishnu.
The temple then collects the hair and sells it to wigmakers.
“I investigated this matter. The hair that is used for the wigs – all of it comes from idol worship,” he said. “Ashkenazim, Hasidim – everyone had stopped wearing them.”
Referencing a ruling from another rabbi in the early 2000s which had permitted wig wearing, Yosef said, “With all due respect to Rabbi Gross, suddenly he came and said it was fine. Then, they ended going back [on his ruling.]”
Yosef warned his followers that the act of purchasing and wearing wigs could expose them to the negative consequences of idolatry.
“Someone who buys a wig shouldn’t ask why they’re having troubles – look, you have idolatry inside your home,” he said.
“I investigated this matter, very well, from a number of different angles. This hair 100% comes from idol worship.”
Yosef also criticized wigs as immodest, saying they do not fulfill the obligation for married women to maintain modesty.
“What’s the point of a head covering? To maintain modesty. How can you be modest with a wig like this?” he said, gesturing to illustrate long, wavy hair.
“Come, let’s think, leave aside rabbinical opinions, just use logic. That’s not modest…”
“This is the madness of women, what can we do? They want the wigs.”
BELAGAVI: Although it is agonising for people to witness daily the gradual loss of their once thick manes, villagers in North Karnataka have found a way to turn this depletion into a source of profit. Instead of discarding hair that is lost while coming and washing, residents of villages – more women than men – of Gadag, Bagalkot, Chitradurga and Chikkamagaluru are either selling it for money or exchanging it for other goods, very much like the barter system that existed in the past. Those either buying or exchanging hair for other goods generally make their visit to the homes of the villagers in the morning before the residents leave for their work on the fields. Maheshwaramma, 45, a resident of Garagadahalli, a village in Chikkamagaluru on the border of Chitradurga, collects hair from the residents twice daily – in the morning and evening. The mane of hair thus collected she exchanges for a wide assortment of household items once a month. A week ago, Maheshwaramma sold nearly 100g of hair for a plastic tumbler that she was looking for. “A kilo of hair will fetch up to Rs 4,000 here,” Maheshwaramma said.
By Elise Franco – Charlotte Inno Staff WriterOctober 27, 2020, 10:35am
Does beauty really have to equal pain?
Ciara May didn’t think so, and she wanted to prove it with the launch of her Charlotte-based startup Rebundle.
The company, founded in 2019, manufactures plant-based, biodegradable synthetic hair used for protective styles like braiding and twisting. May said the synthetic hair used in these styles, which have been used predominately by Black women since the 1950s, have historically been made from plastics and toxic chemicals that irritate the scalp, cause itchy and sometimes painful reactions and is not environmentally friendly.
May’s experiences, and those of millions of Black women around the world, pushed her toward creating a product that she hopes will change the way synthetic hair is made and worn.
“Last summer I experienced severe scalp irritation while wearing my hair in braid extensions. I was scratching my scalp uncontrollably and was so uncomfortable,” she said. “Though I had dealt with this sort of irritation many times before, I had finally had enough. I knew that other women had similar experiences, but I did some heavy research to quantify it.”
Rebundle’s closed-loop hair is not only biodegradable, but its plant-based ingredients make it safe and pain-free to wear, she said. May said the company focuses on building an alternative product by changing the actual fiber of the hair.
The product has been in beta testing since August and is nearly ready to launch. Pre-sales will begin in December, and orders will start shipping to customers sometime in January. The hair will be manufactured in small batches by the Rebundle team.
Now that her vision is close to fruition, May said she’s beginning to feel nervous for the first time.
“I think for the majority of the summer I was really focused on and concerned about getting it right,” she said. “Now that we’re positioning to launch, I have all this anxiety wanting to make sure this is great and people love it. I have to make sure we deliver on the brand.”
Rebundle also runs a program that allows wearers to mail in used hair and braids that the company then recycles back into new products.
“We’re just excited to be in this space,” she said. “It’s an industry that’s hard to get into, and it is that way by design. We’ve carved our way in by doing the market research.”
These days, it’s more important than ever to recognise the talents of those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to bring shows to life. So, we’re highlighting some incredible creatives in our new series!
