O cabelo afro e a idealização dos cachos como estímulo para o consumo de produtos capilares

Abstract

This work aims to understand how the social environment and racism influence the process of use, consumption and acquisition of hair products by people who have Afro hair. It also seeks to analyze how institutions reproduce this ideology in their products, advertisements and advertisements. It is characterized by being an exploratory, qualitative research. For data collection, observation techniques were used in social media and cosmetics stores, semi-structured interviews using their respective scripts, in addition to secondary data collected in the bibliographical research. 5 people who claimed to use hair products were interviewed, 4 of them being consumers and 1 owner of an afro salon and a brand of products for afro hair. The interviews took place between June and July 2023. The collected data and speeches were analyzed with the support of the life history method, considering the individual's subjective factors, and examining how life experiences and cultural factors can affect their decision-making process for the use and consumption of products. Black people carry centuries of repression in their history. The Eurocentric norm of establishing their characteristics as a standard establishes racism in society, racism was explicitly presented and with it erased cultures and symbolisms, in the process of reestablishing themselves in the social environment, black people had to camouflage many of their characteristics, one of them, their hair, with capitalism established in society, racism takes on a new guise. What previously appeared explicitly, currently acts in a veiled and biased way, acting from structural racism, which, in an “unconscious” way, tends to influence the way in which hair products are consumed and not only consumed, but propagated and developed, not prioritizing care, but the definition and socially established “beauty”.