The 63-Day Problem, Part 2: How We Got Here

In Part 1 we told the story of the itch that starts around week three of a new set of braids, and the Korean scalp care built to fix it. This is the backstory: how the shelf ended up full of grease, what’s hiding in some of those bottles, what doctors see when the scalp is ignored, and why a country famous for skincare has been tied to textured hair for sixty years.

A fortune built on grease

In the 1890s, a young widow named Sarah Breedlove was losing her hair. Back then, many women washed their hair about once a month. Indoor plumbing was rare, and hot water was work. Sarah, who would become Madam C. J. Walker, mixed a scalp ointment called Wonderful Hair Grower: a petroleum-jelly-like base and beeswax, sulfur and copper sulfate, and perfume to hide the smell of the sulfur.¹

It worked for its moment. When you can’t wash often, you seal what you have. Walker went door to door, trained other women to sell it, and by her death in 1919 had 20,000 saleswomen. She became one of the most famous self-made businesswomen in America.¹

Here’s the surprising part: the idea stuck long after the plumbing changed. In a 2011 study of 201 parents and caregivers of Black girls, 99 percent used hair oil or grease.² Grease became tradition. Cleaning the scalp between washes never got its own product.

What the label doesn’t tell you

In 2018, scientists at the Silent Spring Institute bought 18 hair products that Black women commonly use, from relaxers to root stimulators to anti-frizz sprays, and tested them in a lab. They found 45 of the 66 chemicals they were looking for, many linked to hormone disruption or asthma. Here’s the part that stings: 84 percent of the chemicals they found were not listed on the label. Every product had fragrance chemicals, and 78 percent had parabens.³ Those products were bought in 2008 and formulas have changed since, but the lesson stuck: shoppers couldn’t trust what they were reading.

Other studies tell a similar story. When the Environmental Working Group reviewed 1,177 products marketed to Black women in 2016, fewer than one in four scored low hazard, compared with about 40 percent of products for the general market.⁴ And a large National Institutes of Health study of more than 33,000 women found that frequent use of chemical hair straighteners was linked to a higher risk of uterine cancer: about 4 percent by age 70, compared with 1.6 percent for women who never used them.⁵ The FDA has promised for years to propose a ban on formaldehyde in hair-smoothing products; its current target is November 2026.⁶

That’s why “clean” matters so much in this aisle. It doesn’t have to mean perfect. It means a label you can read and believe.

What doctors see

Dermatologists have been sounding the alarm for decades, quietly. In a national look at dermatology visits, seborrheic dermatitis, the red, flaky, itchy scalp condition, was the third most common diagnosis for Black patients, behind only acne and eczema.⁷ Back in 1983, a Washington, D.C. study found it in 6.5 percent of Black patients versus 1.8 percent of white patients.⁸

The hair itself is part of the story. When South African dermatologist Nonhlanhla Khumalo looked at natural, never-relaxed hair under a microscope, 10 to 16 percent of the strands had knots, compared with almost none in the comparison group, just from everyday washing and combing.⁹ Her team also found that about one in three adult women in Cape Town had traction alopecia, hair loss from styles that pull too tight.¹⁰ And hair shapes everyday life: in a survey of 200 Detroit women, 45 percent said they had avoided exercise to keep from messing up their hair.¹²

Put it together and you get the bind from Part 1. The hair breaks when it’s handled. The scalp suffers when it’s ignored. Braids protect one and neglect the other.

Korea’s 60-year connection

After the Korean War, Korea was one of the poorest countries in the world. Women sold their own hair to wig factories in Seoul. When the U.S. banned wigs made from Chinese hair in 1965, Korean wigs filled the gap. By 1970, wigs were Korea’s third-biggest export, 9.3 percent of everything the country sold abroad, and many of them were sold in America.¹¹

The connection grew from there. Korean-American families went on to run thousands of beauty supply stores in Black neighborhoods; in 2020, the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association estimated that about 6,000 of the roughly 9,000 U.S. stores were mostly Korean-owned, with about 3,000 Black-owned and growing.¹³ It has been a real relationship, with real friction at times. But for most of those sixty years, Korea sold the hair and stocked the shelves. It didn’t design what went on the scalp.

That’s what makes Bephor different. It brings the thing Korea is best known for today, gentle, balanced skincare, to the scalp under the braids. After sixty years of selling the hair, it’s a Korean answer to the part of the story that was always missing.

Read Part 1: The 63-Day Problem Shop Bephor wholesale