I  think I could pinpoint the exact moment I went from being a child to being ‘a young lady’, as my grandmother called it. While boys get to have their childhoods slowly fizzle away, mine was yanked away in a single event: my period.

From then on it was a slurry of womanly duties and responsibilities, but the most important one was looking and smelling like a lady. I know that this experience is not limited to my personal experience.

In fact, I would argue that we’ve all been initiated into womanhood through the act of taking care of ourselves and constantly keeping fresh and clean. While it’s true that a little soap and deodorant never hurt anyone, we can’t deny that there has always been a magnifying glass on the hygiene practices of women, particularly black women’s hygiene.

With our hygiene being in the spotlight our penchant for self-care can quickly and discreetly turn into one of unintentional self-harm, in various forms. Let me explain: because black women have been led to care more about personal hygiene and physical appearance as a historically disenfranchised group, they are almost always more likely to spend more money on personal appearance than their white counterparts.