Therapy Helped Gabrielle Union Repair Her Relationship With Her Hair

LOVE IS IN THE HAIRTherapy Helped Gabrielle Union Repair Her Relationship With Her Hair The actor and her daughter, Zaya Wade, talk hair, self-image, and the social media blues with Allure. May 12, 2022Gabrielle Union attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating In America An Anthology of Fashion at The Metropolitan Museum of...Getty Images

As inconsequential as it might seem to some people, hair can be a central part of your identity — to the point that a haircut, whether a subtle trim or something more drastic, can change not only how your hair looks but also how you feel about yourself. While a new cut is exciting for some, for others, it can cause a lot of dread as they watch the scissors slice into their hair, no matter how little is being cut off. Gabrielle Union knows this all too well. In the past, when she used to have her hair trimmed, "I would feel like I was trimming away my beauty," she tells Allure on a Zoom call. "I was trimming away my femininity, and I had a real love-hate relationship with length, texture, color, and styles."

It took years of therapy and traveling for Union to quell that anxiety and develop a more positive relationship with her hair. "There is no one way to be feminine. I'm fly as fuck with short hair, long hair, [or] no hair," she says. Because of this personal work, her big chop in 2021 — the result of her simply wanting something new — didn't evoke the same level of anxiety that even a minor haircut once would have. 

It's that flexibility with hairstyles and beauty in general that she admires in her 14-year-old daughter, Zaya Wade, who has dyed her hair pink and blue and played around with numerous protective styles. "It's such a huge source of pride for me and the rest of the family that Zaya is so comfortable being whoever she is in the moment," Union says to her daughter, who is sitting beside her during our interview.

Despite feeling like her identity is tied to her hair, Wade wasn't dissuaded from doing a big chop, which she says makes her "feel a little different and more empowered," in April. Though she loves her buzz cut, box braids hold an even more special place in her heart. "I just feel like a diva [when] I have hair to flip," she says about braids. But lengthy hair isn't vital to her; it's just nice to have the option. 

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Although Union and Wade have both worked on feeling like their best selves, they still have those days where they struggle with their self-image like everyone else. "It's usually those days when you're already not feeling great when you want to be right about how not-great you feel about yourself," Union shares. "So you look for negative comments and unhealthy advice and commentary to wallow in." And there's plenty of negative energy out in the world, especially on social media, where simply scrolling exposes you to countless "perfect" people, causing you to question yourself with every flick of your thumb. 

As someone who has been in the limelight since the 1990s, Union has quite a bit of experience navigating negativity from strangers, but she says that the advent of social media made it so much easier — too easy — for people to share their hateful opinions. "Social media shrunk the world and made everyone super confident to be a thumb thug who says any old thing that pops into their mind," she notes. "But it only took a few times clicking on the profiles of negative commenters to realize that no one who I admire or who is aspirational has ever left a negative comment on my feed." 

It's part of why she's proud to be the face of the Dove Self-Esteem Project's new #DetoxYourFeed campaign alongside Wade, who notes that it is "a great bonding experience for us to be here and share our positivity to counteract all the negativity out there." The campaign focuses on highlighting how social media can negatively impact young girls while providing parents with the proper resources to navigate conversations surrounding harmful beauty standards. 

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Union believes deeply in preserving her peace by using the unfollow, mute, and delete comment buttons to curate the kind of social media feed that makes her feel good. That can sometimes include unfollowing her own friends if their posts cause her to harshly criticize herself. "As people who love one another, I don't determine your love or like of me by a follow," Union says. "So if I'm making you feel bad about yourself, by all means, unfollow my ass, mute my ass, delete."

Her relationship with social media is not just about protecting herself but also her children from its adverse effects, so she's proactive about monitoring their social media accounts. That has involved creating their social media accounts through her own or her husband's own accounts in order to monitor direct messages. They have also set Zaya's account to only accept comments from people who follow her to dampen potential negativity. Union encourages parents to know all the intricacies of the social media world (Finstas. Need we say more?) especially when it comes to teenagers, who she says can become ghosts at times. "You can't be a ghost, and you can't allow them to be ghosts in your house," Union says.

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As a Black trans girl, Wade's identity has unfortunately been questioned and scrutinized by many online  — particularly adults, who quite frankly are too old to be that obsessed with a high school-aged child — but she tries her best to avoid hurtful comments. In fact, she's too focused on school to go searching for any of that toxicity anyway. "We all have lives that we all have to live, and no one has time to scroll and look and get mad or sad and then have all these negative emotions based on a comment from someone who you have no idea of who, what, where, or when they commented this."

Ultimately, social media should feel like a space that provides inspiration, laughs, and entertainment rather than one that forces you to look at yourself with an unfairly critical eye. But it can be harder for the youth to distance themselves and determine what's real versus fake — it's difficult enough as an adult — which is why Union is grateful for the campaign and the resources. 

So as Union advises, unfollow, block, and mute as needed to protect your energy and feel like your best self. "It's amazing to just be able to go wherever the wind takes us," she says. "However we feel best, however we feel most empowered, we just lean in, and it doesn't have to match anyone else's for it to be amazing and valid for us." 

Read more stories about social media:

  • Here's Why You Can't Log Off Social Media — Even When It Makes You Miserable
  • The Evolution of the Selfie
  • The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Health Myths on Social Media

Now enjoy “Bel-Air“ Star Coco Jones’s 10-Minute Beauty Routine:

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Gabi Thorne is the associate news editor at Allure. Since graduating from Harvard University, where she received a student writing fellowship from The Nation to research political news and social media as they pertain to students and communities of color, Gabi has covered beauty, pop culture, news, and more... Read moreAssociate News EditorKeywordsNewsdovegabrielle unionmental healthnatural hairHairwellness

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Originally posted on: https://www.allure.com/story/gabrielle-union-zaya-wade-interview