White Beauty Influencer Accused of 'Stealing' After Using a 'Black' Hair Product

Brittany M. Hughes | January 6, 2023
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A white woman known on social media for promoting beauty products got dragged online and accused of stealing after she dared to use a hair oil marketed to black women.

Literally, that’s it. She used the "wrong" hair oil.

That’s all it took for Danielle Athena, a beauty influencer with about 120k followers on Instagram and nearly 50,000 on TikTok, to find herself the target of an internet lynch mob, all because she posted a video of herself using Mielle Rosemary Mint Scalp and Hair Strengthening Oil, a product marketed for “all hair types and textures” but which angry (and apparently very bored) social media users claimed was actually meant for “people of color.” The harassment got so bad, in fact, that Athena deleted the video - in which she’d done nothing but apply the oil to her hair.

“The problem is they always come… get the products they know and can see black women primar[ily] using and[,] soon as they do[,] it’s not accessible to us anymore due to price raises or it all being taken,” one Twitter banshee whined.

“White women steal from black women and just be doing s**t. and of course she turned those comments off,” another complained on Twitter.

Related: Virginia AG Launches Probe Into High School That Reportedly Denied Students Merit Awards

Still others claimed that when beauty products made for black women are discovered by white customers, companies then change their formulas to accommodate white people, which the company has publicly stated they have no plans to do.

Another ranted that “whitewashed” women are now buying up all the product (which is great for Mielle Organics, the black-owned business that sells it, but no matter) and leaving none on the shelves for black customers, blasting, “Gotta wash my hair later. Gotta reorder since the whitewashed have gotten ahold of the Mielle rosemary mint.” (Inconveniently for this argument is the fact that Amazon, however, still has plenty of it. But, details.)

In fact, Yahoo! News published an entire article sympathetic to the online mob berating this poor white girl for using an apparently sacred hair serum, bemoaning how these understandably angry black women are already “oppressed over their afro hair textures and the lack of products made specifically for them.”

Listen, I'd never heard of this girl until today and frankly haven't the first clue about this hair oil. What I do know is that that rosemary oil, the principle ingredient in this aforementioned Holy Hair Helper, actually originated in the Mediterranean, while peppermint, the other half of this divine elixir, was first cultivated in England and widely used across Europe. Not that it matters, of course - but if you're an idiot looking for appropriation in this story, we should start there.

And I also know that if you're losing your crap over some white lady on the internet using a freely available scalp product you've somehow decided is reserved for your those with your particular level of melanin, that's called racism. And you desperately need to get a life. 

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