Cape Town – Retailers across the country have decided to give TRESemmé haircare products the boot.
The move follows the outrage sparked by a TRESemmé advert on the Clicks website depicting black women’s hair as frizzy, dull, dry and damaged, while it described white women’s hair as normal, fine and flat.
The EFF has led a protest across the country at 425 of 880 Clicks stores.
Since the furore, a number of major retailers have decided to stop stocking TRESemmé products.
The Shoprite/ Checkers group (the largest supermarket chain store in Africa) and Pick n Pay (the second-largest supermarket chain in the country) have decided to join Clicks in delisting Unilever’s TRESemmé brand from its list of suppliers.
Pick n Pay said: "Given the recent concern about the language used by TRESemmé to advertise their product line, we have decided to remove the products from our shelves while we engage with the supplier,” said a Pick n Pay spokesman.
Dis-Chem and Makro confirmed the news on Twitter on Thursday that their stores would stop selling the products. Woolworths Holdings, which said it does not support "the racial biases expressed in the TRESemmé campaign", also removed the products.
EFF leader Julius Malema met representatives from Unilever at the EFF headquarters this morning.
In a statement released today, EFF said the meeting “comes at the request of Unilever, after the EFF gave its subsidiary product TRESemmé 24 hours to account for the racist advert they produced”.
The EFF said it would continue protests across the country while it is engaging with the two entities and “hold them accountable for their racism”.
In a letter addressed to TRESemmé South Africa on Wednesday, the EFF said it would take “the most robust action against TRESemmé with no further notice”, should they not respond within 24 hours.
Cape Argus