Don’t touch my hair: colonial legacies, racialized marketing, and toxic lock-in in Black women’s health

Purpose This paper explains how racialized beauty markets have historically produced toxic harm for Black women within the context of the United States through the recursive interaction of marketing institutions and consumer practices across five historical eras, from colonial and slavery periods through the contemporary digital beauty era. Design/methodology/approach This historical analysis of Black women’s hair care practices uses critical race theory (CRT) to examine racialized market structures. Concurrently, it applies practice theory to map the interlocking elements of consumer behavior: materials (e.g. hair relaxers, hot combs, pressing oils, chemical straighteners), competencies (e.g. family-taught styling routines, salon rites of passage, wash day regimens) and cultural meanings (e.g. respectability, desirability, professional acceptability) that normalize hair modification as a pathway to social acceptance and mobility. Sources include secondary historical work, marketing strategy and consumer research literature, legal and regulatory documents, advocacy and industry reports and epidemiological studies synthesized as historical marketing data. Findings Racialized market systems have historically embedded Eurocentric beauty norms into hair care markets through product design, targeted marketing and regulatory neglect, disproportionately exposing Black women to toxic chemicals. Black women’s hair care practices operate as routinized bundles of materials, competencies and meanings that persist even when health risks are known, because the structural conditions requiring them remain, creating what we characterize as “toxic lock-in.” Analysis shows that throughout this history, Black women have been active agents of resistance, yet systemic conditions have repeatedly reasserted harmful dynamics, demonstrating that market-based resistance alone may not dismantle toxic lock-in. Significant regulatory gaps persist despite mounting health evidence, reflecting the structural entrenchment of systems that produce racialized health outcomes while appearing race- neutral. Originality/value This study makes important conceptual contributions to marketing scholarship. It introduces the concept of toxic lock-in to characterize how racialized beauty markets systematically coproduce harm through the recursive interaction of marketing institutions and consumer practices. It integrates CRT and practice theory into a framework that reveals what neither theory achieves alone, how structural racism shapes available products and meanings, while everyday styling practices feed back to stabilize toxic product demand. It highlights this dynamic across five historical eras, providing a roadmap for future research on race, markets and health equity in beauty industries. For historical marketing scholarship, it demonstrates how racialized markets can be studied as long-run systems of harm and value and shows how CRT and practice theory can function as interpretive lenses for marketing history.