The Double Tax

Good Hair

Back in grade school, I was desperate for reminders. Reminders that it was not only okay to be Black, but that it was also okay to be as dark as I was. Reminders that my features were worthy and that whoever is deemed beautiful by society does not have to define beauty for me. And for years, I didn't get them. I did not get those reminders because I am, by many conventional beauty standards, antithetical to beauty itself. Because women and girls like me, who wear our ancestry on our faces and on our heads, incur the double tax.

At the tender age of five, I went from Head Start to a local private school on full scholarship. There I became keenly aware that my Black skin was apparently too Black, and my curly coiled hair was a bit too kinky. No class picture fully captured the features of my face, and this often became the topic of classroom discussion. "Where did Anna go?" the children would tease, while pointing at my blackened face in the middle of the photo.

By my thirteenth birthday, I sat down for perms that seeped into my scalp and self-esteem. I would think that if only I had straight hair like my white classmates, maybe I would be more accepted. At fourteen, I considered bleaching my skin to erase the history my melanin carried because of not-so-gentle reminders to "stay out of the sun." And on my sixteenth birthday, I, like many other teenage girls, believed myself to be the ugliest person on earth. Which is why I remember the first time I saw her, at the age of seventeen.

It was senior year of high school. The Oscars were on. "Best Supporting Actress" rolled across my television screen, and then her name was announced: Lupita Nyong'o. The audience erupted in applause and then stood up one by one as the camera cut to a woman with skin as dark as mine and a teeny-tiny Afro accessorized with a diamond-studded headband. Her jaw dropped as tears fell down her cheeks. She could only lift herself up, give her brother a hug, and float toward the stage with a confused and dazed look across her face.

The reason I started crying that night was because she looked like Cinderella, and she looked like me. It felt like a real shift in pop culture, and for the rest of the year, Lupita, with skin and hair like mine, seemed to occupy rare air. When she gripped that golden statue onstage, she gripped the hearts of young Black girls like me, and as part of her ascent, her beauty became central to conversations beyond that moment.

For months on end, Lupita's brightly colored patterns and prints were plastered across magazine covers in grocery aisles. She became part of a resurgence of creative natural hairstyles for Black women, including, but not limited to, faded high tops, artistic Afros, and long flowy braids. When she was named People magazine's Most Beautiful, she became only the third Black woman and the first dark-skinned Black woman to top the list. Her rise inspired me to look at myself in the mirror a little differently. I began to embrace what my melanin represented and what stories my tight curls told. I started to believe that maybe I too could be beauty itself.

The Cost of Presentability

Beauty is a form of capital, which makes our appearance a source of power, or lack thereof. The world rewards beauty. Society reveres attractive people. That is why, unsurprisingly, attractiveness is positively associated with elevated levels of happiness and higher pay. Our economic and social utility as women and girls is often rooted in our looks, which reflects either positively or negatively in our pocketbooks.

In the United States, one study found that the average woman spends $3,756 per year on beauty maintenance, while men spend $2,928. Expenditures on everything from hand creams and gym memberships cost the average American woman $300 per month and $225,360 over her lifetime (about $50,000 more than men). Furthermore, three thousand women in the US, between the ages of sixteen and seventy-five, spend on average about $8 per day just on their face. And that was back in 2017!

For Black beauty consumers, these price points are often higher. One McKinsey report found that Black consumers of beauty products had to travel longer distances on average than their white counterparts. Not only that, but even neighborhood staples like grocery stores and drugstores were less likely to carry products that catered to Black consumers. Only 13 percent of Black people reported that they could find products meant for them. This means that , in addition to paying higher prices for beauty products, Black people are spending more time and money to travel farther to find the products that are advertised to us. To add insult to injury, Black-owned brands only make up a small part of the beauty market. Investors may not think Black beauty is profitable, despite Black people spending nearly $7 billion on beauty products in 2021, and the story remains the same for hair care.

For many women and girls, hair can be an extension of beauty, which is why the Venn diagram of people who say "It's just hair, what's the big deal?" and people who breathe down your neck in a checkout line is exactly a circle. About a decade ago, researchers found that customers at a restaurant franchise were more likely to tip blond waitresses than other waitresses, holding all else equal. Hair matters for beauty, and that's probably why the second most common beauty expense for all Americans is hair products, not including shampoo and conditioner. (The most common beauty expense is skincare.) It's also why a survey administered to two thousand American women reported that the average respondent spent $80 per month on her hair. That's $55,000 over the course of a lifetime!.

These expenses-buying hair and other beauty products, traveling to buy said products, and spending time using these products-make up the cost of presentability: the price tag of investing in attraction. Women incur these costs because our survival often depends on how our appearance is interpreted and validated by society. For white women, this is "the pink tax," or the higher prices for products aimed at women, even though those products are often the same as or similar to those marketed to men. For women of color, especially Black women, it is the double tax-the pink tax and then some.

Black hair is not always seen as desirable or professional in modern-day society. In the United Kingdom, Dove and Censuswide found that nearly half of Black and biracial women reported experiencing hair discrimination in school. Of those women, nearly 60 percent reported still experiencing hair discrimination, and that most faced this kind of discrimination as adults, and 71 percent cited negative comments made about their hair from peers, teachers, and principals alike. This is the reality for Black women globally. We have to spend more time and money on hair care and hair appointments than any other women.

The Double Tax: Women use hair and beauty products to satisfy beauty standards. However, products used by women of color, especially Black women and girls, are usually more expensive.

