Conference

Stereotyping the Black Woman: An Analysis of Black Hair Advertisements

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Abstract

Black hair product advertisements communicate both overt and covert messages to consumers through their phenotypic traits, facial expressions, and body language. The problem with the ads is that the messages communicated sometimes appear stereotypical of black women. Other times, the message is a denouncement of a certain set features in favor of another, less ethnic set. Similar studies of black advertisements have been conducted by Leslie (1995), who studied a broad range of advertisements of Ebony magazine from 1957 to 1989, and Gitter, O’Connell, & Mostofsky (1972), who studied Ebony magazine advertisements from 1952 to 1968. However, there is no study that inquired what trends and messages communicated by black hair product advertisements between the years of 2011 to 2015 in Ebony magazine, a time when the natural hair movement gained momentum. Ebony magazine was used, as it is the longest printed black magazine with the widest distribution. The purpose of this study is to identify if there are covert and overt stereotypical messages portrayed by black hair product advertisements, and the models in them, to identify the relationship between phenotypic traits and stereotypes of women of African descent in black hair product advertisements in Ebony magazine, and to identify what (unwritten) messages that the models embody or portray in black hair product advertisements.