Oprah Says Shocking ‘Makeover’ Left Her Devastated

Oprah Winfrey has revealed how a disastrous salon makeover left her bald, devastated and too embarrassed to return to work for weeks.

The 72-year-old media powerhouse said the traumatic incident happened when she was a young television reporter in Baltimore and station bosses pressured her to chemically change her thick, natural hair.

“This is when men could tell women what to do with their hair,” Winfrey told Glamour.

At the time, Winfrey washed and styled her own hair, which she wore long and full. But her bosses complained that it was supposedly interfering with the station’s chroma key technology, which was used to place graphics behind presenters.

Winfrey reluctantly visited a French salon, believing the employees knew how to safely treat Black hair.

That confidence quickly turned into a nightmare.

“I went into a French hair salon, y’all, with my Black hair, and they put a French perm on my Black hair, and all of my hair came out,” she said.

One of the only other Black employees in the newsroom eventually pulled Winfrey aside and bluntly told her just how bad the damage was.

“She came up to me, and she said, ‘You ain’t got no hair. Come go with me to my barber,’” Winfrey recalled.

The barber was forced to shave off what remained of her badly damaged hair. Humiliated by the ordeal, Winfrey stayed away from work until it began growing back into what she described as a “teeny, teeny, weeny little Afro.”

Winfrey has spoken about the painful experience before, including during a 1986 appearance on the television roundtable Dinner at Rona’s.

She said the disaster began after a “horrible” boss tore apart nearly every aspect of her appearance when she was just 22 years old.

“Your hair is too thick, it’s too long, your eyes are too far apart, your nose is too wide, and your chin is too long,” Winfrey recalled him saying. “You need to do something about it.”

The criticism crushed the future television icon, especially because the station had hired her while she already looked exactly that way.

Winfrey said salon workers insisted they knew what they were doing when she arrived for the treatment.

“They said, ‘Oui, madame, we do Black hair,’” she remembered.

But within days, the damage was undeniable.

“And in a week, I was bald,” she said.

Although Winfrey was heartbroken at the time, she later said the experience forced her to reconsider how much importance she placed on her physical appearance.

“I understand now that the reason that happened to me then is because I was putting too much emphasis on my weight, my hair, the way I looked,” she said in 1986.

After wearing shorter styles during her years in Baltimore, Winfrey began experimenting with increasingly bold looks as her television career took off.

During The Oprah Winfrey Show, she appeared with everything from towering curls and feathered layers to sleek bobs, curtain bangs, ponytails and shoulder-length waves. Many of those styles were created by her longtime hairstylist, Andre Walker.

But not every makeover impressed her famously outspoken best friend, Gayle King.

During Winfrey’s 2020 Vision Tour, King recalled calling Oprah after seeing the enormous hairstyle she wore during her notoriously uncomfortable interview with Elizabeth Taylor.

While others showered Winfrey with compliments, King delivered a much harsher verdict.

“Everybody was saying, ‘Oh, it looks so good. It looks so good,’” King said. “I go, ‘It looks like you put your hand in a socket. I don’t know why people are telling you that.’”

Winfrey initially defended the gravity-defying look as “fashion,” but later admitted King had been right.

Looking back, she called the Taylor appearance her worst interview for several reasons, including what she described as her “bad hair.”

Decades after the salon disaster that left her hiding from the cameras, Winfrey ultimately learned to embrace her natural texture.

She appeared on the September 2012 cover of O, The Oprah Magazine wearing a full head of natural curls that required no straightening or blow-drying.

Winfrey said the natural look made her feel “unencumbered” — a dramatic transformation for the young anchor who was once ordered to change her appearance just to remain on television.