How colonization is embedded in wellness and what Chicago women of color do to combat it

Editor’s Notes: The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 14 East

“White women didn’t discover female entrepreneurship any more than Columbus discovered America. They merely gave it some beach waves and a Glossier finish,” journalist Lydia Mack said. 

These days, I can’t seem to escape the white dominance behind business success, specifically in America’s trendy “self-care” industry. Marketed as an empowering industry for feminism, it’s become exclusive for women of color. 

In the United States, about 61% of holistic practitioners are white in comparison to Asian, Latine and Black practitioners totaling 34% combined. Among spiritual advising workers, 67% are white compared to 28% of Asian, Latine and Black workers combined. Lastly, white people dominate the beauty advising industry at about 54%, with the previous trio totaling 40%.  

These numbers demonstrate a clear inequality in who runs our self-care industry. White women exclude women of color as  profiteers  and consumers while commodifying ethnic holistic and spiritual practices for self-profit. There’s a lot to unpack there, so let’s address the exclusion of self-care first. 

Gwyneth Paltrow’s notorious Goop brand is the poster child for elitist celebrities capitalizing off women’s health while excluding women of color. Goop’s ridiculously expensive products include single bottles of essential oil blends ranging from $28-$33. A 30-pack of depuffing eye masks costs $125. 

As of 2017, Goop’s newsletter subscribers (and presumably consumers) came from household incomes with an average of $100k a year. As of 2023, 68.2 % more white households accumulate over $100,000 than Black households. This racial income gap is a pattern that very likely continued from 2017. 

Model Kate Moss also runs an exorbitantly expensive wellness shop called COSMOSS, where collagen oil is $127 and three ounces of face cleanser totals at $58 as well.  Cleanse that in for a moment. 

Part of the reason her products are expensive is because they’re vegan and cruelty free with pretty positive reviews, though there are a plethora of other collagen oils with the same traits for way more affordable prices, such as ones from IHerb, Truly Beauty and  Sephora. 

Where I think the real purpose of expensive pricing comes from is that many people like to buy the brand, not the product. People who buy Moss’ products want to embody her upper-class lifestyle. Moss herself explains how her brand reflects her personal self-care routine, which amounts to a little over $1,000.

The problem thus lies within the fact that Moss, a rich white celebrity, is inserting herself into self-care practices as a businesswoman and adding herself to the many other white women who make themselves the face of self-care services. She, like many other businesses, commodifies women’s health in a manner based on luxury, when many women of color cannot afford the privilege of aestheticizing self-care to an extent white women can. 

Looking at basic income levels for 40-49 year old women  in 2021, (Moss’ assumed target audience based on her age), the average white woman has $10,000 more wiggle room for luxury healthcare than the average Black woman, and $18,000 more than the average Hispanic woman does. 

Writer Kit Stone summarizes it perfectly, “Far too often it feels like a luxury instead of a necessity.” 

The statistics demonstrate a clear racial inequality in accessibility for products like hers, a pattern which is also hard to miss and should be researched and accounted for when developing marketing strategies for wellness products. Unless, of course, you aren’t concerned with accessibility for your products. 

Both of these brands are extremely inaccessible for women of color, a perspective which upper-class white women have the privilege of ignoring.

I believe it’s unfair to sell health and wellness products exclusively affordable for the rich when the above social patterns and numbers demonstrate high socioeconomic status is extremely racialized. Paltrow herself explained she targets affluent women with her health products; to purposely make self-care only accessible to certain people reinforces colonial systems of inequality where the elite few enjoy the benefits of healthcare. 

Beauty gurus will find that makeup is exclusive as well, even if it is more affordable. In 2023, Coresight Research surveyed shoppers and found that 24% of non-white respondents seek a sense of belonging in beauty brands, whereas only about 11% of white respondents identified with this value.

With this in mind, it’s no surprise that large brands like It Cosmetics and Tarte are notorious for extremely limited foundation shade ranges, providing scarce options for dark-skinned women of color (WOC). Celebrities such as Rihanna and Selena Gomez combated this through their inclusive Fenty and Rare Beauty foundations, selling 50 and 48 different shades. Yet, the path to get there shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of people of color. We should have been included a long time ago. 

DePaul student Azelia Hinton has experience navigating accessible beauty and haircare products as a woman of color (WOC). Hinton has experience experimenting with makeup products and techniques. 

Though there are brands which offer wide varieties of bronzer, concealer or foundations for dark skinned people, Hinton notices that these shades sell out quicker because white people also use them for different purposes. 

For example, many white influencers use makeup products for darker skin tones, depleting the already limited stock of products for brown skin. Famous TikTok influencer Kylie Larsen films makeup tutorials using progressively darker contour methods. In earlier videos, she seems to use reasonably darker shades. Recent videos display a drastically darker bronzer product from Selena Gomez’ Rare Beauty line. 

Bronzer products are supposed to accentuate or provide a natural tan, yet Larson uses it as contour when the product is meant to enhance the brown complexion of many women of color. If you take a look at the product, it appears she’s using the shade “medium brown” when it’s too dark for her. 

