Between 1898 and 1914, the Cheshire based company Lever Brothers Limited produced a loose-leaf colour advertisement for Lux soap, which featured a large Black woman wearing a red head scarf which covered all her hair. She is pouring Lux soap over the hair of a Black boy sitting in a tub. His hair is covered by a mound of white suds. The caption on the front of the advertisement reads 'Won't shrink wool'. On the back of the card, Lever Brothers claim that Lux is equally good for washing woollen clothes and hair.

In the photograph on you left you can see how her natural hair compliments the elegant clothing of the period, lending this unnamed woman an appearance of gentility and demure femininity, terms generally applied only to her white female contemporaries who, historically, have been held up as the standard of beauty for all women in the Western World.

The reference in the advertisements to the hair of Black people as 'wool' was a derogatory term dating back to the eighteenth century and to the enslavement of Black people. In 1774 Edward Long described Black people in his book The History of Jamaica :

During the periods of slavery and colonialism, non-Blacks maintained that the hair of Black people was more difficult to groom than the hair of non-Blacks, and therefore less attractive.

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