As a four-year-old playing in the living room of my grandmother’s Soviet era apartment in Glazov, I suddenly realized that she probably wished she had a different granddaughter. This realization dawned on me matter-of-factly, as if beamed into my mind from an all-knowing source. I could picture this other granddaughter so clearly. She had smooth, white skin and chubby, rosy cheeks, with two perfect, bright blonde pig tails curling precociously on the sides of her head. Her eyes were a deep and endless blue, framed by perfect long eyelashes. She was the opposite of me, with my brown skin, dark brown, wavy hair, and dark brown eyes. So much brown. Where did this other, ideal, granddaughter come from? Before I knew how to read, or ride a bicycle, I seemed to know that ordinary Russian families had little granddaughters that were white and blonde. Maybe she was the amalgamation of all the Russian girls in my kindergarten, my family, in my books, and cartoons.
She definitely did not come from my grandmother, who, herself a green-eyed blonde, never made me feel like I was not enough. Neither did she come from my mother, who was pale and freckled with hazel eyes and auburn hair, or my Nigerian father. At every opportunity, my parents extolled the beauty and virtues of internationally known Black celebrities like Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson. They made sure I had Black Barbie dolls to play with so that I would not center blonde and blue-eyed beauty.
But still, I conjured up this other granddaughter. Wherever she came from, she was a certainty that I kept to myself. I knew I looked different from other Russian girls, and that my family was also different from other Russian families— a difference that was not ideal or was more difficult in some way I did not yet understand.
By six years old, I was a certified girly girl obsessed with three things: dressing up, The Spice Girls, and long hair. There are entire photo albums of me dressed up in different outfits, posing precociously, complete with little heels and purses — a sort of analog Instagram lookbook years before high-speed Internet. Despite my parents’ commendable efforts to make me love Scary Spice because she had curly hair and brown skin like me, I could not be less interested in her. I was completely devoted to Baby Spice. To me, she was the prettiest and best Spice Girl, epitomizing what it meant to be a girl, with her long, platinum blonde pigtails and pink outfits. I was constantly begging my mom to grow out her chic 90s haircut, measuring my own hair every time I took a bath, delighted by the way the water made it stretch out long and straight down my back. “How long is it?” I would ask my mom almost every single bath time. “Has it grown?” My mom always assured me that it had, showing me with her hand how far down my back my hair was.
One day when I was seven, I was sitting on the grey-blue carpet in our apartment in Moscow, looking through my parents’ collection of CDs out of boredom. The CDs were mostly in English, purchased by my parents on one of their many trips to London. I couldn’t understand what they said, but I would carefully pull each CD out of its slot in the black plastic organizer and study the artists on the album cover. One CD cover stopped me in my tracks. Four women in black outfits stood out against a white background, with two English words written in skinny black letters above them. Three of the women had deep brown skin, but it was the fourth woman that mesmerized me. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I took the cover insert out and flipped through it hungrily, studying every inch of the tan woman with the long, golden blonde hair. I wasn’t sure if she was Black. I suspected that she might be, even though I had never seen a Black woman with blonde hair before. I wondered how she was able to grow such long, gold, straight hair. The album was Destiny’s Child’s debut and the woman was Beyoncé.
By this time, I knew the power of beauty intimately. Everywhere I went, well-meaning Russian strangers were always telling me how beautiful I was. And I believed them. I saw the way being pretty invited special treatment, from presents and candy to extra attention. Beauty was currency. However, despite being told often that I was beautiful, I also seemed to inherently understand the relationship between beauty and blonde hair, and the special treatment it conferred on the women who had it, drawn to it as I was in everyone, from the perfect granddaughter of my imagination to Baby Spice, to Beyoncé. Blonde hair was the one thing I didn’t have.
The next winter, we traded the onion domes of Moscow’s Red Square for Toronto’s CN Tower and a tiny, mice-infested apartment, fleeing a Russia feverish with Neo-Nazi nationalism. By this point, eight years after the fall of the Soviet Union, skinhead violence was a constant, terrifying reality of life in Moscow for non-white Russians and immigrants. My parents worried about letting me walk to and from school by myself. “Urody,” my grandmother called them, her green eyes angry, her voice heavy with disgust, while walking me to the metro station. Freaks.
One morning a man was gunned down with a machine gun on the sidewalk outside of our apartment building. My pale mother was peppered with racist and sexist slurs every time we walked down the street, my little hand clasped in hers. The economy was in free fall. The Russian ruble lost two thirds of its value, with inflation at 84 percent.[1] The government doubled down on blaming immigrants for the struggles of ordinary Russians and all of a sudden, Black meant “foreigner” and foreigner was bad.
