https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019864987 cultural geographies 1–15 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1474474019864987 journals.sagepub.com/home/cgj A Darling ® of the beauty trade: race, care, and the imperial debris of synthetic hair Caroline V Faria The University of Texas at Austin, USA Hilary Jones Florida International University, USA Abstract This article pushes for a postcolonial geography of care, through hair. Working with the ‘imperial debris’ of care as a disciplinary racial logic, we show how it is renewed, remade, and resisted in the present through the travels, narratives, and practices of the African synthetic hair trade. Here we interrogate Lebanese business expansion, entrepreneurialism, manufacture, and styling, tracing in each case how contemporary narratives of care mirror, entrench, and rework colonial ideals and subjectivities of Whiteness. Disrupting these logics, we close by attending to the influences of Ugandan stylists and consumers who draw on Caribbean, US-American, and other diasporic circuits of Blackness, along with locally rooted innovations. Our work demonstrates how racial power travels through time and across space, asserting the important and sustained insights of a postcolonial geography of care. Keywords Africa, beauty, care, feminist postcolonial geography, race Temporal folds, imperial debris: the postcolonial imperatives of care Another danger, perhaps more serious still: the Syrians are by indifference and by tradition of a great filthiness; they ignore care of the body and the most elementary hygiene. (Camille Guy L’Afrique Occidentale Francaise, Paris: Larose, 1929) We care how you look. (Ad copy leader, Lebanese-family owned company Darling Hair Products, 2014) Corresponding author: Caroline V Faria, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd Street, Austin, TX 78712, USA. Email: cvfaria@austin.utexas.edu 864987CGJ 0 0 10.1177/1474474019864987cultural geographiesFaria and Jones research-article 2019 Article