I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my hair for the longest time. As a teenager and well into my twenties, I felt like it was just too much, too thick, too wild, and just impossible to style properly. I’d often just tie it up, plait it, or on the occasional good hair day, let it hang loose, hoping it wouldn’t puff up into a frizzy mess.
Then, in 2014, Dove Hair Care picked me, of all people, for a commercial, celebrating the very volume and thickness I’d struggled with, in a campaign featuring “real women”. They flew me out to South Africa for a week, just so I could flip my hair in slow-mo for the cameras. The whole experience was absolutely surreal. You can still watch various versions of the ad online on YouTube.
For a follow-up gig with the same brand (here on Vimeo), I had my hair bleached and dyed strawberry blonde. It was a pretty big change considering I’d only experimented with colouring once before. It took a good 2-3 years to get fully back to my natural shade, a kind of dark blonde with lighter streaks which is what I am wearing now. Featuring in a global advertising campaign for Dove didn’t transform my view on my hair overnight, but it sure left an impact as it was a massive boost to my confidence.
Soon after, I moved to London to start my journalism master at City University, and that ad followed me everywhere. Classmates spotted me in magazines. People recognised me from the TV ad that was broadcasting in the US, UK and Canada on repeat. They invariably mentioned and complimented my hair. It made me realise that my “unmanageable” mane, which I’d spent the better part of my teens and early twenties trying to tame with flat iron straighteners (and okay, sometimes an actual iron, but let’s not dwell on that!!), was actually something I should be proud of or, at least, like.
