Progressive Idiocy: L'Oreal Shampoo Ad Has Hijab-Wearing Model
It’s sometimes difficult for me to decode whether the empty sails of progressivism are embracing or decrying tokenism at any given time. Forced diversity is one of the most obvious and insipid trends in modern cultural life, and yet the left seems to alternately celebrate and decry it in a fashion that seems almost random. It’s something that truly baffles me.
I say this as a preface to exploring an extraordinary act of tokenism that’s receiving good copy as far as the media eye can see: A cosmetics manufacturer has hired a shampoo model that can’t actually show her hair.
Quoth CNN: “L’Oreal Paris is breaking barriers and making history by featuring a hijab-wearing woman in a hair campaign.
“British beauty blogger Amena Khan donned a pale pink headscarf while standing in front of a bright pink background in the haircare ad,” the Friday piece reads. “‘Whether or not your hair is on display,’ she says in the ad, ‘doesn’t affect how much you care about it.'”
It very well may not. You may perhaps be able to guess by my byline that I am not, in fact, a Muslim woman. I would venture to guess that when the hijab is off, however, Ms. Khan and other women care about how their hair looks more or less the same as any non-Muslim woman would.
Here’s the issue — whether or not Ms. Khan’s hair is on display may not affect how much she cares about it. What it does affect is how much I care about the product.
“How many brands are doing things like this? Not many,” Khan told Vogue UK. “They’re literally putting a girl in a headscarf — whose hair you can’t see — in a hair campaign. Because what they’re really valuing through the campaign is the voices that we have.”
Leaving aside the nature of the hijab and its repressive origins, I want you to picture a commercial starring a notable observant Jewish individual. I’m going to pick Ben Shapiro in this case, because I want to live in an alternate universe where the conservative commnetator and entrepreneur might actually get endorsement deals instead of threats from antifa.
The commercial opens with Shapiro at a table, eating a sandwich. “I can’t eat Boar’s Head ham on this delicious sandwich,” Ben would say (likely very quickly, thus saving precious commercial airtime). “However, that doesn’t mean I don’t care about how tasty it would be.” Cue the Boar’s Head logo, end scene.
At a basic product demonstration level, that ad fails. Ben Shapiro doesn’t have the capacity to demonstrate to me how good Boar’s Head ham is because, as an observant Jew, he can’t eat it. At an attention-grabbing level, however, it might succeed, because it puts someone who can’t demonstrate the product in the position of endorsing the product, calling attention specifically to their religious background.
This is why L’Oreal’s ad should be repugnant to everyone who finds tokenism offensive — especially Muslims. There is nothing that Amena Khan can lend L’Oreal’s shampoos aside from a lot of headlines. Or, as Ms. Khan so euphemistically puts it, “the voices that we have.”
Ms. Khan could endorse almost any other product in the L’Oreal line and do so successfully. The fact that they specifically chose shampoo is evidence that Khan is being used, at a base level, to show that L’Oreal is “tolerant.” They “get it.”
The problem is, it doesn’t work. This doesn’t make anyone more tolerant. This doesn’t demonstrate the product, and L’Oreal’s target demographic of women is unlikely to be fooled. For every woman who sees this and convinces herself L’Oreal is taking a brave stand for diversity n’ stuff, I would predict there’s yet another woman who realizes how preposterous and obvious this is.
I would also predict not many of the people in the latter class work in the media. Even though this is a blatant act of tokenism and actual, literal appropriation of Islam to sell shampoo (instead of the petty, nonexistent “cultural appropriation” “microaggressions” the Western left seems so enamored with), here’s what a search for “Amana Khan” was turning up early Monday morning:
Wonderful. I’d like to point out that top result was BuzzFeed, an outlet which has published articles with I’m-not-making-this-up titles like “People Are Saying There’s A Haircut Celebs Get Right Before They Steal Black Culture” and “STD Info App Called ‘Hula’ Will Not Change Name Despite Outcry From Hawaiians.”
If the curious case of Amana Khan is any barometer, tokenism is — to borrow Andy Warhol’s definition of art — what you can get away with. L’Oreal has gotten away with this progressive idiocy, judging by the left’s congratulatory coverage of this pseudo-event, and more power to them.
That being said, I was actually quite happy to walk into my bathroom in the middle of writing this article and discover we use Pantene. I’m not sure which would work better on my hair, mind you. But at least Pantene’s models can demonstrate how the product actually works.
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