The 1960s

The 1960s are presented as a pivotal period in the history of Black hair care and the growth of South Korean businesses in that industry. The decade connects two developments: the marketing of chemical relaxers to African American consumers and the rise of South Korean hair in wigs. Together, they show how personal choices about hair took shape within histories of racialized beauty standards and commercial structures shaped by government policy.

Hair and Cultural Identity

The novel sets the decade’s commercial changes against a much longer history. In fifteenth-century African civilizations, hairstyles could signify family or tribal background, religion, social standing, mourning, and spiritual connection. Elaborate styles could mark power and wealth, while hair’s position on the head gave it significance as a passageway for spirits and a means of connection with God. The forced shaving of captured Africans on slave ships violently severed hair from that cultural identity.

After slavery, hair acquired another set of pressures in African American life: standards that treated straight, smooth hair as good and natural curls and texture as bad. The book emphasizes that choices between straightened and natural styles could carry meanings beyond individual appearance, touching on self-image, political expression, and the social definition of beauty. That history makes the industry’s products more than neutral commodities: they entered a field already marked by the consequences of enslavement and discriminatory standards.

Relaxers and the Hair-Care Market

The decade’s role in hair styling appears in the marketing of the relaxer, a chemical product used to straighten naturally curly African American hair. The book distinguishes this development from Madam C. J. Walker’s earlier work: in the early 1900s, Walker became a millionaire through hair-care products for Black women and improved the design of the hot comb, a tool for straightening hair. By the 1960s, George E. Johnson was marketing a chemical alternative. The two moments belong to a continuing commercial history of products that addressed, and profited from, pressure to approximate European beauty standards.

The novel notes that the Black hair-care industry is estimated to be worth more than one billion dollars annually, but does not attribute that figure specifically to the decade. Instead, the 1960s are presented as one formative stage in the history behind the modern industry, where customers’ diverse relationships to natural and straightened hair coexist with commercial systems built around hair alteration.

Wigs, Trade Policy, and South Korean Businesses

The book traces South Korean businesses’ growing role to the popularity of wigs made with South Korean hair in the African American community during the 1960s. Two government actions then reshaped the market. The South Korean government banned exports of raw hair, ensuring that wigs using South Korean hair could be made only in South Korea; meanwhile, the United States banned imports of wigs containing hair from China. The account presents the combination as effectively consolidating South Korea’s dominance in the wig market.

The wig trade later developed into the broader Black hair-care business. The book estimates that South Korean businesses control between sixty and eighty percent of that market, across distribution, retail, and increasingly manufacturing. It describes a structure in which South Korean distributors primarily supply South Korean retailers, making it difficult for other groups to gain a foothold. This later market share is not given as a measurement from the 1960s; rather, it shows the enduring industry structure whose roots the novel locates in that decade.

Legacy in the Family Story

The historical account gives context to Daniel Jae Ho Bae’s family business. When Dae Hyun Bae and Min Soo Bae moved to New York City, a community of fellow South Korean immigrants was already there to help them. A cousin lent them money and advised them to open a Black hair-care store, part of a business in which other members of the community were already succeeding. The family’s entry into the trade is therefore linked both to personal networks among immigrants and to an industry whose development had been shaped by the 1960s wig market.

Dae Hyun does not know this history; what he understands is America as a land of opportunity and the prospect that his children will have more than he did. The contrast between his individual hope and the book’s account of policy, distribution, and racialized beauty standards makes the decade significant beyond a simple marker of when particular products appeared. It reveals how family livelihood and consumer choices are connected to structures built over time.