Natural Hair In The Caribbean: The Truth

Marsha Buchanan


* Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you go through and make a purchase.

Clothes check, shoes check, nails check, hair double check. Caribbean women take great pride in their appearance; we love to look good. We believe in rocking the latest trends, and personalizing the fiercest styles.

We take it so seriously that we often go to extremes to fit in with fashion fads (like wearing knee high boots with fur and matching winter scarf in scorching summer temperatures).

In Jamaica for instance, each ensemble must be complemented by the perfect hairstyle to match and I do mean match; purple wig* for purple halter, pink and blond extensions* for pink pumps that match pink shorts.

Until recently it would seem that we had never heard the concept of throwing in a little contrast. Now that is what you call ghetto fabulous!

The thrust of natural hair pride is like a fever washing the United States and Europe but the truth about natural hair in the Caribbean is that many of the older women – our mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers- still perpetuate the insecurities they inherited from our ancestors before them.

The Caribbean is a place of great racial diversity; a melting pot of cultures. To understand how natural hair is viewed in the Caribbean, you would have to take a look back at slavery where colonizers used brute force to spawn what many Caribbean nationals refer to as “brownings” or the “mixed” blacks.

Often they would have “privileges” above the darker blacks put out in the fields, since the brownings were closer to the master’s shade and could remain in the main house. This caused a rift among blacks who now envied and despised the mixed blacks.

This still exists, but whether they are envied or despised,…



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