Some of South Africa’s biggest retailers will no longer sell TRESemmé hair products, following protests over an advert that denigrated black hair.
Pictures of African hair were labelled “frizzy and dull”, “dry and damaged” in an online advert for TRESemmé products featured by beauty retailer Clicks.
White hair, meanwhile, was labelled “normal” and “fine and flat”.
Shoprite, Woolworths and Pick N Pay all say they have removed TRESemmé products from their shelves, as has Clicks.
Earlier this week, a senior executive at Clicks resigned and a number of employees were suspended.
Many South Africans say racism remains embedded in their society, 29 years after the end of apartheid and white-minority rule.
Some Clicks stores were forced to close on Monday following protests led by opposition party Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who called the hair advert “racist” and “dehumanising”.
One shop sustained minor damage after being firebombed, police said.
EFF leader Julius Malema is to meet executives from Clicks and TRESemmé’s parent company Unilever on Thursday, the party said in a tweet.
TRESemmé acknowledged its advert “promote[d] racist stereotypes about hair”, and apologised.
“The campaign set out to celebrate the beauty of all hair types and the range of solutions that TRESemmé offers, but we got it wrong.”
The chief executive of Clicks, Vikesh Ramsunder, also apologised, adding that an audit of all promotional material would be “urgently implemented” as well as diversity and inclusivity training.
“Whilst the images and content were provided to us by our supplier TRESemmé, this does not absolve us from blame,” he said.
“The implications of this are that black identity exists as inferior to the identity of white people. It is an assertion that white standards of beauty are to be aspired to and features of black represent damage, decay and abnormality,” the EFF said in a statement earlier this week.