Mary J. Blige was inspired to create her signature blonde look by Salt-N-Pepa.
The ‘Just Fine’ hitmaker was simply blown away when she saw Pepa’s platinum hair when she watched the ‘Push It’ hitmakers perform on television as a teenager and that moment has led her to go back again and again, after breaks for other colours, to blonde.
In an interview with ELLE.com, the 51-year-old singer said: “When I saw Salt’s hair was platinum, it was done. Game over.”
The ‘Family Affair’ singer found crafting an “identity” very important as a teen and she loved that no one else attempted to go platinum in her social circle.
She shared: “That’s what was cool about the hood - everybody had an identity. Nobody wanted to look like the next person. Nobody was trying to duplicate anybody.
“I used peroxide to lift my hair color all the way up to platinum [blonde].”
Mary struggled to come to terms with her hair’s natural colour - a sandy brown - as she believed it “felt like cotton” and when her mother styled and it never looked good.
She said: “It felt like cotton. My mother pressed it, and she put all these ponytails in it. It looked nice when she pressed it, but when it was kinky, it just looked nuts.”
The Grammy winner “wished” for wavy hair “like every black girl” did.
She added: “Because of the texture, growing up I always wished I had wavy hair. Every little black girl wanted wavy hair.”
Mary believes that growing up with a single mother in the Bronx, a “rougher” area, led her to “develop tomboy skills” that stayed with her until she burst onto the music scene in 1992, aged 21.
She said: "When you have a single mother with two little girls living in the hood, you develop tomboy skills. You become the guys you’re hanging with, but I’m still a girl. I’m a little rougher because my environment is rougher. There’s always something you have to fight for. It was never a comfortable situation for little girls, so we had to be little tomboys to get through that time of our lives. By the time I got into the music business, that’s exactly what I was.”