Black hair is not considered the default, so the products we need are not produced en masse. Additionally, Black women and girls often require extra products for detangling, deep conditioning, hair masking, and moisturizing because hair breakage and loss are more prevalent among people of African descent. Ingredients used in popular brands may not always be sufficient for maintaining our hair.

The opposite is true for most white women, who can likely walk into any local store and find shelves full of products that cater to their hair without causing permanent damage. Black hair products are often relegated to a fraction of a shelf, if that.

When women and girls of color, especially Black women and girls, do decide to purchase from leading brands, they find that products for coily textured hair are priced higher-about 66 cents per ounce-compared with products for straighter hair, which cost around 46 cents per ounce. A difference in cents can quickly turn into a difference of dollars for full bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and that's what we see unfold.

Women with coily hair spend $5.70 more per purchase of shampoo and conditioner than those with straight hair. Folks, if the average person uses eleven bottles of shampoo (followed by conditioner) per year, a $5.70 difference becomes a nearly $63 cost differential each year. This means that over a decade, women with coily hair are spending about $627 more on shampoo and conditioner alone; meanwhile, the perception of having "good hair" is weaponized against Black women. This further compounds the challenges of navigating beauty standards while contending with unfair expectations tied to what naturally grows from our scalps. When it comes to hair, the pink tax means that women may spend more than men for the same products, and the double tax means that these products are even more expensive or simply do not exist for Black women and women of color.

A Tale of Two Strands

As soon as young girls and women start understanding beauty as a large part of their self-esteem and confidence, they immediately begin to think about how they look and what it will cost them, down to the dollar. I asked high school and college girls about their beauty routines. Most said they start with their hair and then put on makeup (if they wear makeup), and go about their day. I assumed that the difference in money then time spent on makeup would be where the double tax arises, but the big difference between Black and white girls was the money and time they spent on their hair.

When I asked about the role hair played in their lives, the white girls I spoke to said they didn't really worry about it. If they had somewhere to be, they might put in a bit more effort, but for the most part, a standard day didn't demand much.

In this arena of beauty, white girls and their hair are the beauty standard, so their responses to our questions made sense. Products are made for white women and girls, and meeting expectations doesn't require bending over backward or traveling long distances. Their hair routines often revolve around daily use products, with little need for special appointments or treatments unless they go out of their way to do something out of the ordinary. One woman, Ruth, summed it up well, saying: "My hair is straight, and it's been straight my entire life. I'm very thankful and blessed with that, so I let it fly to the wind and focus on skincare instead." That's not to say that every white woman has it easy when it comes to hair care. One woman shared with us that it took her many years to figure out what her hair does and "how to make it look decent." But it was clear from our conversations that not having to worry about hair maintenance allows white women and girls to shift their focus to other aspects of beauty, like skincare, makeup, fashion, fitness, or even plastic surgery, whereas Black women and girls shared that they think about their hair a lot.

Ace, a Black college student, said that for Black women and girls, hair isn't just hair; it's something much more.

It's almost as if hair defines you. Are you good enough? What does your hair look like; is it kinky? Is it coiled? Does it need to be straight for it to be beautiful and for you to get a job?

The high school girls I spoke with took it one step further. They shared candidly that they felt uncomfortable wearing their natural hair outside of their homes because unfiltered commentary ranges, in their words, from "wild" to "out of control." Everyone has an opinion on their hair, adults and peers alike. Research shows that women and girls are overpoliced in school settings and organizations-think policies ranging from skirt length to whether our "sexy" shoulders should see the light of day. Yes, the pink tax is the cost of women having to adjust to these unreasonable standards, but the double tax is Black women and girls having to navigate these misogynistic policies and rules rooted in hair discrimination. In work and school environments especially, hair is a professional target that burdens Black people disproportionately because organizations and schools use it to enforce racism. It is a loophole that whispers, "I can't discriminate against your skin, but I can say that your hair isn't 'good' enough."

By contrast, white girls voiced feeling uncomfortable or annoyed about their hair only with regard to frizziness or greasiness. Nothing a bit of shampoo and mousse can't fix. But the moment Black girls' hair becomes more difficult to manage, there is an immediate shift toward shame. Shame that rushes from our bones to our faces, enforced by nasty looks or jeers, followed by a lingering anxiety that never really fades. People make assumptions about our identity because of our hair.

If white girls dye their hair pink, they may be seen as quirky or creative. However, when a Black girl does it, suddenly our economic status becomes a topic of discussion. Negative stereotypes begin to enter the picture. Which is why fitting the archetype usually means that we sidestep ridicule, satisfy a beauty standard, and boost our own self-esteem all in one fell hair swoop. When a simple hairstyle change holds that much power, hours of preparation and dollars spent are seemingly worth it.

One of the ways Black women and girls conform to beauty standards is by perming our hair. Before the rise of commercialized natural hair products, Black women and girls were pushed toward relaxers and texturizers-creams used to chemically loosen our curl patterns.

These weren't the perms that white women used to achieve curls; these were different. Perms were a response to the changing status quo, pioneered by the first Black women millionaires in the US, Madam C.J. Walker and Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone. These perms made our hair more "acceptable" to the world, and that's why I and so many others started getting them at a young age.

Tatiana, another Black college student we spoke with, told us that before moving to the US she used to wear her natural hair out in a 'fro or in braids. But when she arrived, she saw that the Black girls all around her had their hair permed or relaxed. As Tatiana got older, she learned that straightened hair was what everyone was praising. "Oh, I guess I have to straighten my hair to be called beautiful," she recalled, and that's exactly how I felt too.