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Tracee
I was one of the lone rangers in terms of entertainment who was out there wearing their hair [natural].
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“I don’t think you can have perfection around this because everybody’s experience is different. And so the goal is not to satisfy everyone. The goal is to start the conversation, have the conversation, and also to make people laugh.”
The day after our call, Ross celebrated her birthday by posting a “47-year-old thirst trap” sans filter or retouch. The caption, in true Ross fashion, reflects many of the ideals we’d discussed the night before. “I’ve worked so hard to feel good in my skin and to build a life that truly matches me and I’m in it and it feels good. I remain curious and teachable and so it will all keep getting better,” she writes in the caption. “Boom!”
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One of the things that have become clear through reflecting on this time, Ross says, is the lack of diversity within the entertainment industry during her formative years and the effect that had on how she viewed herself. Of course, she had her mom to look up to when it came to embracing her natural beauty. And there were trailblazers such as Dapper Dan. Among the publications she’d seek out at newsstands was the Quincy Jones–founded Vibe magazine, which focuses on hip-hop, R&B, fashion, and more. But Ross says the overwhelming pop culture images around her weren’t exactly encouraging her to fully embrace herself as a young black woman.
I have faith in the
process of dreaming big,
seeing it clearly, and
making it happen.
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And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? God did this. And I think it’s great,’” Ross recalls. In that moment, the years of inner work she’d been doing to accept her natural hair were apparent, but ahead of the social media era, there was no way for her to know how many people approved of her decision to wear her curls on television. “It wasn’t until season four or five that I started to have that mirrored back to me. I was one of the lone rangers in terms of entertainment who was out there wearing their hair like that,” she says, referencing Lisa Bonet, Cree Summer, India Arie, and Lisa Nicole Carson as other black women who were known for wearing their hair naturally on television. “Yes, it was all over our own communities. But in terms of the images that we saw [on] TV, movies, music, and all of that, that wasn’t there.”
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Her journey to accepting and learning to properly care for her own hair inspired her to branch out into the beauty industry with her own line of haircare products, Pattern. “I, like many women in the 3b to 4c community, have learned to be our own best experts because the industry did not have products that existed to support us. So we were left to our own devices, to the rituals passed down through generations and through the community with each other, to cocktail our own products and make our own things in our own bathroom,” she says of the inspiration behind the launch.
In September, Ross announced Pattern with a bold visual. In a photo that garnered half a million views on Instagram, Ross is naked, her legs and arms strategically positioned as she looks into the camera with a reserved smile. The words “Sometimes, it’s just all about the hair,” encircle the actress’s perfectly tousled curls.
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Beyond growing up in the glamour of the entertainment world, Ross was inspired by various experiences, such as watching a friend, a visual artist, cut open a bagel with a plastic knife in high school (“She did it with such care and so beautifully. It made me think of the way she must paint and the way she sees the world”); feeling a deep adoration of trees and nature; and immersing herself in the magazines she’d purchase at newsstands. “I don’t buy magazines anymore. I actually look at Instagram in [a] similar way, but it’s not quite the same,” she says. “There was a level of excellence and curated specificity in a magazine that I just really… I absorbed it.” Back then, she followed the work of Polly Mellen, the former creative director of Allure; Liz Tilberis, the
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WRITTEN BY Jewel Wicker
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Hair Icon, Instagram Sensation, the Woman We Love to Love
former editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar; and Vogue’s Grace Coddington, eventually getting into modeling herself when she was a teenager. In 1991, she walked in Thierry Mugler’s spring show alongside her mom. The following year, she was invited back to walk alone.
Modeling helped Ross gain confidence to experiment and figure out who she was as a young woman. “I didn’t want people to see the truth of who I was because I felt like it wasn’t worthy of being out in the light of day,” Ross says, explaining that she was shy when she was younger. “My shyness manifested in a really big personality, which, if you think about it, is the same as being so quiet that you hope to be invisible.”
“The worst thing that ever happened to me was the fact that they put the cameras on the phone because I was Miss Auto Self-Timer from the time I was a teenager,” Tracee Ellis Ross says, reflecting on her decades-long love of selfies. Take a glance at the actress and haircare CEO’s Instagram page, and you might notice she appears to be grasping a small object in some of her photos. It’s a remote that she sometimes uses to take her selfies. Ross has gotten so good at taking her own photos that a major magazine even tapped her to shoot her own cover story earlier this fall.
