While browsing through photos that have been reblogged thousands of times on my feed, I can't help but to notice all the beautiful hairstyles reblogged or "liked" that are specifically of blonde women.
And it truly is beautiful. I get jealous when I see platinum blonde haired girls wearing all black. The contrast looks so amazing. Texture, volume, thickness, and moisture varies not only among cultural hair, but in the color of hair as well. Among white girls, blondes and brunettes, there's curly and straight. I once told a group of black girls that my hair was "too rough" and almost got slaughtered. Then there's in-group: the Vietnamese girl with really thin, long hair that easily curls into place in just three seconds of touching an iron has different hair than the Chinese girl whose hair is so thick that she has to ask her sylist to thin it out. We all obviously have textures of hair that work better for some than others.
For a lot of people, hair is a symbolic cultural cue. My mom still brings up the one, single time when I was in middle school standing in a grocery store line and a white woman told me how beautiful my hair was. Nora Ephron thinks Asian women always have perfect hair. But neither of these women were blonde, so in their caliber of hair color, maybe Asian women do have perfect hair.
It was a recent discovery, this problem I have with blondes. And really, I just have a problem with the marketing of blondes being the sole representation of women. Yes, all over tumblr. When it can be pinpointed to a business, however, that's when things get real. Namely, the apparel company, Free People.
They blog about prancing around wearing boho skirts and flower chains in their yellow hair and write about their 24 hour trip to the beach with their boyfriends. That is, catered to the 95% white, 95% blonde, and 100% straight population, and obligatory "others" once in a while. I think they featured one or two Asian girls for Chinese New Year and clothed some of their white folks in exotic looking traditional Chinese dresses. To be clear, I don't exactly have an aversion to blonde hair, nor do I have a negative sentiment towards anyone who has blonde hair on a personal level. But Asian women, hispanic women, and black women just can't squeeze lemon juice and salt in their hair to magically create simple and sexy "beachy waves."
Really, the problem is that I, as an Asian woman, can't relate to anyone on the Free People site. And boho-chic lesbians can't relate to any of the bloggers' excavations to Big Sur with their boyfriends either. Free People has probably never realized how homogeneous their white supremacist company is, or maybe that's exactly what they want their company to be. Deliberate or not, this is how it appears to me. And above all, it's obvious. Isn't this why Disney finally created a black princess after so long of no representation (kiss a frog, problem solved)? We have little to look up to. We can't watch Youtube tutorials of white women doing makeup because they don't have our struggle of putting eyeliner on our monolids without it disappearing when we open our eyes. And don't tell us we don't love ourselves when we get blepharoplasty when you don't know what it's like to have monolids (and frankly, I don't either).
That a company can be so intentionally color-conscious for all the wrong reasons is a terrifying setback for our society and in the fashion and beauty industry.
