I'm not up to speed on this kind of stuff, but we're apparently back into a fashion era when women will go to any lengths to have straight hair, including the popular, but sometimes carcinogenic, Brazilian Blowout. Now, why would Brazil be the world leader at straightening hair?
You know, when I hear "Brazilian" and "hair" in the same sentence, this isn't really the first thing that comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteIt must only be black guys who believe in 'keepin it real'. The sisters sure don't.
ReplyDeleteStand by for a burgeoning controversy in coming years about increased sales of skin-whitening creams.
In a multi-ethnic society, physical signs of belonging to the lowest strata of that society will be disguised at significant cost.
Because Brazil is a white lead society with a much higher percentage of blacks than America, and also many more mixed race people of a wide variety of hews, in which a white look or at least mostly white with sometimes a touch of mix is unambiguously viewed by nearly all as the most beautiful and highest status.
ReplyDeleteI must live in a backward region. I still see white girls getting corn rolls to look black.
ReplyDeleteI'm also not up to speed on this but I can tell you that even straight haired women would love to get it even straighter and silkier. There's a widely used treatment that's very Japanese sounding: Yukos system. My ethnically Chinese wife, who has the straightest, blackest, silkiest hair that one could imagine still considered trying it out.
ReplyDeletePerhaps straighter and glossier hair carries subliminal undertones of smoother, shinier skin and with it an aevolutionary advantageous connotation of being younger and more fertile?
As a Brazilian, I can tell you why.
ReplyDeleteThe Brazilian population has a massive Black/Mulatto component. Like many Blacks in other non-African countries, many African Brazilians have always tried to act and look white. Hair straightening is part and parcel of this attitude which apparently can also be seen in American Blacks. In what is perhaps one of the most fascinating race realist posts available on the web, "What it's like to teach Black students", the White teacher who spent years teaching Black-majority classrooms writes the following:
"Blacks are keenly interested in
their own racial characteristics. I have
learned, for example, that some blacks
have “good hair.” Good hair is black
parlance for black-white hybrid hair.
Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to
style, and considered more attractive."
Interestingly enough, Black wooly hair used to be described in Brazil by whites and black/mulattos alike as "bad hair" (cabelo ruim) as opposed to straight hair which used to be referred to as "good" (cabelo bom). I said "used to" because in these politically correct times, people tend to avoid using these concepts.
Maybe this is a universal phenomenon. In this Portuguese hair straightening lotion ad from the seventies (h/t to Gladius Blog), Blacks are encouraged to straighten their hair:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIqwYJrhY3I&feature=player_embedded
http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2752
ReplyDeleteamy wax versus glenn loury. gets pretty heated around the 32 min mark.
Well, from an HBD perspective, it is interesting to note that East Asians are currently upheld as the feminine ideal for hair. Indeed, my sister (who loathes her moderately curly hair) blows a significant bit of change every year on something called the JAPANESE HAIR STRAIGHTENING TREATMENT. The process builds its popularity around the notion that Japanese women have perfect, stick-straight hair.
ReplyDeleteSyon
I've heard that the Brazilians are big consumers of plastic surgery, cosmetics, body image products, etc. I suppose they are also at the forefront of cosmetic procedures, even if they are a little dicey.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the CIA World Fact Book, Brazil is nearly 50% black / mulatto.
ReplyDeleteBrazilians call kinky hair "cabelo ruim" ("bad hair").
ReplyDeleteThe ideal type is the "morena," a dark-skinned woman with straight hair and more-or-less Caucasian features, although of course TV is full of real and bottle blondes.
There are hundreds of racial terms, such as "sarará," a person with African features, yellowish skin, and kinky red or blonde hair. Generally considered unattracti
They do tend to prefer smaller breasts and bigger behinds than do US soft-core aficionados.
Me too
ReplyDeleteFunny that I am Brazilian and I never saw any woman here getting their hair straightened out, and I have cut my hair on salons many times full of women doing their nails, cutting their hair, etc. I am not saying that it doesen't happen; I am only saying I haven't seen it. The only time I ever saw this was a woman doing to her daughter. She was mulatto, and she was putting kerosene with ammonia on the child's hair to straighten it out. The smell was appalling, and she should have been tried for exposing her child to neurological damage with that cocktail.
ReplyDeleteWhat I can tell you is that Brazilian women are EXTREMELY envious and resentful of white European women. The men, not so much. Lighter women are always humiliating darker women, and so forth. The ideal of feminine beauty is the northern European phenotype of pasty skin with straight blonde hair and blue eyes. Brazilian women usually don't find white European and American men sexually attractive because they think they are lacking in manly attitude and charm - they think Brazilian men have more of that -, and yet a lot of Brazilian women want to mate with white European and American men. Why? Because they hope their daughters will have lighter skin and European feautures. Brazilian upper class women who are husband-less and want kids usually import Dannish sperm.
Brazil is a very racist and sexist society. Brazilians have an immense inferiority complex towards Europe. Maybe because Brazil is so far geographically from the U.S(Brazil's largest cities are 8,000 miles away from the U.S' largest cities), Brazilians have never felt American domination as strongly as, say, Mexico. Brazil's inferiority complex is more towards European colonization. For instance, maids here refer to upper class women as "madames". Another example of Brazilian racism: I read a story here that Anderson Silva, universally regarded as the World's greatest pound-for-pound MMA fighter, said that when he was working as an waiter at a dinner, a customer refused to be served by him because he is black. Anderson said this was the only time he ever cried as a grown man, such was the humiliation he felt. Not only is Brazil racist, it is also sexist. For instance, our Civil Code especifically state that, if there is a disagreement between parents on how a child should be raised, that the father's decisions prevails. Many people point out to the election of Dilma Roussef, but she is basically a puppet of her predecessor, Lula. Brazil is a racist and male-oriented society and it is very hard to change thatt....