Liv Burton is a wig mistress and make-up artist. Having trained with some top beauty brands such as MAC and L’Oréal and at the Delamar Academy, Liv went on to work on a wide variety of West End and touring shows such as Dreamgirls, Jersey Boys, Wicked, Aladdin, Bend it Like Beckham and Les Misérables.
Until the end of 2019, she was acting Head of the Wig Department on The Book Of Mormon, then moving to The Big Wig Co. in Berkshire, who produce wigs for film, theatre and television. Liv told us about her working day backstage in the theatre.
Wicked always has two people in early on a ‘day set’ – getting all the wigs ready for the show, as they require a lot of maintenance. Then you typically have four more people coming in at around 3pm to help finish the dressing of the wigs. We then start what we call a pre-set (getting ready for the show) – which means putting all the wigs in their opening places either stage left or right, ready for the show to start.
Each show varies as to how many ‘plots’ the show is split into – which simply means who is looking after which people and at what point in the show. That can often include many quick changes/different make-up changes etc. This is especially true on Wicked, which I would consider the most challenging of all the West End shows I’ve worked on!
In contrast, TheBook of Mormon has just one person on a day set, maintaining the wigs ready for the show and dressing some that were set the night before. The show itself then requires three people to come in and complete the pre-set and get ready for the show. Every show has a half-hour curtain call, which is typically the trigger for pandemonium! Each person will have their set characters to get ready for the show and we then take our places backstage at wherever the designated starting point is, ready for curtain up.
There is little respite. We really don’t stop running throughout the show. From side to side, through the orchestra and sometimes below the stage to catch our performers. This keeps us very active and there is no need for the gym – which I was absolutely thrilled about!
Once you’re in the groove, then the only real challenges are when the performers get sick or injured partway through the show. We must make sure all cover wigs are up to scratch and able to be applied at any given time.
Likewise, when we get injured or sick, we must make sure that someone else within our department can be there to do the quick changes. On Dreamgirls, we were all struck down with a horrific case of norovirus. This resulted in buckets of sick in the wings and a sweepstake on who was going to puke when the high notes were attempted…
It’s fair to say that the old adage that ‘the show must go on’ is carried right through the cast and crew, and each show has the potential to get manic. The art is to not get too stressed and to deal with the problems as they arise. Don’t panic!
The worst part of the job is probably difficult actors. In the main, I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with some true pros who have been nothing but pleasant – some I now call close friends. However, every now and again you come across that one performer who’s not long out of college and has yet to have their diva tendencies ironed out. It doesn’t take long to get worked out, as they need the crew as much as we need them.
You also need to be able to handle the heat. Most of these old theatres are not blessed with air conditioning backstage, so coping with a hot wig oven that’s on most of the day while you’re sitting next to it is not much fun. There was a time at Wicked when all of us strapped ice packs to ourselves.
Going on tour adds another dimension. Finding your own digs is one of the biggest challenges. Being at a different theatre every week, having to find it and your digs, whilst lugging your wardrobe-size suitcase onto a train alone is also a huge strain.
That said, you are all in the same boat and it’s a wonderful bonding experience. During the tour you become a family. This really contrasts with the West End experience, which is more like a regular job – albeit with fabulous music and buddies to play with backstage.
Since lockdown, I’ve been keeping my hand in making wigs and I’ve provided make-up tutorials for people looking to update their look or get an education on how to improve their make-up routines.
I did find myself doing a temporary gig at Tesco as a picker, which started at 3:30am. I got this job after trawling through thousands of others, and, like my fellow theatre mates, not getting anywhere.
Luckily, I received an email the week I finished at Tesco from a local pub asking if I could pop in for a quick informal chat about what hours I need. By the end of the meeting I had got the job. If you think some theatre people are primadonnas, they’ve got nothing on chefs!
Lastly, I’ve started an autumnal and Christmas wreath company. I am loving the creative process involved in producing one-of-a-kind creations, and it’s helping to maintain an income and keep my creative mind sane.
