For the duration of one of my several deep dives into the hashtag around the vacations in November and December of 2021, I started off to detect anything: pretty few of the girls on the #BlackWomeninLuxury hashtag have been sporting their organic hair. I might see a few box braids listed here and there (generally worn on trip in a position like Bali or the Maldives), but the overwhelming greater part of ladies beneath the hashtag are devoted to their bundles. As I scrolled further, I found I wasn’t the only a person who had this assumed. Practically as shortly as it crossed my mind, a TikTok video from Atlanta-dependent product Tyler Simone answered my dilemma.
“The place are all the naturals on Black women luxury TikTok?” the voice-more than questioned as the viewer is taken care of to short clips of Simone with her tightly-coiled pixie on a golfing program with selfies of her holding a bouquet of roses. It was intended to be a straightforward TikTok to insert to the file, but, as it turns out, Simone unwittingly walked into a firestorm she never anticipated.
“I imagined, ‘Well, I do awesome things,'” Simone tells Allure in a mobile phone call about why she decided to bounce in on the prompt. And she appears fantastic performing it, as well. Her online video acquired over 55,000 likes, which was a surprise to her. “I designed the movie but I failed to count on men and women to see it. None of my TikToks experienced created any traction or everything, and that was the 1 that did,” she claims. “I just got pulled into this #BlackGirlLuxury planet.”
And what she located in that earth? Lots and lots of, uh, spirited discourse in her feedback on the merits of her videos in the larger context of the movement. Lots of commenters doubled down on the dilemma posed in her voiceover: why you should not we see much more gals with natural hair in that area? “This has been my 1 complaint,” a commenter on Tyler Simone’s video wrote. “Why is luxurious Black female TikTok all silky straight hair?” one more wrote, “YESSS. Simply because social media can make it seem like you normally want to have a weave to be gorgeous.” These are all valid observations, but as TikTokker @her_majesty.musu pointed out, when you feel about it, it’s only natural that all those prolonged, silky bundles would be a function of the aesthetic.
“Some women of all ages deem hair extensions as a status symbol,” she mentioned in a TikTok that she has since removed from the system and uploaded to her YouTube channel. “It is not automatically about self-despise.” She notes the phenomenon of Black girls obtaining a number of bundles of hair — much more than they really want to reach a sure appear — as component of the flex. If you can find the money for all that human hair, you surely have a number of cash to your name. “It reveals other gals, ‘I acquired it like that,'” she defined.
