Relaxer sales have dropped almost 20% in SA as women choose natural hair

The natural hair movement is growing. More women, locally and globally, are embracing their natural hair and the sales for relaxers and chemical hair products are reportedly dropping. According to an article in Quartz Africa, the increase of women going natural has caused relaxer sales to drop by 18.6% during the period of 2013 and 2015. "Clicks did not give official data," Lynsey Chutel reports in the article, "but say they have identified the same trends in their stores around southern Africa."
“Increasingly,” she writes, “women of colour all over the world are choosing to wear their hair naturally, a cultural transition that has as much psychological value for them as commercial value for the manufacturers and stores finally catering to them.”
Before, we had very limited options in terms of what we could do with our hair, but now there is an array of products that can be used to nurture and maintain natural hair. In addition to the fact that the hair care industry now better caters for women with natural hair, more women feel confident to celebrate their roots and encourage other women to do the same. As Lynsey explains in her article, this wasn't the case several years before, when 'nappy' hair "often felt like a burden" to women everywhere.
These are the stats that were collected by Mintel, as reported by PremiumBeautyNews.com.
Source: W24