I did not go to university. I was desperate to be in the arts and set my sights on working in theatre and film. After 13 years of hard graft, I am so proud that I stuck with it. I love what I do. This industry is what I know, and Rishi Sunak’s view that we in the arts are unviable is a huge kick in the teeth.
We are seeing green shoots with some shows coming back to the West End, however I’m fearful that we will yo-yo between lockdown and freedom for a good few years yet. This leaves cast, crew and production companies in total limbo and keeps us from what we do best, which is to create joy and happiness for people.
Black women have a complicated relationship with our hair.
On one hand, there was a time when coiler textures’ ability to grow towards the skies was seen as a symbol of high status, and portrayed closeness to the divine. But in contemporary times, despite the vast influence of the second wave natural hair movement, the texture caste system we were forced to conform to — where straight hair is seen as “good,” while tighter coils are seen as “bad” — during the colonial era still persists today. And there are several parallels when it comes to wearing wigs.
“Black women’s relationships with wigs began in ancient Egypt,” says hair historian and head of psychology at the University of the District of Columbia Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka. “There’s a lot of research suggesting that wigs were supposed to show rank in society in this culture. A lot of the royal families had these very decorated wigs with gold and lace and other adornments to show that they had nobility.”
Styles would range from curly to coily, and some would even be braided or in locs.
The upper class would also choose to shave their natural hair off in order to have the option to only wear hair when they wished, which was a true privilege, considering the scorching temperatures at the time. However, those of a lower rank were not permitted to wear wigs during this era, the expert explains.
A lot of the royal families had these very decorated wigs with gold and lace and other adornments to show that they had nobility.
– DR. AFIYA MBILISHAKA
Another interesting fact is that some ancient Egyptian queens wore wigs not only on their head, but also on their chin. “Queen Hatshepsut was known for her great work as a pharaoh, but she would actually wear a beard wig to show her status,” says Dr. Mbilishaka.
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The royals of ancient Egypt would have others care for their wigs by using essential oils to help groom the hair, and they would even be mummified and buried with the pieces on their head.
But the use of wigs during this time to represent royalty or those of high status is a stark contrast to why Black women in the United States wore them during desegregation throughout the ’60s.
“Wigs had been used to address employment,” explains Dr. Mbilishaka. “There were actually certain hair requirements when a Black woman had to integrate her job, and she had to comply with a style that her natural hair maybe couldn’t do. So whether it was a flight attendant, or a nurse, it was a part of the uniform to wear the wig. It justified the respectability of that person.”
On the other hand, Black doo-wop girl groups from the ’50s and ’60s also wore elaborately styled wigs, many of which featured a signature bump at the crown. And it wasn’t necessarily about covering their natural strands, but rather using these wigs for creative expression.
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“It was a part of performances,” Dr. Mbilishaka shares. “With all the variations of Black hair, these wigs were used to create hair uniformity. There was a theatrical element. Even if we look at some of the movies from the 1970s, we knew that they were wearing afro wigs.”
But regardless of whether or not Black women are on stage, wigs have always had a place in our culture and in our homes for a variety of reasons. One of the most major being hair loss.
Dr. Crystal Ugochi Aguh, the director of the Ethnic Skin program and assistant professor of dermatology at John Hopkins has found that nearly half of Black women will experience some form of hair loss in their lifetime, with traction alopecia being a common cause. However, it is important to note that the vast majority of wigs Black women purchase do not replicate their natural pattern.
“There’s still is a sector that’s paying to fit into this beauty ideal that’s perpetuated by Euro-American culture,” explains Dr. Mbilishaka. “There’s still a caste system related to hair where it may be challenging for some Black women to accept their hair texture and length because of systems of white supremacy and racism that makes them feel as though their natural hair is not acceptable. Or, people have given them the feedback that their hairstyle and texture are not acceptable.”
Still, the way a Black woman chooses to wear her hair, or whether or not she wants to put on a wig, is completely her choice. And regardless of if the hair we wear grows from our own scalp or it was purchased at a store, we’re past due for the freedom to be able to do what we want with our hair, when we want, without the assumption or judgement we’ve become so used to having to accept.
This is All Natural. From the kinkiest coils to loose waves, we’re celebrating natural hair in its many forms by sharing expert tips for styling, maintenance, and haircare.
