A bride who’s had naturally gray hair for years has turned it into a stunning wedding look after convincing her bridal stylist of what was right for her.
In recent years, we’ve seen a growing movement among women who often spent years dyeing their hair to embrace their own natural beauty by leaving it gray. And in many cases, the results have left them feeling more comfortable in their own skin and happier in general .
But while it might be easy to assume this trend is exclusively relevant to older women, it’s just as important to those who went gray earlier than expected and learned to accept that difference for themselves.
Unfortunately, some of them will find that not everyone is so welcome to the idea of rejecting the hair dye , but one bride’s story illustrates how not all of these people are so set in their ways.
For 15 years, Kadeja Jackson of Miramar, Florida would go to the salon for regular dye jobs because she was embarrassed and ashamed of her prematurely gray hair.
As the Mon Cheri Hair Design firm explained in an Instagram post , this was because her hair started turning gray at the age of 16.
But starting seven years ago, Jackson started to adopt a different attitude towards her hair and decided to try leaving it as it is. As a result, she received an unexpected number of compliments from strangers asking how she achieved her silvery look.
As she said to People , “I felt more beautiful than I did before. I got tons of compliments.”
And while she was building this confidence in herself, she was also developing her loving relationship with Derrick Baker, who is now a football coach and behavior specialist.
According to People , they had met in the ninth grade and remained friends through all of high school, but he revealed his true romantic feelings for her during their freshman year of college.
20 years later, he would ask her to marry him on Mother’s Day of 2021 after they had two children together.
In Jackson’s words, “He’s very accepting of who I am, he loves who I am. He’s a wonderful father, an exceptional father. Just a strong man.”
So as you might expect, he wasn’t any more impressed than Jackson was when her bridal stylist wanted to cover up the gray for her wedding day.
Both would object passionately to this idea and as Jackson put it, “I didn’t want to look in the mirror on my wedding day and see a stranger. I just wanted to look like me.”
After she sent the stylist more photos with better lighting, she started to see things her way, which was encouraged by Jackson’s makeup artist, the Miami-based Tia Codrington.
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As Codrington would tell the stylist, “I’m so happy that you let her just be her.”
And not only did the resulting look satisfy the happy couple, but they had a surprisingly powerful effect on others after videos of her hairstyle went viral.
Her posts would attain 5.9 million views on Instagram and 1.4 million on TikTok, and thousands of those viewers would end up sending her DMs telling her how much her decision meant to them.
In Jackson’s words, “If I can encourage anyone, I’m happy. I’ve been getting a lot of messages about people embracing themselves — just off of my confidence that they see. They’re now willing to embrace things that they didn’t quite embrace at first.”
h/t: People