“A lot of non-poc people like to buy products that are made for darker skin tones and use it like contour. You’re just taking products for people that do need it,” Hinton said. 

For Hinton, hair care is her favorite form of wellness and the primary self-care she practices. 

“Every time I do my hair, I feel much better,” Hinton said. 

She does find it limiting to explore hairstyles and routines due to the exclusivity leaving out curly hair textures.

 “I definitely feel isolated sometimes,” Hinton said. “There’s so many products for people with straighter hair, and then there’s just one little shelf for people with textured hair like mine…there will be times where I go to buy a product and its gone … it’s hard to have to go across town to a different Target.”

Finding quality hair services for different hair types is a challenge for many other WOC. According to 2020 national surveys conducted by Tresamme, 86% of Black hair stylists have a hard time finding a consistent and quality hair salon. Additionally, 70% of white hair stylists surveyed wish they had more training caring for textured or coily hair, but 61% of total hair stylists also believed charging extra for these services was fair. 

It appears many white hair care specialists are open to diverse hair textures, but only if they are compensated for challenging themselves. Putting more obstacles for equitable wellness is embedded in colonial racism, as these white stylists feel entitled to take extra money from WOC with textured hair. 

Even when stores sell textured hair products, there are physical barriers to accessing them rooted in racism. Most notably, Walmart was criticized for locking up Black hair products but not other hair products, inferring the assumption Black people are more prone to stealing goods. There always seems to be some sort of obstacle for women of color.

Brands should target a wide variety of audiences and consider the experiences and needs of other people. Encouraging impressionable women to view self-care as a luxury with the end goal of mirroring elitist white celebrities stagnates change in an already inaccessible healthcare system for women. The more Goops and COSMOSS we have dominating our self-care industry, the more white-washed and colonized it becomes. 

Fortunately, many BIPOC businesses are fighting white, capitalist dominance over self-care. In Chicago’s Little Village rested a discount mall home to 40 Latine and POC vendors, some of which operated botanicas, which are herbal, incense, candle and spiritual goods businesses rooted in various Hispanic cultures. 

Beginning in late 2022, disputes and abrupt displacement of these vendors became a huge conflict for city officials. Owned by PK Mall and Pilsen Plaza, the Little Village discount mall space was leased to the private company Novak Development, which booted out half of the building’s residence for construction development and eventual leasing for new residents. 

The gentrification of this classic retail space for BIPOC communities was met with backlash, and eventually many vendors reached a deal with the city and moved to Gage Park. They were promised fiscal compensation for their abrupt evictions, though they fear for empty promises, especially given some report sales have gone down around 80% since being displaced. Nonetheless, their continued faith and determination reflect many other hardworking BIPOC businesses in Chicago’s gentrifying neighborhoods. 

Located in one of Chicago’s most gentrified neighborhoods, Pilsen, Enez Beauty salon maintains a strong presence. Owner Karen Jimenez creates an intimate and comfortable home for women of color and queer folk. Her Colombian roots and curly hair play a significant role in her passion for inclusivity. 

“I wanted to be extremely inclusive to BIPOC folk,” Jimenez said. “I’m Latina, I’m queer. There’s no way that I’m going to work at a white institution where I’m going to have to conform to their ideals of what is proper hair care. I can pave my own path.” 

For Jimenez, the lackluster options for textured hair types stems from timidity surrounding taking risks on unfamiliar territory. 

“Complacency, stagnancy and comfort,” she said. “It has to tie in with a fear factor of having a different type of persona in your chair.” 

Making money with your skills is one gamble, even more if you’re exploring different techniques on new hair textures. 

In contrast, Jimenez enjoys welcoming new clients and customers in her salon chairs. She actively learns different hairstyles to fit all textures of curls, a challenge she encourages other hair stylists to take on. Textured hair can have a significant cultural attachment for many people of color, and so it’s important to provide high-quality services for them too. 

“If they have a stylist there that knows how to do 4c hair, the owner should be like, ‘We’re going to do a class day where she’s going to teach, and we’re going to pay her extra. She’s going to teach us how to properly attend to 4c hair,’” Jimenez said. 

Hinton also emphasizes the importance of continuing to speak against appropriating Black hairstyles such as cornrows and locs, which can have a significant cultural meaning maintained through complex and long self-care routines that also provide healing. 

“It’s always good to do research on hairstyles before you do it to see like where it comes from the origin, you know, ….I just feel like when white women do it [Black hairstyles], they don’t do their research. They just do it because they think they look good, right?” Hinton said. 

In many African tribes, colored locs have spiritual connotations, such as red locs representing blood and the essence of life, and thick hair denoting when a woman is fertile. These are forms of traditional wellness that are often appropriated as trends. 

As a non-Black person, I obviously do not want to speak for and on a culture I have not personally experienced, but based on what I have observed from communities around me, many Black people feel locs and cornrows are appropriation when done by white people, and so to respect the self-care it can provide them is important to honor. 

On a wider scale, white women also appropriate many other ethnic practices, most notably Asian holistic and spiritual rituals. They master these rituals then claim to be experts only to sell them for personal profit. 