At a Chicago beauty supply shop, one American dream has come true. Another is still waiting for its chance. The crowd was growing impatient as Crystal Holmes fumbled with the keys to the store.
Dozens of people were swarming the street around Western Beauty Supply, the Chicago shop where Ms. Holmes works. She had persuaded some of them to let her open the store so they could rob it without breaking the windows.
“She’s taking too long,” someone yelled. “Let’s go in and get it.”
Western Beauty Supply sells products like wigs, hair extensions and combs mostly to Black women. Most of the employees, like Ms. Holmes, are also Black, but the owner is a Korean-American man, Yong Sup Na.
When a few young men appeared outside the store earlier that evening in May, Mr. Na went out to speak with them. He offered some of them cash, and they walked away. At that point, Mr. Na told Ms. Holmes that he felt confident his business was safe. “They are not going to break into the store,” he told her.
A few minutes later, though, a larger group showed up. A woman snatched Mr. Na’s keys, but Ms. Holmes persuaded her to give them back. Then she ordered Mr. Na, her boss, to leave. “You don’t know what could happen,” she told him.
Even as Ms. Holmes tried to save the store from ruin that evening, when protests and looting followed the police killing of George Floyd, she understood what was causing the turmoil roiling Chicago and dozens of other cities.
“I understand where the rage is coming from,” Ms. Holmes, 40, said in an interview. “We don’t have any businesses in the community and we are getting killed by the police and killing each other, and we are just getting tired.”
In the years she has spent working for Mr. Na, customers have constantly told her that she should open her own store. But she has watched some Black women struggle as owners in the industry, and her priority has been keeping a steady job to support her family.
Outside the store, people in the crowd kept pushing for Ms. Holmes to let them in. But she couldn’t get the keys into the lock. Her hands were shaking too much.
‘The same small slice of pie ’
Mr. Na, who is 65, grew up in South Korea in a home with an outhouse. He watched television by standing outside a neighbor’s window and peering in at the set. Mr. Na was in his late 20s when he arrived in the United States. He knew only one person, a friend from his village who had moved to Chicago.
Not religious but seeking to meet other immigrants, Mr. Na soon joined a Korean church. A few years later, a friend from the church bought a shoe store on Chicago’s South Side from a white man who wanted out.
“This man was upset that the Black people were moving into the neighborhood,” Mr. Na recalled in an interview. “Koreans didn’t care. This was an area that they could afford.”
With no access to a bank loan, Mr. Na bought the store from his friend by using proceeds from the shoe sales. He paid $5,000 a month for 13 months. The business was straightforward.
“You were buying cheaply made goods at a low cost from a wholesaler,” Mr. Na said. “The customers were not snobby.” He also owned businesses that sold pagers, cellphones and clothing. The endeavors allowed him to pay for private school and then college for his two daughters.
Over the years, other Korean retailers told Mr. Na that beauty sales were a steady proposition, even in recessions. In 2007, he started his first beauty shop. He opened Western Beauty in 2014, on the city’s West Side, and started Modern Beauty in the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville two years later.
The portion of the beauty industry that caters to Black women generates about $4 billion in sales a year. Much of those sales are rung up in small beauty supply stores, which are ubiquitous in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The stores seem like a natural answer to the numerous calls from policymakers and corporate America to create more Black-owned businesses after protests over systemic racism broke out this spring.
Yet fewer than 10 percent are owned by Black women, said Tiffany Gill, a history professor at Rutgers University. Instead, many of them are owned by Korean immigrants. Korean Americans also lead some of the largest wholesale distributors that import the hair products from China.
“These are two historically marginalized groups fighting over the same small slice of pie when there is so much more of the pie that neither has access to,” said Ms. Gill, the author of the book “Beauty Shop Politics: African-American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry.”
For years, Mr. Na worked seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. His daughter Sandra, 33, remembers one night when her father didn’t come home. He had been rushed into emergency surgery to remove a shard of glass from his face after a scuffle with someone who tried to rob the store.
