Mary J Blige is on the cover of Elle USA Magazine and sis is giving!
The scene is set in a salon with a 90’s vibe, with Mary dishing on her signature style, including her hair.
She shared that she struggled with her hair for a while, noting that her environment really impacted how her style developed.
Read a snip below via Elle USA:
Before Salt-N-Pepa added some seasoning to her life, Blige struggled with her hair.
She felt its sandy brown color blended into her skin, leaving her hair looking flat and without character.
“It felt like cotton,” she says now.
“My mother pressed it, and she put all these ponytails in it. It looked nice when she pressed it, but when it was kinky, it just looked nuts.” She felt like an outlier at school.
“Because of the texture, growing up I always wished I had wavy hair.
Every little Black girl wanted wavy hair.” For a while, she resorted to perms, weaves, and dyes to give her hair the dimension she felt it was lacking.
Identity meant everything to young Blige.
“That’s what was cool about the hood—everybody had an identity. Nobody wanted to look like the next person.
Nobody was trying to duplicate anybody,” she says. And nobody in her circle had been bold enough to try blonde hair—yet.
But in high school, with some help from Salt-N-Pepa, Blige found the look that would become her hallmark.
“I used peroxide to lift my hair color all the way up to platinum [blonde],” she remembers fondly.
Blige developed a knack for experimenting with different hair colors and styles, from blondes to reds.
Society has always tried to police Black women on which hairstyles are deemed acceptable or which lipstick shades are flattering.
Blige’s platinum blonde was the middle finger to old-fashioned hair stereotypes set in place to push Black women away from the center of beauty conversations.
Blige was the disrupter.
As a Black teenager growing up in the Bronx—not far from Blige’s home zip code in Yonkers—I came of age in the kind of salon we’re shooting photos in.
The salon was a microcosm of Black womanhood, a place to try on looks society (and our mothers) had steered us away from.
I learned there were “safe” hair color groups: Maroon burgundy was a daring color, but anything veering closer to fiery red was dismissed as “ghetto” or “loud” by older women in my orbit.
Blonde was never a thought for me growing up.
No matter how attainable Blige made blonde hair seem for Black women, my deep skin and fear of damaging my strands made me look the other way.
Blonde was a color relegated to “bombshells,” with an image search history excluding Black faces.
So I opted for a gingery brown, dyeing just the ends for my initial color job, and then gradually moving up to streaks as my confidence strengthened.
That’s the thing about Black hair—it’s not just something to fiddle with.
Our hair holds emotional significance and helps define our identity, especially when the societal standards of what constitutes “beautiful” rarely include Black women who look like Blige.
It took a few dye jobs to finally find myself.
My mother found her look in reddish browns; I found mine years later in aquamarine blue.
Blige found hers in blonde.
She was subtly championing radical self-expression by borrowing references from the past, reimagining them, and making them her own, with immense impact on fans and fellow musicians alike.
Read the entire editorial here.
