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Jhawk163 t1_j6cru60 wrote

Reply to comment by 13-Penguins in Black and Hispanic hairdressers are exposed to a complex mixture of chemicals, many of them unknown, potentially hazardous, and undisclosed on product labels, researchers report. There are more than 700,000 hairdressers in the United States, more than 90% of whom are estimated to be women. by MistWeaver80

Ok but like, any race hairdresser can do the hair of any race customer.

I get that obviously there are parts of cities that have different ethnic makeups in different ratios, but surely a more accurate title would be "hairdressers working on Black or Hispanic hair" would be more accurate, due to the chemical used being unaffected by the person applying it, and moreso by the person it is being applied to.

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DapperKoala t1_j6cwpjm wrote

Not necessarily. I have curly hair, not the same texture that someone who is black or hispanic, and I find that a lot of salons don't even have the right products (or stylists for that matter) for my white people curly hair.

While knowledge of proper treatment for curly hair has gotten better over the last decade, a lot of salons cut and treat hair as if it were straight hair. I have had HUGE issues with salons in the past with no one there knowing how to even deal with curly hair correctly.

If I were black or hispanic I would 100% go to a salon that specialized in that texture hair over a place that didn't.

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Lady-Seashell-Bikini t1_j6dcktt wrote

That's not necessarily true. Many hair colleges don't really go over Black hair, so Black women are more likely to go to Black hair salons, where the hairdressers are well acquainted with their hair texture.

Many White and Asian hairdressers will not necessarily know how to style their hair texture without them already having straightened hair first.

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13-Penguins t1_j6d7ri6 wrote

In theory yeah, but in practice, most stylists work with clientele that has a similar hair texture, and thus same race. Even when I lived in a mostly white neighborhood, I still had to look for a black hair stylist, which meant traveling to a different town. Just think of it as, would you take advice for hair care from someone who has completely different hair than yours, will never use those products on themself, only worked on hair like yours a couple times in school, and hasn’t worked on hair curlier than beach waves since? If another black girl went to a white hairstlyist and vouched for them, then that’s a different story. It’s the same with makeup artists, tattoo artists, and dermatologists for me, you want to go to someone who you know has experience working on skin like yours.

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