The Na family lived for a time in a Latino neighborhood and eventually moved to a largely white suburb north of the city. Ms. Na said her parents had insisted that she spend her summers learning Korean, working as a tutor and taking academic enrichment classes. Ms. Na and her sister, Jenny, visited the store only rarely when they were growing up and played with the register.
She said her father never talked about the “social and racial impacts” as a retailer on the South Side. Her father came from a generation that experienced poverty and hardships, Ms. Na said, and didn’t have the time to focus on much else except taking care of his family, which included sending money to his siblings back in South Korea.
As part of a younger generation faced with fewer of these pressures, Ms. Na said, she has had opportunities to think about issues of race from a different perspective.
‘A Black woman is in charge’
Crystal Holmes grew up a world away from South Korea, in Chicago’s East Side. But like Mr. Na, she faced challenges from the start. She was raised mostly by her grandmother until she was a teenager.
“I knew I wanted better,” she said. “I always said I would never put my kids in the situation I was in.”
Ms. Holmes, a mother of two, worked for a time for a fried chicken chain, but switched to beauty supply stores when she found that many pay every week.
At the first store she worked in, the owner, a Korean man, was so impressed with her sales skills that he said he would help her open a store one day, Ms. Holmes said.
Then things soured. The owner accused her of stealing from him after he discovered the register short of cash, she said. She told him how one employee, who was also Korean, had insisted on taking turns on the register and had a gambling problem. But the owner didn’t believe her.
“I just walked out of the store,” she said. (A security tape later showed that she did not steal anything, according to Ms. Holmes.)
Many beauty supply stores have a reputation for being demeaning places for the Black women who shop in them. Ms. Holmes said she had been in numerous stores where employees followed customers or required them to check their bags at the door.
It’s not just small retailers. Until June, Walmart kept its Black beauty products in locked display cases. “You can’t treat everyone like a thief,” Ms. Holmes said.
Mr. Na’s stores are different, she said. Women are allowed to shop without being watched. She likes to walk the floor talking to the customers about their hair and offering them advice.
Ms. Holmes sometimes accompanies Mr. Na on trips to the wholesaler to pick up inventory. She is usually the only Black person in the warehouse. Once, she encountered another Black woman from a beauty shop in Wisconsin.
“I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’” Ms. Holmes recalled. “And she said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’”
Still, there is tension. Some customers ask Ms. Holmes why she works so hard for a Korean owner. One woman said she was like a “slave.”
Ms. Holmes, who earns $14 an hour, was able to pay for three years of her son’s college tuition but could not afford his final year. Her son, now 26, plans to go back to school. But he lost his job at a downtown restaurant during the pandemic and has a baby on the way, so college may be further delayed.
Ms. Holmes also hopes her 20-year-old daughter, who has a 9-month-old son, can attend college eventually.
Mr. Na has been encouraging Ms. Holmes to start her own business one day and offering her advice on how to get started, like how much money she will need to save.
For now, Ms. Holmes appreciates the small perks of the job. How on a good day, the store can feel like a gathering place where women talk about their lives and swap beauty tips.
On many Sundays, Ms. Holmes opens and closes the store on her own. “Some customers see me by myself and say: ‘Where are the Koreans? Are they in back?’” When she explains that she runs the store on Sundays, “they are shocked,” she said.
“It’s mind-blowing to them that a Black woman is in charge.”
‘Eat or be eaten’
Sandra Na has also wondered why Koreans dominate the sale of Black women’s hair products.
She acknowledges that Korean immigrant communities can be “insular,” and that her father, who speaks limited English, prefers to do business and associate with other Koreans because it is easier.
But other forces are also at play. Ms. Na said her father had been shaped by his parents’ experience living through the Japanese occupation of Korea and then the Korean War. That left him with a shared feeling of grief and loss, which Ms. Na said is often referred to as Han.
It helps explain, she said, why her father typically hires Korean managers in stores where most of the employees are Black.
“Han creates a level of trust among Koreans,” Ms. Na said. “That trust goes back decades.”
Since the protests, many business leaders and public figures have sought to address racial disparities with more investment. Square, the payments company led by Jack Dorsey, the billionaire founder of Twitter, has pledged $100 million to financial firms supporting Black communities. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has proposed a $7 billion federal fund for Black entrepreneurs.
