Tia Mowry has been in the public eye since she was a teen, but it hasn’t always been easy — especially when it came to embracing her natural hair. As the decades have passed and stereotypical beauty standards have been dismantled one by one, the 44-year-old actress is leading the way when it comes to showcasing her gorgeous gray hair as well.
Mowry is tackling all of those hot topics in a personal essay on InStyle.com to help other people understand that “beauty is confidence, beauty is feeling good about yourself, beauty is embracing all of your flaws, and beauty is aging.” When she was a teen starring on Sister, Sister, she was already “surrounded by European standards” of what women are “supposed” to look like. She admitted that she even straightened her hair in the later seasons of the TV series “because this is what society was pushing as beautiful.” After the show ended, Mowry attended auditions with her curly hair, but was told by a casting director that it was “a distraction.”
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She credits Instagram for helping to change the narrative and ending her “negative relationship” with her hair. “I started to see more girls like me. Meaning, there was this amazing community of curly girls, and just Black women celebrating all the various textures and colors of their hair at every age,” Mowry recalled. “It changed my perspective on what beauty actually was and how it could be defined.” Of course, there was another hair hurdle to come her way that the mom of two might not have expected: gray hair.
Revealing that she started to go gray in her late 20s or early 30s, she “wasn’t alarmed” because her parents raised her to believe that “it is a blessing to get old.” However, there were plenty of people in the entertainment industry telling her otherwise. “I was working on a film, and someone on set told me, ‘You really need to cover those gray hairs! Girls shouldn’t be seen that way.’ And I said, ‘No. I’m going to keep my gray hair. This is normal, this is what happens,’” Mowry said. Like other actresses, including Andie MacDowell and Sarah Jessica Parker, Mowry is choosing her path when it comes to beauty and aging. “Because at the end of the day, no matter what the trends are or what people tell me about how I should look, I define what beauty is for me,” she summed up. And that’s exactly the way it should be.
Before you go, click here to see all the celebrity women who showed off their natural gray hair on the red carpet.
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