What a strange strawman argument. I don’t think anyone is ignoring other issues with these companies just because they try to be more inclusive.
For example, you can praise Amazon’s efforts of inclusiveness while still condemning their union busting ways.
Why this need to paint everything as black or white? Or assume that everyone else is doing so? Some of us are capable of nuance.
I think I’ve missed something here. What regulation or proposed regulation is this change a response to?
Is it possible it is a…marketing change? Dictated by a company’s determination (which could be right, could be wrong) that they would sell more product with a change in the packaging?
No, it can’t possibly be simply that the company has decided to market their product in a different way in order to sell more! That makes no sense. Companies, especially beauty products, don’t sell by associating themselves with particular emotionally based areas of their potential customer base. All shampoos are clearly purchased based on technical judgements by educated consumers. 
Can someone enlighten me?
It occurs to me that I misread Senegoid’s post, which on re-reading I realize isn’t saying that we want to know which gender, but that we want to know whether singular or plural.
There are ways to indicate that, also; though I grant that people sometimes don’t use them even when it would be useful, just as people sometimes don’t make it clear when ‘you’ actually includes ‘we’ and when it doesn’t.
And that is why we now have body-care products marketed specifically towards men - because men were ignoring a bunch of stuff believing it was targeted exclusively for women.
Now, some of the gendered marketing stuff IS total BS - but not all of it. Men need care products, too, but often have different preferences in what and how they use it. 3-in-1 products, for example, which can be used as body wash and shampoo both appeal to more men than women, and some of their downsides are minimized with people who have less sensitive skin and shorter (buzz cut or shaved) head hair. Different scents appeal differently to men and women (although back when I worked stocking such products in a retail outlet there were plenty of women using “men’s” deodorant and even men using “woman’s”). There are now moisturizers that try to appeal directly to men, particularly those working outside or in the trades such as O’Keefe’s. It’s not all bad, as it makes people aware of options and as a general (though not absolute) rule options are good.
However, when you start labeling something “normal” it implies everything not so labeled is “abnormal”. That’s why you have products for “sensitive skin” and not “abnormal skin” or “dermatological train wrecks”. As someone who for most of my life has NOT been able to use skin products for “normal” skin (even if I am Northern European White) that was psychologically very painful, especially in my teen years.
So… what to do with hair and skin products?
Well… you could start being more specific. For shampoo, for example:
This takes race and ethnicity out of the picture to a great extent although, of course, you’re going to find more people of a particular ancestry in some groupings than others.
You could probably do something similar for skin products
Aside from cultural/marketing things? Yes, there are some sex-specific differences. For example, men’s skin actually is slightly thicker than women’s. Not by a lot, but there is a difference. Men have different sweat/oil/odor differences. Shaving a man’s beard is different than shaving a woman’s legs. For that matter, the facial hair of women (with rare exception) is different than men’s, and men who do shave their legs still have to deal with slightly more/thicker hair than women. So a razor optimized for shaving a face is going to be different than that optimized for shaving legs, the handle might be different sizes due to typical size differences between men and women, and the products surrounding such treatments may differ between men and women due to (on average) women’s skins being a bit more sensitive than a man’s, and men often shaving their faces more often than women shave (or wax) their legs meaning men can often have a real need for products that soothe their much-scraped faces.
Note that some of these are hormone related, so that some of this kicks in at puberty, some of this can change a great deal for trans women and men during/after transition, and even post-menopause for cis-women and for all men as they age.
Now, that said, these are not ridged barriers. The deodorant police will not show up if you buy from the “wrong” aisle. Women can use 3-in-1 products and men can wind up with elaborate beauty care routines. The only person who really helped me with the issues I was having with shaving my legs (lots of hair - thanks Russian ancestors! - and very, very sensitive skin) was a macho jock who played Big Ten football, swam, and biked who shaved his legs due to tape needed for injuries and what not and had had problems with this himself. Which is not where I was expecting to get help, but there you go.
But if you market to specifics - “this is for legs irritated by bandaging, scrapes, and other mechanical irritation”, “this is intended for shaving areas of heavy beard growth”, “this is intended for shaving areas with light hair growth”, “this is for skin damaged by working out of doors”, “this is for skin prone to rashes” - it becomes less about who is normal and who isn’t and more about optimizing choices for what you need or have a problem with.
Exactly, like I said above, a company decided to adjust their labeling/marketing in the hopes of making a few more bucks. Whoop-de-fucking-do.