But the struggles of Black women in the beauty supply industry show that some barriers to success are more complicated.
In interviews this summer, Black women who own beauty shops in Dallas, Buffalo and Sacramento said they were consistently denied accounts with major Korean-owned suppliers. One of the women said that as soon as she had sent over a copy of her driver’s license, the supplier stopped returning her calls.
These rejections, the women said, prevent them from stocking the most popular hairpieces, forcing their customers to shop elsewhere.
While Mr. Na is a retailer, not a distributor, he said he was aware of some of the challenges Black women proprietors faced in obtaining products.
He said Black owners are often unable to rent or buy stores that are physically large enough to allow them to work with the big suppliers.
“It has nothing to do with racism,” Mr. Na said. He acknowledged that if Black women gained a larger footing in the beauty supply industry they could seriously challenge Korean businesses.
“It is competition,” Mr. Na said. “Eat or be eaten.”
‘You come shop with me’
In the end, the group didn’t wait for Ms. Holmes to let it in. The looters smashed the window and barged inside.
Mr. Na walked across the street, sat in his car and looked on as his store was ransacked.
Like many Americans, Mr. Na had watched the footage of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck in horror. He wondered if the unrest would ever stop and whether he should bother to rebuild.
“I feel like racism is something that will never go away,” he said.
After the looting, Ms. Holmes returned to the store to clean up. Some people from the neighborhood were surprised to see her helping Mr. Na. A few customers were angry she would not let them take some of the products that had been knocked off the shelves.
“Why are you on their side?” she remembers one Black person asking her. “Why aren’t you riding with us?”
Ms. Holmes said some people were too quick to judge. “They are on the outside looking in. They don’t know the person I work for. He’s a good man.”
When Sandra Na drove to Chicago from Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband, she was struck by the level of destruction at Western Beauty Supply and Modern Beauty. A cash register that contained no money was smashed, the glass in the display case had been shattered, and dozens of bottles of hair solutions had been dumped on the floor.
She believes most of the looters were seizing on the chaos wrought by the protests over the killing of Mr. Floyd to steal desirable products, she said. A range of businesses across the city were destroyed that day, including pawnshops, grocery stores and Walmarts. Some of the damaged stores were Black owned.
Ms. Holmes said she agreed that the crowd wanted only to steal merchandise from Mr. Na — not to make a statement that his store was not Black owned.
Still, Ms. Na said she recognized that some people might begrudge small businesses like her father’s stores. “I have a hard time thinking there isn’t resentment there,” she said. “You see an outside ethnic group capitalizing on your people.”
As painful as it was to see her father’s shops destroyed, Ms. Na said she was heartened that the broader protests had spurred efforts to address systemic racism. “The attention is there,” she said.
Mr. Na was able to reopen his business with insurance money, government grants and more than $94,000 in donations from a GoFundMe page his daughters set up. In August, though, he temporarily boarded up his stores after a police shooting in Chicago set off a fresh wave of protests and looting.
Back at work, Ms. Holmes said a few customers had told her again that she should open her own store.
She’s hoping Mr. Na will help her get started. Mr. Na, who is planning to retire in the next few years, said he had been considering ways he could do so.
“One day I’ll have a store, and you come shop with me,” Ms. Holmes tells customers. “Just wait.”
Sally Beauty Supply and Cosmo Prof announce the four brands selected for the second iteration of the Cultivate Cohort. This accelerator program is designed to empower female-owned beauty brands to bring their visions and business plans to life.