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As a teenager, Ross says setting the self-timer on a camera then posing in front of it often elicited eye rolls from her siblings and a bit of reprimanding from her mom (“Enough! It’s enough,” she says, mimicking her mother, Diana. “You can't just be looking at yourself all the time!”), but it was a skill that eventually paid off. “I don’t travel with an entourage,” she says. “It’s [just] me. And sometimes I’m like, ‘I really look good right now! I should really document it!’” If it looks like Tracee is living her best life on the ’gram, it’s because she is.
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Photographer: Amar Daved Stylist: Shibon Kennedy STyLIST ASSITANT: Bastien Allen
HairStylist: Marcia Hamilton Makeup ArTist: Lottie using RealHer Makeup Manicurist: Maho Tanaka
The product line, which Ross says has been a decade in the making (she wrote her first brand pitch as Girlfriends was ending in 2008), offers a hydration shampoo, three types of conditioners (aimed to service women with curls, coils, and tight hair textures), a leave-in conditioner, a shower brush, and more.
In the age of social media, women of color have been able to find niche communities that speak exactly to their needs more easily than in previous years, turning to influencers on YouTube and Instagram for advice on a range of natural-hair topics including protective styling, trimming, and styling hair of various textures and lengths. “I think [social media has] given a whole bunch of people access [who] would have never been given access before,” Ross says. “The industry has woken up, but I’m grateful that there are other avenues because the gatekeepers of the industry have not, in any way, reflected the reality of the world around them.”
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I used to sit in my mom's dressing room and watch her get dressed. … I was the one who used to steal stuff out of her closet and play in that world.
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A few years before she started modeling, Ross was living in Europe as a ninth grader when she decided to stop applying relaxers to her hair. She remembers the phase fondly, laughing at the process of watching curls spring from her scalp over time as her ends remained straight, a lingering reminder of the years she spent chemically forcing her hair to reject its natural state. “I mean, there are photos; it’s intense,” she says. “But there was so much pride in the new growth. The fluffier it got, the more I felt like I was on the right road. It was fascinating.”
By the time she appeared on Girlfriends in 2000, Ross had learned to embrace her curls, even when others didn’t approve. “I remember going
to the Essence Music Festival [in the early 2000s], and a woman pulled me aside to say, ‘Girl, you’re on TV. Why don’t you put heat on your hair?’
Ross’s mother had a profound effect on her self-image, particularly in the 1981 video for “Work That Body.” “I was really intrigued by it because my mom was wearing a bathing suit and sort of dancing around in a skimpy little thing, yes, but there was nothing about it that felt overly sexualized,” she says. “I noticed that there was an energetic difference of my mother saying, ‘This is me’ versus ‘Look at me.’” Ross says when she re-created the video in 2015, it illuminated this major lesson from her childhood. “There was this sense that I could choose—not in order to create some sort of male fantasy—but I could choose what made my heart sing and made me feel safe, big, strong, powerful or in charge, sexy or soft, or vulnerable.”
In addition to inspiring Pattern, Ross’s hair journey also inspired an episode of Mixed-ish, the new Black-ish spin-off she executive-produces and narrates. The show centers on three siblings (including the oldest sister, Rainbow, who is the younger version of Ross’s Black-ish character) who struggle to deal with being mixed after they were displaced from life on a commune where they’d previously lived unaffected by race. Recently, critics have reflected on the ways in which Mixed-ish tackles race, with some writing that the series paints a simplistic view. “What I think is wonderfully important and beautiful about the show is that we are attempting to unpack and talk about something that is not often talked about, if ever, in this interesting juxtaposition between the black and the white when you are that mixed person,” Ross says when asked about critiques of the show.
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It’s the week of Halloween when Ross shares her views on beauty, fashion, and art over the phone with me while on set in Los Angeles. Ross has been vocal about the fact that many of her days involve waking up at 4 a.m. and heading to set for shows such as ABC’s Black-ish, but on this Monday evening, she’s full of energy. Her tone is bright. Her laughs are boisterous. Her answers are a measured dose of wonder and wisdom.
That same energy is what has been winning over fans since the beginning of the millennium, when she starred as Joan Clayton on
Girlfriends. Today, nearly two decades later, social media has only
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amplified her traits that have long fostered a vulnerable connection between the Black-ish star and fans.
From a very young age, Ross was interested in beauty and fashion, a passion fueled by the glimpses she gained into the industries through her mother, the vivacious singer and actress Diana Ross. “I used to sit in my mom’s dressing room and watch her get dressed,” Ross recalls, adding that her mom did her own hair and makeup. “There are early pictures of me dressed up in her things. I think I was always drawn to the bold and the glamorous and the beautiful.”
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