Braiding used to be low maintenance and budget-friendly. What happened?

Every time I get my hair done, I find myself confronted with rising costs, and dizzyingly long maintenance regimes

This week, I tried to book in for some knotless braids at the last minute. I knew I was going to be writing about how the simple pleasure of getting a head of box braids is starting to feel increasingly complicated, and thought that it would be good to get some pictures of the process. Then, I found myself getting wound up as the subject of this newsletter began to play out on a sort of meta-level.

When I decided to get my hair done for this piece, I knew that booking a next-day braiding slot would prove to be a kafkaesque task. My usual place asks that you schedule around a month in advance. My second option says that we’d need a “private room” to bring a photographer, bumping the bill up to £600. While trying to write an immersive report on the difficulties that come with getting braids, I suddenly realise that I am living the report.

None of the salons seem to care about my journalistic endeavour. They don’t need the publicity, or have time for it. As one salon tells me: “We have a high demand for braids, which is why it is hard to be super flexible.”

The lack of supply is causing tension. Braided divas frequently bemoan the power stylists have to set increasingly high prices. New Yorkers can pay around $450 (£339) for knotless braids, a more expensive style that has become the standard in the city in the past five or so years. In London, I’ll pay between £150 and £250 for the same. It wasn’t always like this.

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Navigating an elaborate affair

With braiding you’re paying for every inch of labour – with waist length costing £20 more than bra length, small braids costing about £40 more than medium, and so on. If your hair isn’t pre-stretched, add another £20. Want your hair washed and blow dried? That’ll be an extra £20-35. For boho or goddess braids, a newer trend where wispy tendrils cascade out of your plaits, that could be, say, £50 more. If you’re using synthetic hair, it’s going to matt over the one to two months that you wear the style, so it’s better to use human hair bundles. But these can cost upwards of £250. Each of these decisions fills me with a moment of micro-dread.

When The Long Wave’s lead writer, Nesrine Malik, tells me that the Dutch braids she just got in Nairobi were the equivalent of £2, and that a full head of knotless only costs £20, I get a bit hot and itchy.

Obviously, London is its own economy. But I can’t simply opt out of the dizzyingly expensive process. Having your hair done isn’t exactly a choice, with one in five Black American women aged 25-34 having been sent home from work for their hair. To make matters worse, shifting beauty standards have completely normalised (if not mandated) these boho, knotless and butt-length styles, which take at least five hours to install.

“Braiding used to be a matter of convenience and low maintenance,” Nesrine tells me. “Branded as a ‘protective style’, it felt like something that could deliver you from the hamster wheel of washing and drying and curling or straightening. Now it is its own elaborate stressful affair.” And even once they’re done, the pressure doesn’t end. “Many of us are told that we’re doing it wrong: not washing them enough, keeping them in too long, getting braided too tight, too heavy.”

Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, economist, Harvard PhD student and author of The Double Tax: How Women of Color Are Overcharged and Underpaid, agrees. “This is a topic that’s significantly understudied,” she tells me. “But we do know that the cost of beauty has gone up over time. That’s due, in part, to inflation, but also to ever-growing beauty standards.”

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Victimised by similar forces

Still, Opoku-Agyeman believes that it’s shortsighted to solely focus on the experience of the consumer. “[Black hair stylists] are expected to know how to do everybody’s hair, and you get penalised if you can’t,” she says. “So you might have to just get more products, in order to accommodate all the different hair types that might come through your door.”

Opoku-Agyeman, who is Ghanaian-American, says you also need to factor in the spiralling rent in places like the US, and that shipping synthetic hair from China is no longer as cheap as it was. “When tariffs entered the picture, I was telling folks that this was actually going to hit black women very hard.”

Other specialised products like conditioners and gels made by Black-owned businesses may be more expensive, because they can struggle to gain investment, leading to low levels of supply. Opoku-Agyeman believes that the costs customers complain about aren’t resulting in massive profits for braiders. I still feel a little uncertain about the extra costs: I’ve heard stories of customers being charged extra for being a new client, or for having long or thick hair. Opoku-Agyeman gently checks me on these annoyances. “You have your sort of corner case type people, who will charge you just for parting your hair, right?” she says. “I think [this] is preposterous, but I don’t know how frequent they are.”

And I don’t want to undervalue Black women’s labour for, not only a specialised skill, but an art form. Perhaps as consumers we’re directing our ire towards victims of the same forces. “The folks who own the means of production around hair braiding are not the folks who are typically using hair-braiding services,” Opoku-Agyeman says. Most braiding products are not sourced from Black-owned businesses.

“Back in the day, people used to braid outside, braid in their houses, but now people are trying to build out a business.” They also are tending to you for the five to eight hours that you’re in the chair, often without a lunch break. Braiders need to be trained, which can be expensive. It’s hard work.

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Paying the societal cost

What Opoku-Agyeman, Nesrine and I agree on is that Black women feel an intense pressure to be “presentable”, which comes from within and outside Black communities. “There is a real societal cost, and literal cost, to not getting your hair done,” Opoku-Agyeman tells me. “People are willing to spend $500 to get their hair done, because if I don’t, I’m not going to get the job … you could get suspended. You could get expelled.” Maybe when we get angry at add-ons, we’re really feeling anger at a lifetime of having to pay luxury prices for something that feels like a necessity.

This doesn’t only apply to braids. You could say the same for “wash and go” routines, the “straight natural” movement, locs, relaxers, fades and other Black hairstyles that have been subject to similar creeping policing and commercialisation. No matter what style you choose, the restrictions are tight and only seem to get tighter: with numerous steps, products and services deemed “essential” to keep you looking neat and professional.

The hair discrimination that forms part of this pressure is something that we can address in our own schools and workplaces. But it is also only one symptom of a longer, knotty history in which Black women’s hair has simultaneously been a site of expression and oppression. For many of us, going to the salon can feel like both of these things at the same time.

So what are we to do? As I admire my French curl braids, topped off with scalp-slick canerows, all I can think about is where I might channel my resentment at these rising prices. After six hours in the chair, it’s not toward my braiders. The beauty industry that profits from our social and economic anxieties? That’s a different question.

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Can you keep up with the increasing stress, and cost, of braids? Share your experience by emailing us at thelongwave@theguardian.com and we may include your response in our next issue.