In 2018, the inaugural Cultivate program propelled brands Curlanista and PuffCuff to new heights, transforming them into household names and growing by 3,771 percent and 88 percent over the past year, respectively. As part of the 2020 program, four brands were selected to receive business grants worth a combined total of $60,000, online distribution at SallyBeauty.com and CosmoProfBeauty.com in October, along with a 4-week virtual boot camp built to set the brands up for success. Introducing the 2020 Cultivate Cohort:
UniQurl – Formulated for kinky curls, Registered Nurse Alexis Stanley developed UniQurl’s hair care line to serve a hair type that has traditionally lacked options. Each product is designed to maintain and nourish naturally kinky hair. True + Pure Texture – Natural hair expert, celebrity stylist and salon owner Pekela Riley, started her line of luxury hair extensions with a passion to serve women of color from diverse backgrounds. Products are meticulously crafted to develop beautiful, natural hair textures that blend kinks, coils, curls and waves. Peculiar Roots— Driven by the passion to see locs and natural hairstyles receive the pampering and care they deserve, Tara Darnley founded Peculiar Roots to help others embrace their uniqueness. Pattie Yankee Products— Celebrity nail artist Pattie Yankee is one of the most sought-after nail experts in the industry and is taking nails to the next level with her line of polishes. The line is a frequent staple on New York Fashion Week runways. The Cultivate program saw an overwhelming response of applications with many focused on natural hair care to meet the unique needs of the often underserved textured hair consumer. Sally Beauty Holdings has a long history of supporting and launching both female and Black-founded businesses. Sally Beauty is proud to have over twenty-five Black-founded brands including Vernon François, The Mane Choice, Mielle, Design Essentials, and newly added Flawless By Gabrielle Union and Kim Kimble, to name a few.
“We are amazed by the ingenuity found among female entrepreneurs, who are consistently finding creative ways to meet consumer demand during the ongoing pandemic,” said Pam Kohn, SVP and Chief Merchandising Officer at Sally Beauty Holdings. “We’re proud to be part of each of these brands’ incredible journeys in bringing the latest DIY trends to market, particularly at a time when salons and consumers are seeking new solutions.”
The company is rewarding the Cultivate Cohort with online distribution and business grants worth a combined total of $60,000. The winning brands will also participate in a 4-week virtual boot camp focusing on key areas such as merchandising, social media, marketing, ecommerce, store operations and entrepreneurship. Each focus-area of the boot camp was selected to ensure businesses are set up for success and longevity in the beauty industry. Following the boot camp, the winners will present to senior-level Sally Beauty and Cosmo Prof leaders at the Perfect Pitch Capstone event for a chance to receive in-store distribution in select stores.
For more information about the Cultivate Cohort, visit Sallybeauty.com/cultivate or Cosmoprofbeauty.com/cultivate.
About Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc.
Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: SBH) is an international specialty retailer and distributor of professional beauty supplies with revenues of approximately $3.9 billion annually. Through the Sally Beauty Supply and Beauty Systems Group businesses, the Company sells and distributes through 5,062 stores, including 158 franchised units, and has operations throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Peru, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Sally Beauty Supply stores offer up to 8,000 products for hair color, hair care, skin care, and nails through proprietary brands such as Ion®, Generic Value Products®, Beyond the Zone® and Silk Elements® as well as professional lines such as Wella®, Clairol®, OPI®, Conair® and Hot Shot Tools®. Beauty Systems Group stores, branded as Cosmo Prof or Armstrong McCall stores, along with its outside sales consultants, sell up to 10,500 professionally branded products including Paul Mitchell®, Wella®, Matrix®, Schwarzkopf®, Kenra®, Goldwell®, Joico® and CHI®, intended for use in salons and for resale by salons to retail consumers. For more information about Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc., please visit sallybeautyholdings.com .
Hair extensions are popular and expensive. But it’s often poor women who cut off and sell their hair – for little money. For some it offers more independence, for others, suffering and stigmatization. It’s only hair, the dealers with the scissors say. But everyone knows that’s not true.
Take Prak Sohka, for example. The 42-year-old lives in the countryside of Cambodia, some 170 kilometers away from the capital city of Phnom Penh. She says her hair has won many beauty contests and that she cares for it with a mixture of coconut oil and a special blossom. Prak has a photo in the apartment that shows her at the age of 18 with long black hair. Shortly afterward, she says, a woman approached her and offered the equivalent of 40 euros for Prak’s hair. It seemed like a fortune to her at the time. Then it took another five minutes until the hair was gone and only a few strands were left on Prak’s head.