Yep, and the Boomer outrage machine is going to piggyback on this to make some money too. It’s just a modern spin on the WAR ON CHRISTMAS.
Do you have an example of someone praising a company for fixing some trivial linguistic issue?
Oh yeah, definitely - floral scents are almost exclusively geared towards women’s products. Men have more eucalyptus/sandalwood type scents. There’s probably people who make a career about this sort of thing.
A LOT, if not most, products aimed as “sensitive skin” STILL have fragrance in them. They tend to have less, but unless the label explicitly says “fragrance free” assume it’s perfumed to one degree or another.
Well… there can be some differences between products aimed at oily vs. dry that really do address the problems of being oily or dry… but honestly, there’s not a huge difference. If you’re not at an extreme you can probably get away with using whatever smells nice.
There have been attempts to market Band-Aids in other flesh tones than “Northern European”, but they didn’t seem to catch on. Probably because there’s no color that’s going to make everyone happy.
These days, a lot of people buy ones that are in neon, or have cartoon characters, or whatever on them so I’m not sure “flesh tone” is really that much a desired color anyway.
Products specifically aimed at “Black hair” typically have a much smaller range of choices in chain stores, and are frequently on the top/lowest shelves which can cause access problems.
This is compounded by such factors as Black hair - particularly of Black women - being much more likely to have undergone extensive chemical processing than that of White or Asian or other hair, which leaves it physically more fragile and dry, and much more easily damaged. Hence a LOT of black hair products emphasize moisturizing, conditioning, and protecting hair. Also a LOT of products to hold hair in place or in a particular shape, often in a manner that isn’t at all natural to that hair type.
Hair loss due to over use of beauty products, use of damaging beauty products, and mechanical stresses on hair is much, much more common among Black woman in the US than any other ethnic group. Their natural hair has long been seen as unruly and unacceptable, putting them under pressures the rest of us don’t have to deal with.
Mind you - this is just a White girl looking at this from the outside noticing these issues. Pardon if I’ve gotten any of this wrong, I may be missing something or misinterpreting because this doesn’t directly affect me, but Black women are under a different form of pressure to conform to impossible beauty standards than White women are. Holy crap, I’m sure a Black woman would be able to go into this MUCH more extensively. They have, in fact. But who is listening?
Even worse; for a long time, Black hair care products were kept in a locked cabinet. Walmart only stopped doing so in June 2020.
I think it does distract from the bigger issues. It’s a way for companies to get support and good publicity without making any of the hard choices that would affect their bottom line. Who’s it really helping? Black people will still have to go to specialist shops and pay over the odds to get products that work for them; changing what’s written on the bottle won’t help with that. It just feels like doing something helpful.
Unless, of course, White (and other) people with dyed/permed/etc. hair find that there are a bunch of hair care produces out there they were previously unaware of, due to said products being in the Black ghetto, that also work for their highly modified hair resulting in less stigma for those products AND more incentive for them to be widely stocked. And the companies producing them get more business.
But heaven forbid anyone point out how this might be a win for multiple parties, right?
Gorilla Glue is already widely available branded as “multi purpose”.
How is removing the word ‘normal’ from packaging going to do any of that?
Maybe if they stocked coconut oil in the haircare aisle…
I guess I didn’t phrase my question correctly. I was wondering if products for Black hair are also divided into categories, such as “normal” “oily” and “dry”.
That joke is in poor taste, especially given the topic of the thread. (And especially if anyone comes upon it without remembering the recent news item.)
Oh thank god!! I’ve been buying deodorant by active ingredient, scent, and cost for years, and I tend to swap between one branded for women and one branded for men, depending on pricing.
Hey, there! Why are ya insulting us boomers? We are children of the advertising age, and we expect marketing to change as soon as we know how to interpret it.
Speaking of which, my hair is neither especially dry nor oily, and I tend to avoid haircare products marketed for either dry or oily hair, so I went to the shower to see what my bottle of shampoo says on it. It says “shampoo” and “real botanicals”. And the “real botanicals” smell nice. I think I’m going to survive losing the word “normal” on shampoo bottles.
How d’you feel about supermarkets rearranging their stock and moving everything to different aisles every few months?
I don’t spend a lot of time in the shampoo section. Are companies actually creating haircare products for different races and calling products intended for white people normal?
I feel like I’m missing something.
What does that scenario have to do with this thread?
To help understand why some people dislike the products they buy being changed, even if it’s not a big deal for others. It’s yet another thing to have to learn/unlearn.