I’m sure we’ve all seen the plethora of white, middle-aged women who teach reiki and chakra balancing at extremely high prices. Most of these women teach what is called “modern” reiki, or “westernized reiki.” Modern reiki practices omitted important Japanese spiritual themes to appeal to American audiences after the second world war. Rather than crediting Buddhists to its creation, Christian missionaries became the face of reiki. 

In a similar light, the face of Chinese ethnic practices has become white-washed. The brand Samantha Story advertises a one-hour $90 gua sha class, where essentially a white woman teaches someone how to use the tool. Gua sha is a practice originating from the Ming dynasty used for alleviating heat stroke and colds; modern-day trends use it for depuffing one’s face to appear thinner. 

As a Chinese-American, I’m disheartened to see medicinal practices become aesthetic trends and TikTok hashtags. Selling a culture that is not yours is rooted in colonial entitlement. 

Many people may disagree with prescribing the word “colonization” onto these retail patterns, as colonization is typically associated with European settlers and conquest of land. What if I told you that self-care has been conquered via geographical pursuits and that the privatization of ethnic land is extremely adjacent to classic colonization?

Have you ever seen advertisements for wellness retreats – those week-long stays where the rich elite can de-stress while being waited on hand and foot by people of color in the Caribbean? Those white-led Ayahuasca healing retreats to South America? That’s modern-day colonization. 

Wellness retreat businesses BodyHoliday provides a luxury privatized beach resort in St. Lucia for their slew of white clients posted on their Instagram. The price for one night at their resort ranges from $600 to $3,400 depending on what kind of room you choose. People can also  rent out part of the Virgin Islands for $25,000 a night from the wellness resort Aerial. 

It can be quite isolating for the people of color inhabiting these islands to see an overwhelming presence of rich white people they must work for who replace natural flora with westernized, luxury homes, similar to metropolitan gentrification. 

You start to notice the sneaky ways colonization inserts itself into brown spaces. The way that sacred ethnic healing practices become commodified aesthetics. So, how do we decolonize self-care?

On the individual level, it takes a lot of colonial healing, something Enez identifies as an “undoing.” 

“I really tried to adhere to Eurocentric features, what’s considered beautiful. Making sure my hair was straight,” Jimenez said. “Now, it’s just a lot of undoing. I went from ‘I don’t like to wear gold’ to wearing it because it’s so Latino.” 

Undoing shouldn’t just happen on a personal level, though. Dismantling the colonization of the entire self-care system is an effort that requires white business owners to acknowledge their privilege and appropriation of cultures that they market as aesthetic commodities. 

Chicago-based business owner Dr. Feyi Sangoleye has extensive experience in teaching others about the self-care behind garments. Emigrating from Nigeria years ago, she holds a Ph.D. in nursing science from DePaul University. Her business, TeMi Beads, incorporates traditional Nigerian spirituality in the waist beads that she creates from personally sourced materials.

Dr. Feyi Sangoleye, Courtesy of Dr. Feyi Sangoleye

Color combinations of the beads have meanings such as courage, tranquility and strength, according to her research. She encourages people, especially women, to choose what speaks to them in an intentional manner. 

“There needs to be an appreciation of the culture behind it,” she said. “Not ‘Oh, I saw some celebrity wearing it, and I’m just going to go with it.’ It can’t just be aesthetic.”

This sentiment pertains to many of the ethnic spiritual practices mentioned earlier such as reiki, gua sha, meditation, etc. We shouldn’t embrace these practices as cute profitable trends but as well-researched cultures with intention. 

For Dr. Feyi, the cultural wellness part of her beautiful waist beads cannot be ignored. The purpose is not to have a new belt to match clothing but to carry a spiritual objective of self-love, feminine empowerment, and other goals one has. Not only are these considerations consumers must take into account, but businesses as well. 

“Wellness has also been taken over by others,” Dr. Feyi said. 

It can be tricky to navigate being a white person in a space of ethnic wellness. Embracing other cultures is what unifies a lot of uncrossed bridges in society, but doing so with the mindset of uplifting BIPOC voices and taking a backstage approach to supporting ethnic wellness prevents the replacement of ethnic culture with white elitism.  

 Dr. Feyi encourages small businesses to continue collaborating and supporting one another in the hopes that larger companies will learn to do the same. 

“This allows me to share experiences authentically with other women,” she said. “Being in that room with other business owners, small business owners who don’t have the exact same dream or vision, but we all know we’re striving for more. I’m hoping that bigger wellness companies think the same way.” 

Jimenez echoes a similar message while embracing positive changes that have happened in self-care. 

“I’m really happy that the movement has gone pro curly… that there’s more products involved,” she said. “I do think bigger corporations and businesses should be doing this, because when I went to beauty school, there was nothing about curly hair. Knowledge is power.”

Next time you go into a Target or an Ulta, take note of the brands they sell. What are the values of these brands? How inclusive are they? Challenge yourself to actively search for smaller brands from BIPOC and learn about the cultural meanings behind those incense sticks at Five Below. Think about the ways holistic wellness heals people of color in ways different from the majority — it’s more than just de-stressing from a long day of being a “boss babe” — it’s a practice rooted in healing past wounds and reconnecting with oneself. 

Header by Rafa Villamar