Gabrielle Union on Her Journey to Healthy Hair and How She Quiets Self-Doubt
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Texture Diaries is a space for Black women across industries to reflect on their journeys to self-love and how accepting their hair, in all its glory, played a pivotal role in this process. Each week, these women share their favorite hair rituals, products, and the biggest lessons they’ve learned when it comes to affirming their beauty and owning their unique hair texture.
Gabrielle Union is iconic in every lane she occupies. Beyond acting in memorable roles (from Bring It On to Being Mary Jane), Union has been writing books, dominating fashion week front rows—often alongside her equally chic husband, Dwayne Wade—and most recently overseeing the relaunch of her haircare brand, Flawless. The brand’s new iteration is all about offering salon-quality products at an affordable price point. “What’s the point of creating great products [when] the people they’re meant for can’t afford them?” Union tells Vogue over the phone. Union also wanted to shift the messaging behind the brand. Rather than it being about achieving a flawless look, she hopes to help consumers prioritize hair health. It’s about having a “flawless soul,” she says. “I just want to be a part of people’s hair-health journeys and a part of that evolution.”
Union’s own hair evolution has been, as she puts it, “lifelong.” When she was eight, her family moved from Omaha to Pleasanton, California, which felt “99.9% white,” she recalls. “I thought I could achieve the right kind of attention if I just looked like the other girls and had straight hair.” At the time, she looked to relaxer as a magic potion that “wasn’t just going to give me straight hair but also somehow change my features,” she remembers. “I always felt like my scalp was betraying me when it would start to itch and burn or get lesions. That’s where it all began, this really dysfunctional relationship with beauty and self-esteem and value and worth and wanting to be chosen.”
When Union went from playing teenagers to more adult roles in her 20s (think: Moesha to Deliver Us From Eva), hair played a big role in that transition. In a quest for the perfect weave, she surveyed various hair shops and realized how directly fame was tied to what she could access. “I started hearing that they would have the best hair in a vault in the back, and you had to reach a certain amount of Hollywood fame or whatever to even get access to that good hair,” she remembers. “So, it was like, I just got to get a few more jobs, then maybe they’ll let me have access to the good hair.”
She found the system maddening, with ever-shifting goalposts of “respectability politics—all these things...that you need to do in order to be accepted and exalted.” Eventually, she decided to make her own rules.
In 2015, when Union was in her early 40s, she requested to wear braids on the set of Almost Christmas. Despite being the executive producer, she was met with pushback. Some colleagues argued that her character was meant to be a businesswoman, implying that braids wouldn’t fit with that persona.” I realized how we sort of internalized that respectability politics and what hairstyles mean and represent,” Union says. She succeeded in defining what her character could be—showing that a hairstyle doesn’t dictate what qualities a person possesses. The professional experience had an impact on Union’s personal life too. “My 40s were all about loving myself, however I show up, and being okay with that,” Union says.