Willow Smith is opening up about her personal hair journey on her talk show series, Red Table Talk. In a new episode of the Facebook Watch series—which is hosted by Willow Smith, her That anxiety, looking at them in the mirror, not knowing what to do with my head, made me feel like, I’m going to take the reins on this mother Jada Pinkett-Smith, and grandmother Adrienne Banfield Norris—airing today at 12 PM EST, the three women are joined by Tiffany Haddish and Yvonne Orji, both of whom discuss their own experiences navigating childhood and adulthood in the entertainment industry as black women surrounded by white-focused beauty standards.
For Willow, “a very high fashion photo shoot” showed how hard it was to deal with this problem. The hairstylist working on set was unaware of how to groom black hair and couldn’t execute a look for Willow. In the clip below, the “Transparent Soul” singer describes being forced to create her own hairstyle and the discomfort and disappointment that came along with it.
However, for Smith, this wasn’t the first time she encountered an inexperienced hairstylist regarding Black hair tresses, nor is it the first for Black models. For years, there has been an ongoing conversation about the Black beauty experience backstage, or lack thereof. From hair styling to makeup, Black women are likely to get the short end of the stick compared to their white counterparts. This ultimately calls for more Black stylists and makeup artists to be hired to work with models who look like them.
“All of the white models were getting their hair done; they all had somebody,” she recalls. “The person that was supposed to come to do my hair looked at it and tried to do something to it, tried to touch it.” They were just like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”’. So I basically did my own hair for that really high fashion shoot. That should never be happening.
