Recently, we told you that while taking part in Jay Z’s “Footnotes” series for the song “Adnis,” Will Smith opened up about the type of parent his father was and how that informed the way he initially raised his children. He shared that after daughter Willow became emotionally distressed by the demands of touring for her hit song “Whip My Hair” and shaved off her hair, it encouraged him to allow her and sons Jaden and Trey to be more free spirited and less restricted. It was an epiphany for everyone involved it seems.
Getty
“We’re on the whip my hair tour and she comes off the stage, had a great show, and we were in like Dublin,” he said. “She was like, ‘Oh daddy, it was great. I’m finished!’ I said ‘Yeah, you’re finished for the night.’ She’s like ‘No, daddy I’m ready to go home.’ That was like the fifth show. I was like, ‘You know you’ve got another 30 days on the tour. You can’t be finished now.’ So she went to sleep, and we come down, and she had shaved her head bald. She shaved her head bald in the middle of her ‘Whip My Hair’ tour, right? I was like, ‘Oh, sh-t.'”
Since then, Willow has sported a wide variety of styles, and she’s only 16. But if you ask Willow now about what truly spurred her decision to shave her head at such a young age during such a complicated time, her side of the story will be a lot different than her father’s, but still to the same point — she just wanted to be free to try what she wanted.
“I had to recuperate it, and it got to the point that I didn’t know what my natural hair looked like because I kept doing all this other stuff,” the teen told Refinery29 recently about her “Whip My Hair” days. “I’d look at baby pictures and see what my hair looked like, and I just got curious. Then I ended up bleaching it right after [laughs].”
Now Willow sports locs. She is taking a break from her naturally short locs to wear the long extension kind while she does sporadic performances. Whatever she does with her strands, Willow makes it clear that every style has a special purpose and place in her ever-changing life, but nothing beats going au naturel.
“Every single one of my dreads is like a stress ball for me,” she said. “I twist them when I’m nervous, making them longer and longer, and I like the way my long hair moves when I’m performing. But I have tried so many different looks and colors that it’s made my hair a little weak, so my favorite is when I go all-natural.”
