by Tyra Banks
Carolyn: Now, some people say I look kinda young for my age. And I’ll admit it, I do. But there’s one thing I do to show the world that I have lived one incredible life: I don’t dye my hair (sorry, Clairol). I love my gray hair, but when I first started getting those wisps of wisdom growing out of my scalp, I felt all self-conscious about it because people were always pointing it out. “Wow, Carolyn, your hair is going gray. Why don’t you cover it?”
So I marched my butt down to the salon, where my stylist was skeptical. “Are you for real?” she asked. “Do you know how much work that is going to take to maintain? And I know you ain’t a high-maintenance woman.”
But I insisted, so she did it. I went home, took one look at my jet-black hair in the mirror. I didn’t look like myself at all, so I marched my butt right back to the salon, where the stylist was just waiting for me, shaking her head. “I can’t strip it,” she said. “You’re gonna have to cut it.”
So I said good-bye to my phony black hair and let the gray grow in. It’s my crown of silver, and I’m damn proud of it. There’s a story that goes along with each strand: Some of ’em came from my marriages, some from Tyra’s modeling agents, some from when she signed me up for online dating unbeknownst to me, and some from Tyra’s foolishness herself. These icy strands represent the insane amount of work I’ve put in and the crazy lessons I’ve learned (many you’re reading in this book!)—why the hell would I want to hide that? I have no time to pretend I’m still young and dumb. And hell, even with all the money in the world, you couldn’t pay me to be twenty again. (Except for hot flashes. I’d pay somebody to make those disappear. Just tell me who to make the check out to.)
For many women, it’s the complete opposite, and there are twenty-year-olds out there who are hightailing it to the salon and paying top dollar to get their silver fox on. I’ll be interested to see if they keep the gray when it really starts sprouting from their scalps!
Over the years with Top Model, I’d occasionally visit the set to give the contestants pep talks or offer support, but one of my favorite times that Tyra had me appear on the show was in cycle 22, when she asked me to photograph the final four contestants—with their mothers.
First off, I was shaking on set because it’d been so long since I’d been a professional photographer, but once I got that camera in my hands, it was like riding a bike—it all came back to me!
All the contestants had unique relationships with their mothers, and seeing them reunited was emotional for everyone involved. At the beginning of the shoot, all the moms were very uncomfortable in front of the camera, and one even broke down in tears when she saw herself all fierced up! I had to work to get those mamas to open up, let go, and just flow. I had to remind them that they were beautiful and just as worthy as their young’uns!
When Tyra revealed the final photos, everyone was in tears, even the crew! One of the models, a grown man, almost fell to his knees crying so hard when he saw how stunning his mother looked in those photographs. I really thought that when you looked at those pictures, you could tell exactly what each contestant’s mother meant to them.
Tyra: Props to my mama, and all those mamas, because those were some of the most beautiful and deep photographs I’ve ever seen on Top Model!
And I wasn’t the only one who thought that—when we posted about them on social media, the response was emotional and overwhelming. Everyone loved seeing the moms all edgy and glammed up. When they saw those photos, they weren’t seeing age; they were just seeing pure beauty and the mother-child bond.
It wasn’t too long after that when I decided to ditch the age limit for Top Model contestants. In cycle 24 (yes, 24 baby, we been around!), I welcomed our oldest contestant yet—a drop-dead-fierce mama (who’s a grandmama, too!) who had decided to finally devote herself to her modeling dreams after spending two decades raising her beautiful family. People were to’ up from the flo’ up with tears and excitement seeing me give her a chance at her dream that got deferred. The outpouring of support and tons of love she got was tremendous. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one out here ready to see some mother hens up on the runway with all them spring chickens!
And Mama’s dedication to her own gray hair is rare and next-level fierce! There are some famous mamas out there who look really good. Their hair is laid, it looks stupendous, and there’s no gray. And I’ll admit, they look slammin’. So back in the day when I took my mom to my fave wig shops to find her a version of these cool mom hairdos, she yelled . . .
Carolyn: That ain’t me!
Tyra: And she yelled it hella loud.
Carolyn: Even with a wig, I want to look like myself. I want a lovely silver-colored wig that still represents my acceptance of my age. It ain’t easy, though: Gray wigs that don’t make you look like the little church lady in the front pew are darn hard to find!
Tyra and I switched wigs and expressions after a J.Lo show in Las Vegas. How’s my Smize?
Tyra: Yes they are. Mama’ll have me going from wig store to wig store in Chicago, Atlanta, New York, and Paris(!) searching for some salt and pepper.
Carolyn: So when I do find stylish ones, no matter where I am, I buy them in bulk.
Tyra: It is easy being stuck in customs and explaining that she’s not planning to sell these bundles of wigs back in America. Why? They take one look at all that gray swimming in her carry-on and know not many American women would want to touch them with a ten-foot pole!
Carolyn: I have to say, the only thing that did surprise me about aging was the gravitational pull. I remember the first time I noticed it, looking in the mirror. “Hmm,” I thought, “things that used to be standing up are now lying down.” Then eventually, they weren’t just lying down; they were looking at the floor!
I went to the store and bought every kind of breast lifter, tummy tucker, and butt smoother I could find, but squeezing myself into them just reminded me of when my own mama tried to make me wear a girdle. It triggered something in my brain: Instead of making me feel better and more beautiful, all those stretchy tubes made me feel bad about myself. To hell with this. If a saggy body is what getting older is, then I’ll take it. ’Cause this is me.
Tyra: Sorry, Ma. I have to disagree with you here. I love me some stretchy-ass tubes, and most women do. After all, God created Adam, Eve, and Sara Blakely so that she could create Spanx.
Carolyn: Well, while you sit there and can’t breathe, let me finish what the heck I was saying. Physical beauty . . . it’s just a shell, baby. I know we have all met people who had a Hershey’s Kiss sparkly, pretty wrapper of a face and body, but when you got to know them, they “tasted” like a vomit-flavored Jelly Belly (yeah, those really exist). When outer beauty is all you’ve got and you’re not intelligent or kind, people will get tired of your crap real fast. You’ll even get tired of yourself. Wrappers, no matter how pretty, eventually get crumpled up and thrown away (and no amount of smoothin’ makes them look new again).
So yes, Tyra modeled and got lots of success for her exterior features. But I know full well that what made her into a supermodel wasn’t the forehead and the boobs, but the brain and heart behind ’em.
MY GREEN-EYED MONSTER
Now, don’t get me wrong—I do occasionally get a lil bit jealous of the younger models. Because . . . TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES!
KENDALL JENNER: You can be anywhere in the world and FaceTime with your mama! I had to share a landline with ten other girls in New York City, or walk down the street and around the corner to the pay phone in Paris every time I wanted to talk to mine.
GIGI HADID: You’ve never had to navigate a map the size of a tablecloth to get to a fitting. You have GPS!
BELLA HADID: You have Uber and Lyft! You don’t have to stand in the rain in New York City, trying to hail a cab to take you crosstown at five p.m. in the middle of fashion week.
JOURDAN DUNN: You don’t have to mix four shades of foundation from three
different brands to achieve your color match. There are actually a decent amount of cosmetics companies that now have a myriad of shades to match most brown girls’ skin tones!
KARLIE KLOSS: You don’t have to wait until interviews to prove you’re smart as a whip. Your fans see it every day on your social media feeds! Oh, you can also set the record straight yourself whenever the tabloids start spoutin’ a bunch of lies.
8
FIX IT OR FLAUNT IT
Tyra: On the Victoria’s Secret runway, I was always covering my ass.
You may think I’m referring to watching out for nasty models who wanted to trip me on the runway because my Angel wings were bigger than theirs. But no. The VS models were a family, so there was none of that Showgirls cray-cray going on.
I’m talking about literally covering my ass.
In the beginning, this would just be a little bloop of a skirt that dipped down over my upper thighs. Later, when the Angel costumes became elaborate and thematic, it might be a flowing Princess Diana wedding dress train, a floor-length feather coat, or a sheer flamenco skirt to the floor, but I made sure I always got a little extra. Some of the models strutted their stuff in a thong, nothing more than a few little rhinestones above their crack (and more power to them), but the thought of doing that had my tummy rumbling and my feet quaking in my heels.
I was proud of the fact that I had a good twenty pounds (at least) on every other model up there. I loved my body, and having a little jiggle with my wiggle made me different. What I wasn’t so proud of was my dimples.
Dimples on your face: cute. Dimples on my butt: not so much.
My cellulite was stubborn as a mule (and I’m not talking about those backless, closed-toed shoes). It was completely independent of my weight—no matter how much I gained or lost, my cellulite was still there. So I had to learn to deal.
And by deal, I mean hide that ish.
Heading to the beach? Don’t let me forget my sarong. Dating a new man? Well, for the first six months, I’ll just walk backward when I get up out of bed. I don’t want him to look over in the morning, as the first rays of sun hit my cottage cheese thighs, and think, “Dang! I thought she was a supermodel! What the hell is all that?”
Almost every woman has an Achilles’ heel when it comes to body confidence, whether it’s her cankles, bingo wings, turkey necks, thunder thighs, or muffin tops, and mine just happens to be my bumpy butt. I loved me some Wonder Woman TV episodes when I was a little girl, and it didn’t seem like she found any flaws when she looked in the mirror, but most of us are not Amazonian warrior princesses who can fight dudes with a bow and arrow better than Robin Hood and his hood. (But who knows? Maybe every once in a while, Diana catches her rear view and thinks, “Ugh. Just for once, couldn’t I save the world in a maxi skirt? Or at least some friggin’ loose-fitting culottes?” Naw. I met today’s Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot, recently, and on top of being sweet as pecan pie, she was in friggin’ wonderful shape.) We mortal chicks, though, usually zero in on one or two things we don’t like. But I say don’t obsess about it.
Fix it or flaunt it.
Carolyn: When I was a teenager, the in thing was having a teeny-tiny waist. Now, I was not a teeny-tiny girl. I had a six-pack tummy, but when I put on my gym uniform, my thighs bulged out from my shorts like a couple of water balloons, but it never bothered me all that much.
It bothered my mother, though, even though they weren’t her thighs or her belly. She was always trying to get me to wear a girdle. And not just trying—she’d make me. Now, I love me some period dramas, but this wasn’t The Age of Innocence or Downton Abbey. It was the 1960s, when everyone was dancing the swim and the mashed potato, but Mama had retro values and rocked a girdle on her skinny frame daily, so she made me tug that panty girdle up until it was so tight around my middle that I woulda surely passed out if I set one foot on the dance floor, much less tried to mash a darn potato. Then she’d make me top it off with a big wide belt, like squeezin’ the hell out of my middle was just my style. But no amount of Mama’s cinching gave me a skinny waist, so finally, I took that girdle off one day at school and threw it in the trash.
When I told my mother what I’d done, she was pissed, with a capital P. She accused me of wasting good, hard-earned money, but I stood my ground. I told her she could keep on buying me girdles if that was what she wanted, but I’d just keep throwin’ ’em in the trash. I wasn’t about to risk fainting every day or waste away for no damned waist.
Tyra: I didn’t know I had a fivehead until I became a model. Yep, my frontal lobe was just normal to me, until people started to know my name everywhere I went.
First came the fame, then came the forehead jokes. Shoot, the rapper the Game even busted some lyrics about it. Everyone wants to be mentioned in a rap song—it’s, like, the ultimate nod of love—but maybe not when said rapper uses the space between your eyebrows and your hairline to dis you and Mariah Carey in one line. Then flash-forehead-forward a few years, and I just loved seeing that black man blush crimson when he was guesting on Top Model. He could hardly look me in the eye when I questioned him about the “forehead like Tyra” verse. (Mariah, just hit me up if you want me to guest on a battle reply to homeboy.)