You must be a lot more into women's fashion trends (or something else, if this is a cryptic reference I'm not getting) than I am. I have no idea what you're talking about.
ReplyDeleteOMG - Charlize Theron with shaved head in Namibia.
ReplyDeleteDon't tell MacWhiskey about this.
PLEASE don't tell MacWhiskey.
Brazil is 50% African/Biracial and 50% European/Mestizo. A multidiverse country with Brazil is obsessed with European features.
ReplyDeleteYou know, when I hear "Brazilian" and "hair" in the same sentence, this isn't really the first thing that comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteOh, no ....
Brazil is 50 percent black because they imported about 4,000,000 slaves back in the day. The U.S. imported about 500,000.
ReplyDelete"Brazilian women usually don't find white European and American men sexually attractive because they think they are lacking in manly attitude and charm" - Say that to the German and British exchange students at my university in Northeastern Brazil. They actually get scared at how uninhibited Brazilian women are towards them. And it's not marriage these girls have in mind; they know the foreigners come and go. Brazilians (mainly Brazilian women) often have the idea that Europeans, especially Scandinavians and Italians, are top model material. It's also considered a given Southern Brazilians are more attractive.
ReplyDeleteBut it's not a strong preference. Brazilian men, btw, seem to find white women more beautiful, but darker women sexier.
So, just curious, what is your basis for believing this originated in Brazil's finest high-tech salons? It really couldn't just be a catchy, alliterative name (playing on the bikini wax referenced above)? The technique itself is not that novel, and I take it your allusion to cancer is owing to the copious amounts of formaldehyde used to make the "shell." Is there something about living in the Rockies that makes people want to eat bull testicles, I mean "oysters"?
ReplyDelete"Brazil is 50 percent black because they imported about 4,000,000 slaves back in the day. The U.S. imported about 500,000."
ReplyDeleteBrazil imported mostly men. US imported 300,000.
Brazil is obsessed with looks and beauty. But the men are generally handsomer than the women are beautiful. Something to consider before bringing your hot blonde gf here haha. I've never seen such a large proportion of handsome, muscular young guys as in Brazil (and I'm referring to the white or whitish guys as well, it's like a totally different world from most of the US when it comes to looks; I don't know why).
ReplyDeleteMany shave their chests, that's pretty popular here too, and becoming popular among some parts of the US.
PS I want to add that when I say "as well" regarding white guys, that's a bit misleading but I did it for Steve's benefit and others here who assume Brazil is a mulatto or black place, and Steve seems to celebrate black physicality for some reason. I just wanted people to know I'm referring to the white Brazilians or the whitish ones. In fact for both men and women the standard of sexual beauty is being white or off-white. A blond man is highly desired in Brazil. Blacks are seen as repulsive and ugly, even by themselves. This is as it should be because it's biologically true.
ReplyDeleteHowever, being buff and tan is a must for a man in Brazil, simply having blond hair is rarely enough. It's not that exotic anymore and there are a lot more blond Brazilians now than before for some reason.
I've heard that there's a Brazilian saying that translates something like: a white woman for a wife, a mulatta for a mistress, a black for a maid.
ReplyDeleteI know of people who wanted to have curlier hair in Brazil and would go to the hairdresser for that. But they were blonde.
ReplyDeletep.s. Hello Dextra. It seems we still read the same blogs... "Quem é vivo sempre aparece".
I've been to Brazil a couple of times, and a lot of the "white" people in Sao Paulo and Rio had discernable black ancestry (to me at least as a Euro-American). No "one drop" rule in Brazil it seems.
ReplyDeleteIn Brazil, most whites marry other whites. Although all the blacks, mulattos and mestizos complain about whites, if they could, they would marry a white in a heartbeat (male or female) as it would be seen as a move up in social class.
ReplyDeleteThe racial caste system in Brazil goes:
Whites
Mestizos
Amerindians
Mulattos
Blacks
Brazil is a racist and male-oriented society and it is very hard to change thatt....
ReplyDeleteWhy would you want to? Best to just manage it, because it's actually beneficial for society.
The racial caste system in Brazil goes:
Whites
Mestizos
Amerindians
Mulattos
Blacks
Amerinds (pure ones) over mulattoes? Get real. (Unless you mean heavily black mulattoes.)
Now, why would Brazil be the world leader at straightening hair?"
ReplyDeleteProbably the same reason why Tehran is the nose job capital of the world.You would expect it to be Israel but no...
Brazil is obsessed with looks and beauty. But the men are generally handsomer than the women are beautiful. "
ReplyDeleteThe attractive women are usually blonde(r) Germans.For some reason , German Brazillians are far more attractive than those from the fatherland.
Must be the weather since they are not known to have any darkie(Iberian or African) contributions to their gene pool.
Stand by for a burgeoning controversy in coming years about increased sales of skin-whitening creams."
ReplyDeleteI expect Indian(from India0 firms to be ahead of the game in this regard.They had the product "Fair and Lovely" geared towards women for the last i dunno 40 years. And since 2004, we have "Fair and Handsome"....somebody kill me now....
This is the worst site for female attractiveness discussions. Omega gorks need to STFU on this issue. Go back to your Jap cartoon porn.
ReplyDelete