Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

Author:Martin Lindstrom
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-02-22T14:00:00+00:00

“Being told that there are no social classes in the place where the interviewee lives is an old experience for sociologists,” the author Leonard Reissman wrote in his 1965 book Class in American Society. “‘We don’t have classes in our town’ almost invariably is the first remark recorded by the investigator . . . Once that has been uttered and is out of the way, the class divisions in the town can be recorded with what seems to be an amazing degree of agreement among the good citizens of the community.”1 Brazil is no exception to this ethnographic truth. Most Brazilians will deny they notice any class distinctions, but after a few beers, most will tell you they can assess the social class of other Brazilians on the basis of teeth, clothing, shoes and—not least, especially for woman—their hair and facial features.

The average Brazilian woman is short and slightly heavy, with a dark complexion and curly or frizzy hair, not at all helped by the country’s high levels of humidity. She may or may not have African ancestry, considering that outside Nigeria, Brazil today is home to the largest percentage of people of African descent (during the slave trade era, Brazil was the destination for nearly 5 million enslaved Africans).2 The straighter a Brazilian woman’s hair, the higher her perceived social class, which explains the immense popularity of hair straighteners in Brazil. (An executive at Procter & Gamble told me once that throughout South America, girls and young women spend up to 15 minutes de-tangling their hair.) It may also explain why, alongside Colombia and Venezuela, Brazil has overtaken the United States as the plastic surgery capital of the world. As the Guardian reported in 2014, “With less than 3 percent of the world’s population, Brazil accounted for 12.9 percent of the cosmetic operations performed [in 2013]. This included 515,776 breasts reshaped, 380,155 faces tweaked, 129,601 tummies tucked, 13,683 vaginas reconstructed, 219 penises enlarged and 63,925 buttocks augmented.”3 As a rule, Brazilians have no qualms about undergoing plastic surgery; plastic surgery signals to the world that they care about their appearance.

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