The Sims enlisted Black Hollywood’s favourite hairstylist to create its latest inclusive hairstyles

For Black gamers, customising avatars in video games is an, uh… interesting process. There are often limited styles or simply none at all to create accurate Black characters. In the hairstyle department, you’re usually stuck with exclusively straight and wavy hair, or if you’re lucky, one or two Afro-textured styles that, to put it nicely, are pretty basic.

From time to time, we get a small win when video game companies add more Black hairstyles, like in 2020 when Animal Crossing released the Top 6 Stylish Hairstyles, comprised entirely of Afro-textured looks. Now The Sims 4 players can rejoice because the newest Growing Together Expansion Pack includes five new Black hairstyles created by Lacy Redway. 

As a hairstylist, Redway’s hands have graced the likes of Tessa Thompson, Zazie Beets, Sadie Sink, and many more. However, working on a human or mannequin head is completely different than conceptualising a hairstyle for a video game character, providing new territory that required Redway to remain “authentic” to real-life Black hairstyling. “I was really specific about parting and baby hairs and how things lay, or how the hair came out of the scalp,” she says. And yet this challenge, she says, was her favourite part of the process. 

Immediately when I watched The Sims 4’s gameplay trailer, a smile formed on my face when I saw the Michaelsons, a Black family who wore the new hairstyles. The four family members are premade characters that exist in the game. Celeste, a mother of two, had the braids styled into a top knot with baby hairs that were laid better than mine even on a good day. Her husband, Christopher, had the short coily haircut.