For the Salooni cofounders, the project is as much about the practicalities of black hair care as it is about the varying history that hair tells about the lives of African women through the ages. Billions of dollars have been pumped into the research and marketing of things like hair relaxers, which in Bahana’s opinion do more harm than good. ”We are very poorly educated about how to care for black hair,” Bahana says. “It’s only now… that we’ve started sifting through what we’ve been taught and what [practices] we want to keep and what we don’t want to keep.”

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