Tracee Ellis Ross on Her Natural Hair Journey!

My hair has always been a huge part of me. I swear you can chronicle the evolution of my spirit and my embracing and celebrating all of who I am through my hair journey.

In all honestly, I’ve completely resorted back to all of my childhood hairstyles! The way I wear my hair at home, the way I braid my hair, and the way I comb out my natural curls to get that huge wind swept, salt water look… it’s all very reminiscent of my childhood photos and the history of my mother’s hairstyles.

I have not always been natural. I had a relaxer in my hair during my teen years…well it was more of a texturizer than a relaxer.  But I started as a natural girl. I used to go to Joseph’s every Saturday to get a roller set, a wet set.  I’d sit under the dryer for an hour while I waited for ‘lil Joe-Joe to do my blow-out. He was like, ‘THE guy’, so everybody waited for hours and hours to see him and that was the majority of your Saturday.

So I did that for many years and if I couldn’t go for my hair appointment, my mom would blow my hair out or put the hot comb on the stove, which was a part of her childhood.  My hair never required a ton of heat and my texture was actually really consistent but the pivotal point came when I moved to Europe to go to school.  Enter the Relaxer.

I remember calling my mom from there and saying ‘Mom, I know that hair, in it’s essence is already dead, but my hair is dead in a way that I don’t know how to explain.’  I was all the way in Europe and I was in school and it was just me doing my hair.  I would kind of blow out the front of my hair, my sort of ‘quote, unquote’ bangs and kind of poof them forward with a headband and take the rest of my hair and put it in a little bun really low down at my neck.  And so I had this poof in the front and whatever in the back and whenever I’d come home from Switzerland I’d get my hair relaxed.  So when I left Switzerland and started going to school in the States, which was 10^th grade, the evolution of my Natural Hair began.

So I didn’t cut my hair off, I basically grew my relaxer out and then the journey began.  It was sort of like this crazy experimental process of trying a million different products and actually, I’m still the kind of girl that will try any and everything!  The hard part was when I started working, I mean modeling was one thing, but then when I started acting…that’s when it got difficult.

For the first three seasons of Girlfriends, if I had an early call-time, I would wake up 3 hours before so my hair could dry naturally.  Three hours before!  I didn’t use any form of heat on my hair at the time… no blowdryer, no diffuser, I wouldn’t let anybody do anything to it. I had finally gotten my hair back to its virgin condition… my huge natural curls were back and I wasn’t letting any heat or chemicals near my head!  So yes, there would be these conversations with the assistant directors where I’d plead for a 9 am call time, but if I got a 6am call time – and I’m not joking – there were times when I’d wake up at 3 am.  And it’s not like you can wake up, wash your hair and go back to sleep.

 Then something else occurred, an exploration of sorts.  Around year three, Tracee’s hair became Joan’s hair… it was interchangeable. So when I was off camera, when we weren’t shooting, I started to get bored with my look. The things that were so me, weren’t anymore- – the ‘Tracee bun’, my natural hair, became the ‘Joan bun’ and Joan’s natural hair. I was like, okay, I need something different, I need to be able to break away and turn back into Tracee when the season finishes.

So, I went to get my hair blown out and the person that usually did my hair wasn’t in town and the woman that she referred me to used a stove and an iron… it was still a flat iron, but it was too much heat for my hair and although I spent the entire summer with gorgeous, shiny, blunt, crazy great hair, three months later, my hair would not curl. So I ruined my curl pattern and I freaked out! But that created a whole new exploration.

There was a man by the name of Scott Williams that came in to work on the set of Girlfriends, I think it was Season 4.  After that season, I took great pictures of the straight hair that will never happen again (because the curls would never come back), and we started to discover the Chi curling iron, not the Chi-3 but the Chi. I don’t think they make it anymore, they keep trying to reconfigure it and it’s not the same, but it’s okay because I’ve discovered other things now. But anyway, the Chi iron saved my life! It was ceramic and it would get hot enough that it would leave me with straight, silky hair, but it wasn’t so hot that it would change my curl pattern.  So we nursed my hair back to health using a silicone-y something on my hair and the Chi and that’s when I discovered all these other hairstyles that I could achieve. And we found that balance between my natural hair volume and more ‘movie stary’ looks- that’s what we used to call it when I started naming all of the hairstyles!