Meghan Markle and Mariah Carey are making waves on the airwaves.
The Duchess of Sussex welcomed the pop icon to her “Archetypes” podcast Tuesday, and during their chat, the two biracial stars discussed the difficulties of having natural hair in Hollywood.
Speaking about her 1993 music video for “Dreamlover,” Carey recalled, “People were saying, ‘girl next door’ … because there was also this ambiguity about me, racially, that fed into that, and those curls.”
Continued the 53-year-old Grammy winner, “Here’s the thing: They didn’t know how to do my hair, because if it was a white hairdresser that had never dealt with textured hair, they would tend to do a different thing. And my hair would be like, ‘You’re not doing that!’”
Even if Carey was assigned a hairstylist who exclusively worked with natural locks, she said, “it would become too much product and too much weight.”
Markle, 41, said she also experienced having her hair “shellacked” by “so much heavy hair grease” in the past, when pros would try to “slick those roots down.”
For both women, these frustrations extended beyond their work, with Carey recalling that “nobody knew how to do [her] hair, even as a little girl” growing up with a white mother and a black father.
“I think sometimes when it’s the other way around, you get the benefit of someone who’s dealt with textured hair,” the “Obsessed” singer added.
For Markle — who described her own hair as “so curly and so, so thick,” and recently delighted Sussex fans by showing off her natural texture during a video call — maternal grandmother Jeannette was once tasked with taming her tresses.
“She’d go, ‘Just hold on to the sink,’ and I would grip my little hands on both sides,” the duchess remembered. “You have no luxury of being tender-headed.”
It’s shared experiences like these that made Markle a Carey fan from the start.
“When I was a young teenager, I wanted to dress, look, be, sing, do everything like Mariah Carey,” she said.
“She was so glamorous and fabulous and talented. She was successful. And she was mixed, like me. She was an aspirational figure I could see … and you have to see it to believe it, they say. Well, I could see her. And it made me feel like I was also seen.”
But Markle’s “girl crush” on Carey almost came to a “quick demise” elsewhere in the episode — titled “The Duality of Diva” — when the “Fantasy” hitmaker accused the duchess of “diva moments” of her own.
“She must have felt my nervous laughter, and … she jumped right in to make sure I was crystal clear that when she said diva, she was talking about the way I dress, the posture, the clothing,” Markle clarified post-interview.
“She meant diva as a compliment, but I heard it as a dig. That moment, as she explained to me, she meant it as chic, as inspirational.”
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