Baby hair is brushing back into style. Is it the trend for you?

Baby hair is the term for the short, wispy hairs that grow at the edge of one’s hairline. Western fashion has typically dictated that this hair be rendered invisible. But international stars of colour, from Indian actor Priyanka Chopra to American musicians Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez and Alicia Keys, are styling their baby hair to mark a different trend.

Hairdos have historically been dramatic markers of identity for women of colour. In Africa and South America, going back to indigenous communities and tribes, carefully curled, textured and embellished hair was a marker of identity and style.

In the 1980s and ’90s, an earlier wave of calling-on-their-roots celebrities such as singers LaToya Jackson, Ginuwine and Fawn Quinones styled their baby hair in dramatic ways that highlighted rather than hid the feature. The new wave began tentatively, with most A-listers using subtle touches to incorporate baby hair into red-carpet looks. Early adapters with more daring styles included Rihanna and British singer FKA Twigs.

It has since trickled down to include more celebrities, more daring styles and runway looks. Stylists and influencers have begun posting reels on how to do it yourself. The hundreds of thousands of posts bearing the hashtag on Instagram suggest that it is making its way through the population too.

Try it on?

There is a range of options for anyone looking to experiment with the trend. Many celebrities just brush down and gel the baby hair so it forms a subtle border for the face. This was part of

Priyanka Chopra’s “natural” look at the Met Gala in 2017. What made the biggest impression that evening, sparking days of memes, was the unusually long train on her beige Ralph Lauren trench-coat dress, but look closely and you’ll see the wisps of baby hair around her forehead. “(It’s) all about naturalness,” her hairstylist Bok-Hee later told US Weekly.

There are also, of course, more elaborate baby hair styles. For her Saturday Night Live appearance in December 2019, Jennifer Lopez created a waterfall effect, using carefully gelled wisps and tendrils. Alicia Keys styled her baby hair with tiny Swarovski crystals for the 2020 Grammys. Rihanna has been playing around with her baby hair for years.

Race relations

There’s been some debate about who “can” style their baby hair, and at what point it becomes an act of cultural appropriation. Celebrities such as singer Katy Perry and actor Lucy Hale have been criticised for trying to leverage the trend on for publicity, while not even practising it.

In 2017, Hale was slammed for trying to pass off her bangs as baby hair, in a post on Twitter. She later deleted the post.

Perry was accused of wearing fake baby hair in her This Is How We Do video in 2014. She was also slammed for the cornrows. In 2020, the singer apologised for her acts of cultural appropriation, during an interview on her own YouTube channel with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. A black friend “told me about the power of Black women’s hair, and how beautiful it is, and the struggle… I will never understand some of those things because of who I am. But I can educate myself, and that’s what I’m trying to do,” Perry said.