‘We don’t do this hair’: The growing demand for Afro-textured hair care and salons in Korea

The first time Senegalese model Brigitte Ciss walked into a salon in central Seoul’s multicultural Itaewon neighborhood, she was told, “We don’t do this hair.” “It turned me off mainstream salons for good,” she told The Korea Times. Since then, she has built her own patchwork of stylists: a Korean-run Black hair salon in Itaewon for braids and silk presses, an African stylist for sew-ins and other protective styles and sometimes wigs sent by her sister. For day-to-day life, she toggles between what clients want on shoots and what feels comfortable in public. Similarly to Korea, she describes her home country, Senegal, as a place that took a very long time to accept natural hair, adding that her parents still make comments when she wears her natural curls out. “Living in France and the United States actually made it easier to wear my natural hair,” Brigitte said. As a model with five years of experience in Korea, Brigitte is happy to match whatever look a client wants. But, once the cameras are off, she wears her natural hair out because, as she puts it, “as a foreigner,

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