Harris details her ‘hair story’: Braids were ‘definitely the look for most of my childhood’

Vice President Harris is entering into hairy territory — sharing the history of her hair. 

The vice president opened up about her much-photographed locks in BuzzFeed’s Cocoa Butter video series “Hair Story,” released Monday.

“As long as I can remember, my mother would part our hair down the middle and put it in two tight braids,” she said.

“I wanted to wear it out,” said Harris, 59, recalling the work-around she devised as a grade schooler.

“It’s so funny because I’d go to school — so [my mother] would put it in the two braids — and then as soon as I got to school, I’d take the braids out,” she said with a laugh.

“To get ready to go home at the end of the school day, my friends would braid my hair for me,” Harris said.

“The braids was definitely the look for most of my childhood,” said the country’s first Black vice president, first female vice president and first vice president of South Asian descent. 

Gazing at her senior class picture taken while a student at Howard University, Harris exclaimed, “As you can see, pearls are not a new phenomena for me.”

“I decided I was going to, through my college years, have short hair,” she said.

“Instead of having to deal with the amount of time that it takes to do your own hair or get it done — which I really couldn’t afford to do — it just was easy. When I was in college, I just didn’t want to have to put that kind of time into worrying about my hair,” she said. 

Years later as San Francisco’s district attorney and then on Inauguration Day in 2021, Harris said, “I decided I wanted to grow out my hair.”

“The blow-dryer was just to make it a little bit more manageable,” she said. 

Noting a 2023 interview with actor Keke Palmer where she said she prefers a brush to a curling iron, Harris told BuzzFeed, “Yes, it’s the round brush. Not the hot iron. That’s how I do it.”

Harris isn’t the first Black female political figure to open up about her tresses.

In 2022, Michelle Obama said she intentionally waited until she left the White House to wear her hair in braids.

“They ain’t ready for it!” Obama said at the time, suggesting the country was “getting adjusted” to a Black woman as first lady.