Ingrid Patricia Grassals, founder and owner of Go Natural Caribe, the first natural hair salon in the Dominican Republic, closed its salon doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic in January. She had offered an essential service to Dominicans: natural hair care, a rarity in the Dominican beauty industry until the last 10 years.
“Until about 10 years ago, [Dominican] women made money straightening their hair, ”Grassals said in an interview with The Beacon. “Our beauty industry started to change when a community was created. We are known around the world for straightening hair, but it took a while for women with afro hair to get a service for them, and for you to treat me with affection like any other.
Understanding colorism in the Dominican Republic can be difficult and complex. As a white Dominican myself, I don’t personally know the racial disparities in a country that has 70 percent people of mixed African and European descent, according to the Human Rights Group International. However, there is one aspect of Dominican identity that is so strongly coloristic that almost anyone can see it: the beauty industry. Beauty salons and beauty shops are a huge market in the Dominican Republic, and any woman who lives here can tell you that getting her hair done every week is not uncommon.
There are many ethnic and racial prejudices that influence the construction of discriminatory and exclusive ideologies, harming the majority population of African descent in Dominican society. CEPAL reports that the consequences experienced today are the result of years of human trafficking and slavery. This is evident through the racist policies and rhetoric claimed to date.
Miami Herald journalist Frances Robles spoke about her report on colorism in the Dominican Republic on NPR, describing her as so ingrained in Dominican culture that many black Dominicans deny their color in the first place.
“I would say the majority of blacks, especially in the Dominican Republic, don’t see themselves as black,” Rables said. “I’m saying the people who are in the United States would be an African American like anyone else. They just don’t see that in themselves.
The Dominican Republic is the only Latin American country that liberated itself from Haiti, not Spain, in the 1800s. Even after their liberation, the presidents and political leaders of the Dominican Republic launched the ‘idea that everything that was Haitian was bad, and that everything that was black was bad. I see and hear the ramifications of this mentality every day.
Racism permeates all aspects of our daily lives, and the beauty industry is no stranger to it, in every corner of the world. However, the Dominican Republic has a unique relationship with race and beauty. The Executive Vice-President of the Association of Industries (AIRD), Circe Almanzar, said Dominican beauty products are seen as a “country brand,” as a staple for Dominicans around the world.
The President of the Association of Small and Medium-Sized Cosmetics Manufacturers (Apymefac), Juan Rodríguez, emphasizes that the cosmetics sector generates 193,500 direct and indirect jobs. Rodríguez points out that in the country there are 150,000 beauty salons and 40,000 other online consumers as suppliers and representatives of product lines. He also points out that although beauty products are only 25 percent of products on store shelves, 75 percent of these beauty products are consumed in DR.
Indeed, the Dominican Republic is one of the few countries where most people (mostly women) visit beauty salons every week. The beauty industry is of critical importance to the Dominican population and is a driving force of the economy. Needless to say, how we market beauty is extremely important, and these marketing techniques often mirror how Dominicans view beauty standards.
While the practice of attending these shows sounds like a cultural experience, unique to Dominicans, especially Dominican women, it can also be quite taxing. An article by Melissa Godin in SAPIEN The magazine said it best: “Dominican hair culture is far from glamorous.” It’s expensive, and sometimes ritualistic, but most alarming is anchored in Eurocentric beauty standards.
Although, as mentioned before, the Grassal fair closed its doors in January of this year, they continue to give workshops and sell their range of products.
As a member of an Associate of Arts (AA) specializing in fashion and clothing design at the Altos de Chavón design school in Santo Domingo, Grassals explained that she never intended to indulge in the line of cosmetics, but that the idea had fallen to him.
“I have had natural hair since 1998, but it was in 2010 that I started to discover that there was a movement in the United States on natural hair and it seemed very interesting to me because to this day , I did not know of any place specializing in care. afro hair, ”she said.
Grassals became frustrated with finding little to no information online or through other hairstylists on what to do with her natural hair. She said it just wasn’t what people saw as necessary for the beauty industry.
“The training Dominicans have on hair care is always like that idea of ’Wao, you wash your hair, put on the curlers and blow dry’, it’s routine,” she said.
The one that obviously ends with straight hair, without natural strands.
She used this issue as an incentive to start her blog, where she tried home treatments and oils on her hair to see what worked best for her. Grassals adds that while it was a drastic and difficult change at first, it really paid off for her. She created products at home, welcomed and took customers at home. Soon her success increased so much that she was able to open her own salon. It is the same indifference of other salons to cater for all women’s hair that has helped her attract more clients.
“There was a salon in front of us and everyone who came with curly hair to the front salon, even if they didn’t know my salon, were sent because they didn’t want to work with curly hair.” said Grassals.
She said Go Natural Caribe wasn’t created to shame women for doing whatever they want with their hair, but to embrace a part of them that many didn’t even know existed. Grassals looks back on memories of young girls she could tell had naturally textured hair that she never even knew. They had been straightening their hair for so long that they had no idea what it really looked like – and it wasn’t a one-off incident, she said, it happened quite often.
It’s ingrained in our culture, and it’s too visible to ignore. However, women like Grassals have inspired others for the better.
Because I am a white Latina, I will never understand the burden that Afro-descendant women carry. However, I live here and it’s not hard to see that when I walk into a living room they treat me differently from my friends of color. My hair is ‘cabello bueno’ or ‘good hair’, and stylists tell me I should be thankful for being ‘blessed’ with these manageable strands. I am not offered as many products and services, and I am going in two hours or less. Meanwhile, my friend with much more textured hair than me laughs with the woman washing her hair;
“Ay que yo voy a hace ‘con eto’ moño”, which translates to “What am I going to do about this hair?”
For years, I thought I needed less maintenance because I didn’t always feel like I had to go to the salon. But that’s because every time I’ve been there I’ve been told I look good, so why should I go? On the flip side, a lot of my friends and family saw it as a necessity to get their hair done every Friday and I never (and never will) understand why.
REMEZCLA wrote an article in 2015, for which they interviewed Carolina Contreras, better known as Miss Rizo, another founder of one of Santo Domingo’s first natural hair salons. The 29-year-old activist and social entrepreneur recounts her experiences as an Afro-Latina who decided to go all natural. She received close scrutiny from her parents who threatened to loosen their hair while she slept, and from her brother who called her by names because she wore her hair the way she wanted.
I saw this with my own eyes when my 10 year old little sister, who has naturally curly and textured hair, straightened her hair for a year in a row because she didn’t know what to do with it. She told me that she didn’t know people with hair like hers, and no one in my house knew what to do, since all of our hair is different from hers. There isn’t a salon near us that takes care of her hair, they just relax and straighten it, so it took us a while to learn how to style hers.
This is why it’s important to support these companies, because not only do they help combat these colorist beauty ideals, but as Grassals pointed out, it helps other women of color to be successful in the same field.
“I trained my hairdresser and she trained her daughter and now they also have a salon. So like all the people I have trained, not all, but most of them, have also undertaken themselves. “
It all starts with listening. Listen to women, especially women of color, and understand where these standards of beauty come from, before immediately assuming that they come from a place of superficiality.