My friend Raphael Saadiq of Tony! Toni! Toné! fame still calls me Tweety Bird whenever he sees me. I like to think it’s cuz I have big eyes like that cartoon canary, but we all know the nickname is probably inspired by the region above my eyes. The flip side of this was that my forehead was as much a part of my secret model’s arsenal as my arse. (And, like I always say: The bigger the forehead, the bigger the brain.)
If I wanted to look edgy and high fashion, I could slick my hair back and put my forehead on full blast. Throw a little intimidation in my Smize and I was an ice queen from the future come to stomp on all y’all. Or I could put my Tweety away by adding a clip-on bang, and look like an approachable, all-American sweetheart on her way to someone’s sweet sixteen bash. I tawt I taw a big forehead. I did—I did taw a big forehead!
Instead of a flaw that kept me from getting work, my fivehead turned out to be an advantage, my own sweetest taboo (shout out to that gorgeous goddess of a chanteuse Sade, my sister from another big-foreheaded mister). Why? Because it gave me a Vogue today, Victoria’s Secret tomorrow versatility that most models of my time didn’t have.
(Maybe I shoulda looked into getting it insured—have someone in a suit from Allstate come out and measure it. Is it too late, Dennis Haysbert?)
However, the truth: If someone would have come to me when I was first teased about my forehead and offered me the option of forehead reduction surgery, would I have forged my mama’s signature on the papers then and there?
Who knows?
Actually . . .
Naw.
Carolyn: Big-forehead gene is in our DNA. I have one, my father has one, and Tyra’s just carrying on our proud heritage. Luckily, Tyra wasn’t insecure about her forehead, because I always encouraged her to wear her hair slicked back in a bun.
Just two big-forehead women havin’ a bangin’ good time.
My personal hairstyle has always been the slicked-back chignon, and I tend to think the bigger the forehead, the better the slick-back. Just add some oil or gel, brush a lil baby hair down around those edges, and you’re rhet ta go, forehead shining bright like a diamond (OK, pat it with a lil loose powder), on full display for all to see. Over the years, and because of a few mishaps with lye-based straighteners (long story; I’m sure a lot of you have been there yourself), my frontal lobe has grown as my hairline has thinned. While the world is teasing my baby on the daily about her fivehead, Mama will continue to embrace her own, even if it someday goes all the way back to my ears.
Fiveheads: If ya got ’em, flaunt ’em!
Tyra: Let’s be real, though. Learning to love the thing you hate (or have been teased about) can’t always be done. We are humans
with emotions, feelings, societal pressures, and social media (!), and there are some things we will always just not like.
And that’s OK. It really is.
So I say, if you can’t figure out a way to flaunt it, then you totally have a right to fix it.
For example: I tweaked my nose. I had a Pinocchio nose: It just kept growing. Though instead of growing long, it continued to grow left and right in the area between my eyes. And that spot felt itchy all the time. Like the skin was stretching or something.
Besides the itching, I didn’t have an issue with my nose, but when I started modeling, someone else did. A super blunt makeup artist said, “Girl,” as I sat in her chair while she blushed my cheeks. “There’s something weird going on with your nose. Those nose bones . . . I swear they’re bigger than last year. You ever thought about getting that fixed? It’s like it’s alive.”
When I was little, about three years old, I fell hard on my face while my aunt was babysitting me. “Carolyn, you need to take this baby to the hospital,” she said when Mama came to pick me up. “She broke her nose!”
Well, I wasn’t screaming and crying that much, so Mama wasn’t having it, so no hospital trip for me. But all those years later, we started to wonder if maybe my aunt had been right, and that part of why my upper nose bones were growing so funky had to do with my tipsy toddler tumble.
Out of curiosity, I made an appointment with a doctor. He was highly regarded, and he examined me and said my nose was a medical, mangled mess and needed a complete overhaul. He proceeded to make all of these high-tech sketches of what my newly conceived nose would look like. It was straight-up-too-thin-too-pointy-too-WTF. I was like “Nose way, José.”
