Haircare Plays a Major Role in Health and Wellness for Black Women

by RUNGRL Staff

How much of a role does haircare play in your life when it comes to fitness? As active Black women interested in both wellness and healthy hair, RUNGRL knows the struggle. Whether you have work meetings in the morning or dinner plans in the evening, you don’t want to have to sacrifice your hair to get in a good workout.

Since we know we are not alone in our concerns, we decided to work to better understand everyone’s individual hair routines. As part of our #MyRunningHair initiative, we created a survey to ask RUNGRL readers about hair care and maintenance so that we can use those insights to propel our efforts to reduce these things as barriers to health and fitness for Black women.

Our survey respondents--U.S. women, aged 18-44, who identified as Black, Hispanic or Multiple Ethnicity--overwhelmingly agreed that the maintenance and styling of their hair plays a major role in the decisions they make around when and how often they work out.

Here’s what else what we found:

They care about being active. 87 percent exercise at least twice a week.
They wear their hair natural. 79 percent identify as wearing their hair natural (without chemical straighteners or other chemical modifiers).
They don’t want to spend much time fixing their hair. 66 percent appreciate easy-to-maintain hairstyles and prefer to spend 15 minutes or less on their hair each day.
They love using products to maintain their hair. 45 percent are spending $25 or more each month on hair products.

We’ve compiled the most standout results into a handy infographic.

View or download infographic as a PDF.

Now that we know how RUNGRL readers feel, we're using this initiative to serve up tips, information and solutions to help you manage your fit lifestyle and keep your hair fabulous, because we believe that you CAN have both. Read more about the #MyRunningHair initiative on our #MyRunningHair campaign page and learn how you can be a part of it!