To Adorn

My final project is a visual representation of the research I’ve conducted over the past few months on the cultural anthropology of grooming practices in the Black American community. Involving research I recently presented on the need for more sustainable cosmetic products in the United States (also linked below, since award funds were used to help create this project), I organized a staged photoshoot to represent different elements from the books I read. These elements include: 

• The relationship between Korean American immigrants creating beauty supplies/beauty supply products and the link that has to the unfortunate realities behind beauty supplies (and their products) profiting off of Blackness 
• The residual effects of assimilation on grooming practices (shown in the pictures of the Black Male muse getting his hair cut in the past and in the present day, and the picture of an Afro being cut) 
• The restoration of Blackness in the perception of natural hair, and the precedence of this perception over the use of Black hair for a “liberation movement”