We sought solace in Canada’s multicultural mosaic, leaving behind everyone we knew and loved. After nine months in Toronto, we moved to Regina. We had never heard of Regina before, but a steel plant there had offered my dad a salaried job as a metallurgical engineer. My parents were ecstatic. It was almost unheard of for an immigrant to find a job related to what he actually studied in university, and so soon after arrival. I was delighted to discover that Destiny’s Child was famous here too. Fluent in English after six months of school in Toronto, I could actually understand what they were singing. Beyoncé became my new Baby Spice.
By the time I was in the fifth grade, the childish beauty that had made strangers stop me in the street had been replaced by pre-teen awkwardness, all skinny long limbs, thick glasses, and hair that seemed to become frizzier and curlier by the day. I was no longer the exotic “mulatta girl” as other Russians would call me, with wavy brown hair in Moscow, but the nerdy, Russian immigrant with weird lunches, an unwavering commitment to raising my hand in every class, and an accent. In other words, I was hopelessly uncool and not beautiful. Fifth grade marked the beginning of three years of relentless bullying and a conviction that my hair was the enemy and the true source of all my problems. Straight, blonde hair appeared to be the prerequisite for social status and popularity at my elementary school because all the popular girls were blonde.
One day I realized, if Beyoncé, who was Black like me, could do it, why couldn’t I? Whatever Beyoncé had meant to me before, now, she became the prototype of what a beautiful, Black girl was supposed to look like. I was desperate to deposit beauty’s currency in my bank account. Achieving her hair, and in that way becoming beautiful again, was the key to all the things that felt unattainable to me at that time, including belonging. If only I could just be beautiful again, they would stop bullying me.
I pored over images of Beyoncé in magazines, and I watched every music video. When “Bootylicious” came out in 2001, I was glued to the TV, hypnotized by the way her hot pink outfit made her ashy blonde, stick straight hair with hot pink tips pop even more. I didn’t think it was possible for her to be even more beautiful and yet somehow, she achieved it while gyrating in “Bootylicious.” The superiority of straight, blonde hair on Black women was reinforced everywhere I looked. In addition to Beyoncé, there was Ciara, Christina Milian, and Mary J. Blige. Beyoncé remained the blueprint for me.
Finding a hair salon in Regina where the stylists could bring my Beyoncé vision into fruition was a herculean task, but I was committed. The first hair salon I went to had one Black stylist. She was from Jamaica, with a jet black, stick straight bob, relaxer-induced bald spots, green eyes and a lilting sing-song voice. As soon as I sat in her chair, I told her I wanted hair like Beyoncé. She paused before speaking.
“You know that’s not Beyoncé’s real hair, right?”
Amusement made her eyes twinkle. I stared at her without understanding.
“It’s a wig,” she continued, waiting for me to stop being daft. “There is no amount of relaxer that I can put in your hair that will make it look as straight as hers right out of your scalp because her hair is not real.”
Shock and denial coursed through my veins. How could it be a wig. I knew nothing of weaves or hair extensions. I decided the stylist didn’t really know what she was talking about, but since she was my only option and her own hair was completely straight, I let her relax my hair as much as she could without making me bald. The results were disappointing. My hair wasn’t straight, or long. It was just slightly less curly than before.
Years of experimentation followed. Chunky caramel and blonde highlights, different perming treatments, my mom ironing my hair with a literal iron while I crouched hopefully over the ironing board, and a string of drugstore flat irons that could never get it to be stick straight and smooth.
None of these failures discouraged me from my ultimate goal. I spent hours surfing the Internet, reading about the Chi flat iron which was a luxury we could not afford. Fortunately for me, puberty and contact lenses allowed me to enter the sacred hot girl strata in high school. The popularity that had evaded me in elementary school was mine at last. But, my obsession with getting Beyoncé’s hair remained. To me, the beauty that had catapulted me back to power, was despite my curly brown hair, not because of it.
By the time I got to college, I had a healthier relationship with my hair. It became less of a thing to be wrangled into submission, and more of an area for experimentation. I wish I could say this change came as a result of my conscious repudiation of the straight hair hegemony, but it was actually thanks to a high school boyfriend who thought my curly hair was beautiful and encouraged me to wear my natural curls coupled with a better grasp of how to take care of and style my hair. I stopped getting blonde highlights, opting instead for jet black hair.
One year after college, I arrived in Boston, eager and excited to begin law school. My hair was a box-dyed fire engine red, inspired in no small part by Rihanna, who was frequently rotating between black, blonde, and red hair. Within weeks of arrival, I found myself at a hair salon near campus in Cambridge. My hair was past due for a touch up and I wasn’t yet familiar enough with the city to stray too far from campus.
