Over the last two decades, ethnic beauty markets in Los Angeles have grown rapidly as cultural commodification soars alongside the growth of migrant workers in the global city. The South Asian beauty industry, in particular, has emerged as a site where there is a hypervisibility of ethnic aesthetic practices, such as threading hair removal and henna art, as well as South Asian migrant women who are formally and informally employed in these salons. Threading, often marketed as an Indian, Asian, Ayurvedic and/or Eastern hair removal technique, uses intertwined cotton threads that are rolled across the skin to pluck hair out from the roots. This growing market for threading services has uniquely relied on the labor of migrant women from the subcontinent, one that has been sustained through efforts to authenticate women’s labor as desirably Other. Based on 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the South Asian beauty industry, this article examines the structural mechanisms through which migrant women are racialized as ‘authentic’ workers with a focus on businesses’ hiring practices resulting in the hypervisibility of migrant women in the industry, marketing and advertising of these services, as well as state legislation. I use the term ‘racialized authenticity’ to understand these structural productions and the ways they inform the context within which beauty industry interactions take place. These interactions occur in threading salons where racialized expectations around un/desirability are encountered by workers and consumers as well as in training programs where threading is taught. Together, these insights reveal the contradictory forms of South Asian racialization in the US that allow workers to authenticate their labor as desirable for consumers while simultaneously signaling their foreignness.

在过去的二十年里，随着文化商品化和全球城市农民工的增长，洛杉矶的民族美容市场迅速发展。尤其是南亚美容行业，已经成为一个高度可见种族美学实践的场所，例如穿线脱毛和指甲花艺术，以及在这些沙龙中正式和非正式雇用的南亚移民女性。穿线，通常作为印度、亚洲、阿育吠陀和/或东方脱毛技术销售，使用缠绕在皮肤上的棉线从根部拔出毛发。这一不断增长的穿线服务市场独特地依赖于来自次大陆的移民妇女的劳动力，通过努力将妇女劳动力视为理想的其他劳动力，这一市场得以维持。基于在南亚美容行业 22 个月的民族志实地考察，本文研究了移民女性被种族化为“真实”工人的结构机制，重点关注企业的招聘实践，导致移民女性在该行业的高度可见性，这些服务的营销和广告，以及州立法。我使用术语“种族化的真实性”来理解这些结构性产品以及它们为美容行业互动发生的背景提供信息的方式。这些互动发生在穿线沙龙中，在那里工人和消费者遇到了对不受欢迎/不受欢迎的种族化期望，以及在教授穿线的培训计划中。一起，