Tiffany Haddish Reveals Why She Shaved Her Head, Says It’s the ‘Most Alive I’ve Ever Felt’
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Tiffany Haddish recently reflected on her decision to shave her head in 2020.
She said it was “the most alive I ever felt.”
The actress and comedian made the big chop to better understand her body. “I know where every mole is but I don’t know my scalp,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
In July 2020, Tiffany Haddish shaved her head on Instagram Live. Pandemic lockdowns were in full swing, there were no red carpet events in the foreseeable future, and she had been wanting to take the plunge for some time. “Everything made me think, ‘Why not now?’” she told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show. “And if I do have to be on anything, they always put me in wigs anyways.” Now, nearly two years later, Haddish tells Byrdie that being bald was “the most alive I ever felt.”
The Girl’s Trip star’s decision to cut off all of her hair was driven by self-exploration. “It’s really important to know who you are, to know every nook and cranny of your body, and that’s the one part of my body I didn’t know,” she said. In captioning the original Instagram video, the comic wrote: “I know where every mole is but I don’t know my scalp.”
But she does now. And although the hair has begun to grow back—she often rocks it in short platinum finger waves—she reflects on the initial baring of her scalp as a near-spiritual experience. “Baby, best feeling I ever felt in my whole entire life,” she told Byrdie. “The most sensations I ever felt. The most alive I ever felt. And then I was jealous of every bald-headed man I’ve ever seen.”
The comic specifically recalled stepping outside on a sunny day for the first time without hair. “When you touch the back of your head, you feel it in the back of your feet. