The Shelf Audit Files No. 06 — 9.4 Billion

Black women put about $9.4 billion a year into beauty. Black-owned brands hold roughly 2.5% of the industry selling it back to them. 

The reason usually given for that gap is not the real one. The real one is a six-month window in 1966, two governments that never spoke to each other, and a wholesale system that a law professor — not an activist — describes in a peer-reviewed journal as collusion and exclusion. 

This is the one book in the series with no shopping list in the front. So the back half is the shopping list: every Black-owned brand crowned across the other eighteen Files, gathered into one directory. The essay tells you where the 2.5% went. The directory tells you exactly where it is.