How the country is celebrating 'natural' Miss SA Zozibini Tunzi

Zozibini Tunzi crowned the 61st Miss South Africa. Image credit: Miss SA.

As tweets and tabloids shared posts of congratulations and well wishes, Meltwater tracked and analysed the news media and social media.

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Miss Worldwide

Miss South Africa wasn’t just the talk of the town locally. While South African social mentions accounted for 23.16% of global mentions, Thailand came in second with 9.79% social mentions and the United States of America was third with 5.10% – making these the top three countries that talked about Miss South Africa 2019 this year.

Miss Universe 2018, Catriona Gray, also caused social media buzz when she was announced as one of the judges for the Miss South Africa event. With the announcement being made on 5 August 2019, social reach hit 3.28 million on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter collectively. Facebook particularly saw a steady increase as local and global Facebook pages took to the platform to share the news, initially announced on Instagram.

View this post on Instagram

Reigning Miss Universe @catriona_gray joins her predecessor @demileighnp , @thandohopa @zintathu and @connie_ferguson to choose Miss South Africa 2019.

A post shared by Miss South Africa (@official_misssa) on Aug 5, 2019 at 7:00am PDT

Natural woman  

While Tunzi is the bearer of the new Buhle crown for the duration of her reign, it was her natural crown that received more news and social media attention.

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Conversations around Zozibini’s hair dominated on Twitter the most when we analysed the top social sources for these conversations, accounting for 47.3% while blog posts came in second with 32,7%.

I always have to reaffirm to my daughter that brown is as good as peach as she calls it and that she doesn't need to have long hair like queen Elsa because she is a beautiful princess in her own skin. Now thanks to #ZozibiniTunzi my Lil girl has her beautiful queen to aspire too. pic.twitter.com/wpTpE1ABb9

— Nolwandle_Nolly (@NolwandleNolly) August 12, 2019

What social media users in South Africa thought about her hair was also predominantly positive (76.4%) on social media, as posts shared how inspiring it was to see a Miss South Africa winner sporting natural hair. Only 5.5% of all social posts negatively commented on Tunzi’s hair.

News coverage, on the other hand, garnered topics mainly around how Zozibini resides and studies in Cape Town, and is originally from the Eastern Cape. But when it comes to her hair, topics included how Zozibini’s win was redefining ‘rigid beauty standards’ and empowering more ‘black women’ to embrace their natural ‘beauty’.

Insights provided by Meltwater.