“Yeah, I don’t know how to do hair like yours,” the white stylist said, looking at me unblinkingly through black-rimmed glasses. I was ignorant to the race-based geography of American cities and the unspoken understanding that someone like me should be going to a Black hair salon in another part of town. In Regina, there were no Black neighborhoods or Black hair salons, and I’d spent many hours in the chairs of stylists who looked nothing like me without incident.
“What do you mean?” I said, genuinely surprised. I was awkwardly standing in the sleek black-and-grey foyer. He hadn’t invited me to take a seat in his stylist’s chair or even taken my hair out of its bun to look at it. With each passing second, I grew more aware of the difference between my skin and the other people in the salon. The hum of conversation between other stylists and customers seemed to fade away.
He walked behind the front desk, increasing the distance between us. “I can’t do it, sorry. You’re going to have to go somewhere else.” There was a coldness in his voice that I couldn’t quite understand.
“My hair is like any other hair,” I felt compelled to explain, my cheeks burning. Clearly this was just a misunderstanding. “And I had an appointment today.”
He looked at me silently, unmoved. His steady gaze and straight posture let me know he was confident in his position and certain in my powerlessness to change it.
As I walked out of the salon and on to Cambridge’s sun-dappled, cobblestone streets, I felt like I had been transported back in time to an upside-down world. Suddenly, the warm, early Fall air felt too hot on my skin. The sun was too bright, its presence incongruous with the darkness I had just glimpsed.
I called my mom immediately and told her what happened. The shock in her voice travelled all the way from her living room to ignite my indignation. My voice rising, I said, “I grew up in Saskatchewan of all places, where there are no Black people and yet I have never been turned away by a hair stylist! My hair isn’t even that curly!” The words continued tumbling out of me, picking up speed and volume as they went, “Of course he wouldn’t know that because he didn’t even look at my hair. I wasn’t even asking for a curly-hair specific service—I just wanted my color touched up! Maybe I would understand his reaction if my appointment was to get hair relaxer or a perm or some other service that they do not provide.”
The next day the manager of the salon called me, apologizing profusely, explaining that this stylist did not represent their salon and that if I felt comfortable, I was welcome to come back, and they would do my hair for free. I was not expecting this, and I found myself laughing nervously on the phone while she was speaking, pacing around my small dorm room. I felt the heat of the prior day’s humiliation begin its slow creep up my neck. More than anything, I want this whole thing to go away, I thought. But I agreed to go back because a free cut and color meant one less thing to worry about paying for with my measly student budget.
The experience of being denied service because of the texture of my hair was so foreign and ludicrous to me that I wrote the whole incident off as just one bad apple, refusing to let it mar my experience of Cambridge. It was almost funny that after years of hating my hair and wishing it was straight, when I had come to accept and even love my curls, some old guy in a no name hair salon decided to make me feel ugly and powerless. This was the last time I went to a salon in Boston that did not have Black stylists.
But still my dream of blonde hair did not die. Even though I loved my curls, blonde remained the shining, golden zenith of beauty. Now that I was living in Beyoncé’s country, with her as proof that American hair stylists knew how to make my type of hair blonde, the dream finally felt more attainable. By the next year, after many appointments, I was blonde. I was surprised and annoyed to discover that being blonde was a lot of work. Not only did it take hundreds of dollars and hours at the salon, but I was in a constant battle with brassiness, using something called purple shampoo to try to stave off that unwanted orange tint. My hair’s shade of blonde was never quite right, it was never blonde enough, or it was too yellow, or too orange. But rather than being discouraged by my failures, I was like a deranged artist, endlessly trying to bring to life the image in my mind because having blonde hair meant moving through the world with ease. As a result, for the next two years my curls were lifeless and dry. But my hair breaking off constantly was a small price to pay for feeling like I belonged in every room.
When I moved to New York after graduation, I started going to a salon that specialized in curly hair. My stylist, a Bosnian immigrant with curly blonde hair promised me that I could be both blonde and have curls. With her help, the next two years were the pinnacle of my blonde hair. She even put a little polaroid of me as hair inspiration on one of the salon walls. After all these years of trial and error my hair was finally the same color as Beyoncé’s and I loved it. Bouncy, gold corkscrew curls framed my face and caught the sunlight just so. But at precisely the time when I had finally achieved it, I began to realize that having blonde hair and being a blonde were two separate things and that what I had really been seeking was the status, power, and acceptance of the latter.
In “The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blonde,” Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that blonde is a social status and not just a hair color with natural blonde hair conferring status in the form of “honor, esteem, and power to those who legitimately hold it.”[2] It is the hair color of Disney princesses, the biggest Hollywood celebrities, and the most popular influencers of today from Alex Cooper and Alix Earle, to Jackie Aina who is Black and blonde. Through movies, magazines, and Instagram feeds across borders, we’ve collectively come to see blonde hair as the price of admission to, and the indicator of belonging in, certain social circles.
