Goodie Box

I finally got my hands on an Anita Grant Goodie Box Sampler, which I've been aching to do for months.
The self proclaimed 'mixtress' makes organic, gourmet hair and body products that smell, and look good enough to eat and come packaged like gifts - I almost felt guilty ripping the thing open.
Product reviews to come.

In praise of: Lori van Echtelt, savior of the European afro

My quest for afro-friendly hair and beauty products made by real people (as opposed to Softsheen-Carson) started here: Mariposa Import, run by the sweetest Dutch woman ever.
Lori van Echtelt (pictured) went up against import-export laws, bad afro hair advice and some seriously ill-adjusted Dutch lorry drivers to bring Europe half-way decent products.
The best thing about her is the fact that she inspires trust. She tries every product she sells, doesn't stock anything that doesn't work, and can give decent advice. It's a refreshing change from the local Pak, (I dare you to go in and ask for a humecant) and it made me feel much better about buying products I couldn't see or smell.
She also really appealed to my self esteem. She had natural hair, knew her products, her client base and her EU export law and she was growing a business. I'm still prepared to pay 12 euro for conditioner because of what she represents.
My favourite buy will always be the Oyin Honey Hemp conditioner which makes my hair feel amazing. It has great slip, so much so that I've stopped combing my hair, and just condition with this to de-tangle. Worth every cent of the 12 euro price tag.
Three years down the line there are a whole passel of places online, and, to my knowledge, one actual shop floor selling similar products. It almost feels like a revolution...

L'Oreal racist. It's official

As if the Nazi collaboration wasn't enough, L'Oreal has just been slapped with a £20, 000 fine for racist hiring in a historic French case.

The French campaign group SOS Racisme brought the case against L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetics firm, over the campaign in 2000. Garnier France sought saleswomen to demonstrate the shampoo line Fructis Style in supermarkets outside Paris. They sought young women to hand out samples and discuss hairstyling with shoppers.In July 2000, a fax detailing the profile of hostesses sought by L'Oréal stipulated women should be 18 to 22, size 38-42 (UK size 10-14) and "BBR", the initials for bleu, blanc, rouge, the colours of the French flag. Prosecutors argued that BBR, a shorthand used by the far right, was also a well-known code among employers to mean "white" French people and not those of north African, African and Asian backgrounds.Christine Cassan, a former employee at Districom, a communications firm acting for Garnier, told the court her clients demanded white hostesses. She said that when she had gone ahead and presented candidates "of colour" a superior in her own company had said she had "had enough of Christine and her Arabs". The Guardian

The great thing is, they're not above selling to non-white people, they own Softsheen-Carson and RedKen, for god's sake. They have a huge slice of the billion-dollar-black-hair-industry cake.
And the same people who made those hiring decisions weren't above hiring Beyonce and Kelly Rowland to shill (because, apparently, a $500 weave needs moisturising). They just wouldn't hire them to sell.

Just to recap, the firm that actively decided not to hire anyone who wasn't white owns:

• Redken
• Softsheen Carson
• The Body Shop
• Diesel & Armani Perfumes
• Maybelline
• Ralph Lauren
• Lancome

I know I'm ditching the Dark & Lovely* fuck Kelly Rowland.

* Full disclosure: I kept that in for dramatic effect. But I stopped using Softsheen stuff like two years ago. It hurt my 'fro, which I think should be a capital offence.

filthy, filth Frenchmen

So I only just found out what the Saian Supa Crew song Angela is really about. A French friend, whose mother is from Guadeloupe told me about the summer it was a huge summer jam and everybody was playing it, despite the fact that they could barely understand the creole lyrics.
But her mother understood.
The cute summer jam is actually a pretty detailed ode to anal sex.
You have to understand I only just youtubed the video... in retrospect it seems kinda obvious...
It's still a tune, though.
It's like the time I found out the N*E*R*D song 'Brain' was about oral sex. I must have been the only person on the planet who thought it meant Pharell liked smart girls...

Damn OBE TV

I'm in my parents house. Cosy, good food, and free laundry facilities. However. My mother insists on watching African TV channels (and there are several hundred at last count) on the loudest volume humanly possible.
Now if you've never seen a Nollywood movie, that won't mean much: let me explain.
There's like one boom mike for the entire set, and nothing else.
Remember when you were like 10 and would record ''radio shows" for fun? You'd get the tape recorder and talk into it like the DJ then hold it up against the stereo speakers for the music?
That's exactly how these things sound.
So the dialogue will always be a bit low and hazy, but you will hear every rum and rattle in the air conditioning, car, and whatever happens to be going down on streets of Abuja.
And every so often the danger music comes on or somone dies and suddenly you're in the club and the floor in the lounge is vibrating.
I'm thinking of getting her earphones for christmas.
Or starting a sound engineering school in Port Harcourt... as soon as they stop kidnapping three-year-olds.

Stonewalling Accra

My London Pride plans were killed off by some dodgy prawns or a dodgy oxtail-rice-and-beans combo - I still haven’t narrowed down what it was that had me doubled-up in pain on Oxford Street this afternoon.
I felt an almost desperate need to go all Stonewall in response to the violently regressive responses to pride parades in Accra, Jerusalem, Moscow…. the list of places where you’d still get bottled for being gay is pretty damn long.
I’m most bothered by Accra. Ghana has an oddly rich historical gay culture, which somehow managed to survive colonialism and all those sunburned, jowly governor general types with Mandingo complexes (another post, another day).
The backlash in response to a proposed LGBT conference has involved writing homosexuality out of the countries cultural history and criminalising it.
Until 2004, gay marriage was, by default, legal but underground; anytime one was public it drew the usual polemic. Accra was never San Fransisco.
The key thing for me is the fact that before the resurgence of fundamental religion in Ghana, the country was actually relatively liberal; nobody felt the burning need to kill the gays.
Then poverty intensified, the Anglican Congress, the Vatican and the Islamic Council got their claws in (third world desperation is a massive growth market) and the country goes into a regressive spiral.
Because in a country with a 5% HIV prevalence rate, people being imprisoned in hospital because they can’t pay their medical bills, and patchy economic growth, the real threat is a little girl-on-girl action.