In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison tells the story of a young Pecola Breedlove—a dark-skinned black child in the 1940s who suffers on account of a racist beauty culture that has seeped into every part of her world. Faced with the pain her alleged ugliness has wrought, Pecola rigorously inspects beauty for its contents. As Morrison writes, Pecola finds “beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.” In the Netflix miniseries Self-Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker, which aired on March 20th, yet another Breedlove toils at beauty-work from the margins of a violent visual culture. Born Sarah Breedlove, the first free child of former slaves in 1867 Louisiana, the enterprise icon Madam C.J. Walker is best known for revolutionizing black hair care. 

Although Walker’s salesmanship is often privileged in retellings of her life and work, we have largely forgotten to regard her technical genius where the materials and methodology of haircare are concerned. Beauty is not only business but also a science; as black women in the 1880s knew well—and Morrison’s Pecola learned for herself in 1941—pursuing the secrets and science of beauty, within a society contaminated by white supremacist patriarchy, required remarkable technique and tenacity.

Dissecting Walker’s story into four 45-minute episodes, Self-Made delivers a rags-to-riches empowerment tale about what it means to do beauty. Treating Walker’s history-making achievements as its base ingredient, the miniseries goes on to introduce a number of platitudes into its narrative mix. The most potent of these asserts the transformative power of self-making, particularly where matters of beauty are concerned. More often than not, “beauty” is a variable that determines so much of one’s life experience, and power only works to accelerate beauty’s premium. Thus, for the disenfranchised, beauty has long represented both a source of rejection and the possibility of reclamation. In Walker’s story, we bear witness to one woman experimenting with these two warring ideas. 

The opening scenes in Self-Made display the labor and rewards of beauty culture. Daguerreotype photographs of elaborately styled black women are interspersed with clips of hot combs sizzling, curls bumped to completion, and unfinished heads of hair awaiting the discipline heat promises. When we meet Walker, played by Octavia Spencer, she is still Sarah Breedlove, a woman suffering the loss of her hair and her first husband. In her quest to generate new growth in her life, Breedlove’s hair serves as a metaphor for self-actualization under duress. 

Through trial and error, black Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century labored at styling and caring for their hair only to suffer painful side effects—many women during the period struggled with dandruff and skin disorders due to the harsh irritant chemicals at their disposal. In Self-Made, it’s only in quick fleeting moments when we see Walker as a kitchen chemist, a scientist navigating beauty experimentation within these historic conditions. In one scene, Walker instructs saleswomen in how best to dilute the smell of sulfur. In another, she learns, at the expense of her daughter A’Lelia’s scalp, the dangers of incorporating lye in her hair products. Still, the “Walker Method,” a hair care process invented by Walker, which included a formula for pomade, scalp preparation, lotions, salves, and instructions for the use of heated combs, made little to no appearance in the series. 

As she experiments with new possibilities for black hair care, Self-Made’s Walker tests out the potential of a new vision for black beauty altogether. Throughout the series, both colorism and texturism are framed as the primary variables shaping the black beauty market. In keeping with its director Kasi Lemmons’s affinity for the supernatural, the series represents this reality most compellingly through the ghostly presence of a “colored Gibson girl”—a beautiful light-skinned phantom who haunts Walker throughout her journey. A reference to artist Charles Dana Gibson’s iconic etching of the quintessential (white) woman of the 20th century, the black “Gibson girl” is offered up in the series as a false solution to racist beauty standards. In this “new” image, the black woman, as solute, is merely dissolved into the solvent of archetypal white femininity. As it seeks to topple this taxonomy of beauty, Self-Made argues for the end of the Gibson girl, in whatever color she may take. Yet, even in its explicit resentment of the black Gibson girl, the series doesn’t negotiate a complete beauty overhaul—the kind of dramatic revision that might bring forth true freedom for its characters and its viewers. 

In early archival images of Madam C.J. Walkers’ products, there is no black Gibson girl. Instead, there is, most often, just Walker herself. As the face affixed on her own merchandise, Walker, with a head full of thick healthy hair, served as an unspoken testimony of sorts. Alongside that which could be inferred from her long locks, the products vowed to “restore and beautify the hair without injury to the scalp.” Defending against the dangers of mythology, some of the ads even asserted “there is nothing imaginary about the world-wide fame of Mme. C.J. Walkers Ultra-Quality preparations.” An icon of self-making, Walker’s use of her own likeness created an enticing marketing narrative, one that hinged on the power of visual discipline. Her success asserts that it’s not only possible to establish control over one’s body and appearance but also highly profitable. The daughter of enslaved people and a former washerwoman herself, Walker capitalized on a culture that had long required intense regulation and rigor from black people. With this understanding of white supremacy’s demands, the Madam supplied black communities across the U.S. and the world with a kind of armor. Imperfect, as reforms often are, the products couldn’t prevent racism’s assaults, and didn’t suggest otherwise. Rather, they advertised access to the pretty and the professional, knowing full well the difficulties black women faced when unable to fit into such rigid classifications. 

As we watch Self-Made, we bear witness to the results of Walker’s experimentation with all the classifications that mark her life: race, gender, and class, just to name a few. On her way to financial success, she tests her products, her relationships, and her convictions to differing results. In the end, however, it’s the world’s final test on her body and health that seems to call the romance of self-actualization into question. At 51, Walker passed away due to complications of hypertension and kidney failure. A condition that describes the ongoing elevation of one’s blood pressure, hypertension is fatal because it’s enduring: the arterial toll comes at a cost. Over a century since Madam C.J. Walker’s passing, black women in the U.S. continue to experience a higher risk of hypertension and cardiovascular disease. If nothing else, Walker’s death, which looms at the end of the series, suggests that we are shaped by our world regardless of our efforts to shape ourselves. Still, for as long as the conditions of black women’s lives remain the same, our arteries and aspirations will continue to fashion themselves accordingly. This is the science of self-making, which women like Walker understand has always been a matter of life or death. 

Image credit: Octavia Spencer as Madame CJ Walker in “Self-Made” (Netflix | Fair Use)