Hair As a Source of Income In India and China, the market for human hair has long been a billion-dollar business. To meet the great demand, other Asian countries have also started getting in on the trade. Cambodia is one of those, a country in which, according to World Bank statistics, 4.5 million people live below the poverty line, meaning they have to get by on less than $2 a day. In Cambodia, especially in the countryside, hair is seen as a renewable raw material they can sell to pay for their children’s’ school fees, food and the mortgage on their home.
Photojournalists Louise Pluyaud and Benjamin Filarski spent time reporting in Cambodia in February, just before the coronavirus struck. They met with women in villages who had already sold their hair two or three times. Women familiar with the shame and the rumor that cutting off your hair can create bad luck.
They also met with the women who scout the large markets of Phnom Penh for shocks of human hair, for which they pay up to 500 euros, because of the boost it gives their self-confidence. They also hope the hair extensions will make them more successful in their careers.
Empowerment or Humiliation? The photojournalists also met with the merchants who sell the hair and wear T-shirts with words like “Never stop growing” on them and signs with slogans like “Be more beautiful for a better life” hanging in their shop windows. But is this empowerment or humiliation?
Hair isn’t just hair, as Pluyaud and Filarski found out. It’s also money. And the hair trade also has to do with dignity. What does it mean when women buy other womens’ hair in order to live up to a beauty ideal, with the result being that the other woman, the one who doesn’t have money, is no longer able to live up to that ideal herself? Is it a sign of the humiliation of women by Cambodian society because it leads to women more or less mutilating each other? Or is it empowerment given that women earn money that makes them more independent from their husbands and families?
Pluyaud says that the women who sell their hair aren’t victims – that they know what they’re doing. “They use what they have to create a better future for themselves and their children,” he says. It allows many of them to accomplish things they would like to do. But he says the situation is different for the women buying the hair. They often feel pressure to meet certain standards that society imposes on women in Cambodia.
The weave and wig business is more than a $2 billion global industry and China is a major player, but its harvesting process is often under scrutiny.
In a U.S. crackdown on several Chinese companies that export human hair, the Feds in early July confiscated 13 tons of illegal weave being smuggled from China. The hair products, which were shipped from China to the port of New York and New Jersey, are worth an estimated $800,000, The New York Post reported.
The human hair industry is so lucrative that the product is often called “black gold,” and the hair comes from ethnic minorities locked inside China’s internment camps, The New York Post reported.
The majority of imported Chinese hair comes from manufacturers in the country’s Xinjiang region, a region where 2 million Uyghurs, mainly Muslim and ethnic minorities, have been detained since 2016. The Feds believe the confiscated hair was from this region. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection service said the products may have indicated “potential human rights abuses of forced child labor and imprisonment.”
As part of a month-long investigation by CNN, the network found inmates who said they were tortured and abused at the camps. Along with electrocution, intrusive medical examinations, and forced sterilizations, the inmates said their heads were shaved.
Reports by Associated Press and several other news organizations have repeatedly found that people inside the internment camps, which activists call “black factories,” are producing sportswear and other apparel for well-known U.S. brands, The Jerusalem Post reported.
China has continually denied accusations of forced labor or detention of ethnic minorities.
According to Chinese officials, the nearly 400 camps “are re-education camps established in order to counter terrorism and Islamist extremism.” China calls them Vocational Education and Training Centers, but this is far from a true representation of what they are, according to reports.
“Instead, available evidence suggests that many extrajudicial detainees in Xinjiang’s vast ‘re-education’ network are now being formally charged and locked up in higher security facilities, including newly built or expanded prisons, or sent to walled factory compounds for coerced labor assignments,” said Nathan Ruser, author of a report on the camps by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, in a BBC report.
In 2019, there were an estimated 3 million detainees in China’s internment camps, according to Randall G. Schriver, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, Reuters reported.
Black women are heavy consumers of human hair wigs and weaves. In fact, the business of hair extensions is booming in the Black community, according to Tiffany Gill, associate professor of history at Rutgers University and author of the book “Beauty Shop Politics.” The U.S. Black haircare market was estimated to be worth more than $2.5 billion in 2018 by research company Mintel.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now refusing exports of human hair from the Xinjiang region to enter the country.