Black Girl Beauty Networks: How Black Girls Reclaimed, Reshaped, and Cultivated Black Beauty Culture
Research Poster Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Kesla Elmore
Exhibition Number 27
Abstract
As the violence of the nadir continued to inflict terror upon Black people across the American South, Black singles and families began to migrate north in search for safety and prosperity. Beginning around 1915, Black Americans traveled north and west seeking refuge and opportunity. Black women and girls who participated in the beauty culture of the day— a landscape distinct from the white, mainstream cosmetics marketplace— facilitated community among new urban dwellers. Their musings on style spilled into literature, film, and eventually, television. In response to Black migrants' demand for an arena of beauty all their own, new products emerged. And the advertisements that promoted these goods created a pathway for Black-targeted media vehicles, especially newspapers and magazines, where brands could reach their desired customers. This project works to trace the development of Black girls’ beauty culture through the Great Migration, and how this transference from the South to the North helped to usher in new ways to world making for Black girls by their resistance to Eurocentric beauty standards, and the pressures to uphold them—all while building their own space within the beauty industry and transforming it every step of the way. Through the analysis of Black media and literature and its representation of Black girls, I will establish the ways in which Black girls transformed beauty culture, and how the Great Migration situated Black girls as key components to the development of the Black beauty industry.
Importance
I center Black women's beauty culture as a major component to Black girls’ identity formation and community building through the theoretical lenses of Black feminism, media studies, and digital humanities. Focusing on Black girls representation in early Black print culture in newspapers like The Crisis (1910), magazines like Ebony (1945) and Jet (1951), I will explore the ways in which the implementation of Black beauty culture and the access that Black girls had to it upon migrating North, created an intricate and deeply nuanced dynamic between Black girls and their relationships to beauty and identity.