To a large extent, regardless of race, we all consume the same images and narratives of what it means to be beautiful. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the idea of beauty and Black women, saying, “Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blue-eyed, blonde, thin white women could not be considered beautiful without the Other– Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair.”[3] The extension of this idea is that in a society where female beauty is racialized, Black women’s beauty is contingent on its proximity to Whiteness: the lighter the skin, the looser the curl, the straighter the nose, the more beautiful the Black woman. When in the same society, beauty is also currency, then the desire to have it isn’t just an exercise in vanity. From this perspective, hair is one of the only ways Black women can gain access to the power conferred by beauty in a racialized society. Of all the things that a woman can change about herself to fit the dominant image of beauty, hair is the easiest. It is easier and cheaper to color your dark hair blonde and straighten the curls, or install a weave, than it is to lose weight, or get a nose job.
But no matter how blonde my hair was, I would never be a blonde. When law firm hours made the constant upkeep feel impossible, and I told my Bosnian stylist that I wanted to dye my hair black, she desperately tried to discourage me. “I dyed my hair back to brown once,” she said. “I hated it.” But I was unmoved. I had arrived in Oz and discovered that it was all an illusion. The ease, safety, and acceptance I was seeking came from being a blonde and not from having blonde hair. Since I could never be a blonde, I did not want it anymore. I wanted to look like me. That day, we colored it the blackest black she had.
When Beyoncé launched her haircare line in 2024, seven years after I dyed my hair black, part of the marketing for it was a wash day video, with Beyoncé doing a voiceover. The video was aimed at proving that her hair was real, with the camera zooming in on her stylist washing her hair, no hair extension tracks in sight. “Get into those strands coming out of those hair follicles please,” Beyoncé says at one point. Through this video, Beyoncé was telling us that if we used her products, we could have hair as long and as thick as hers. The reality of genetics and an unlimited haircare budget aside, the video was interesting because it showed Beyoncé playing into and feeling the need to address a stereotype and myth that follows all Black women in America: that our hair doesn’t grow, and so we wear fake hair. But the curly hair Beyoncé shows at the beginning of the video, the hair that grows out of her “hair follicles” is not the hair that is synonymous with her and it is not the image she has built her celebrity upon. Instead, the hair that’s launched a thousand aspirational copycats, including myself, is straight or a wig, or in some iteration of big bouncy silver screen starlet curls almost always enhanced with hair extensions. At the end of the video, her curls are blown out and styled into big bouncy bombshell curls, ultimately reinforcing a white beauty standard. Although I bought the products because I was curious whether they would help my hair grow longer, I did not subscribe to the message.
A few months ago, I went to see Beyoncé in concert in Los Angeles. Her hair was as much a part of the show as she was. It was bigger, and blonder, and longer than ever before. She would whip it with gusto from side to side while singing and dancing. Strategically placed wind machines would blow her glistening, bright hair dramatically behind her, while symbols of Americana glittered all around her. In the on-screen visuals, a gigantic Beyoncé in a range of platinum blonde hairstyles, would be lassoing, riding horses, and fighting people in a saloon. She was so breathtakingly beautiful, so larger than life, and so undeniably talented, that at times I couldn’t believe that she and I were both human women.
As I watched, I thought about the way seven-year-old me latched onto the image of her on that Destiny’s Child album cover, and how that led to my twenty-year long obsession with becoming blonde. I thought about how there are still very few Black female celebrities whose hair tells Black girls that their curly, dark hair is okay just the way it grows out of their scalp. I thought about how, even now, as one of the biggest superstars in the world, Beyoncé still seeks status and power through blonde, perpetuating an unattainable, mythological beauty standard. I thought about the extent to which even she has internalized a beauty that is not her own. As I looked at her dazzling image on the screen, I found myself mesmerized by her hair once again and wanting the beauty that she had. Should I go back to blonde? The question popped into my head, and along with it, a series of images of me at the hair salon going through the various stages of hair color from dark brown to blonde, booking appointments every three months, and losing hard won inches.
No, I decided. I like my hair and I hate going to the hair salon.
[1] Coyle, C. (2022, May 16). Russia’s 1998 currency crisis: What lessons for today. Economics Observatory. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.economicsobservatory.com/russias-1998-currency-crisis-what-lessons-for-today
[2] McMillan Cottom, Tressie. The Enduring, Invisible Power of Blonde. The New York Times, January 19, 2023 Timeshttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/19/opinion/the-enduring-invisible-power-of-blond.html
[3] Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd
ed., Routledge, 2000. p. 98.
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