Beauty product manufacturer L’Oréal Paris is now releasing its first shampoo advertisement featuring a woman wearing a hijab (a Muslim headscarf) for its latest hair care product, Elvive.
A blogger, model and co-founder of Ardere Cosmetics, Miss Amena Khan was chosen to feature as the French company tries to reach out to new consumers.
One could question the usefulness of trying to sell a product whose effect you can’t see being featured in the ad itself (as the hair is obviously covered by the scarf), but what do I know of course.
Miss Khan claimed that this was a revolutionary step: “How many brands are doing things like this? Not many.”
“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.”
Once again, pardon us for saying so but one could question whether you are being valued as a customer for your beliefs or if L’Oreal simply realizes that a great part of the French population now wears a headscarf and therefore markets to them, but okay, if you believe that they do this to be ground-breaking, so be it.
Of course, Miss Khan, who happens to have half a million followers on social media, couldn’t be stopped and continued to claim: “You have to wonder, why is it presumed that women who don’t show their hair don’t look after it?”
“The opposite of that would be that everyone that does show their hair only looks after it for the sake of showing it to others. And that mindset strips us of our autonomy and our sense of independence. Hair is a big part of self-care.”
With this latest development being shown on the French television sets and billboards in its capital, many conservative commentators fear that French writer Houellebecq who was heavily criticized for predicting in January 2015 in his novel Submission (French: Soumission) that the socialist party would one day (in 2022) present a Muslim presidential candidate in order to simply cling to power is coming one step closer.
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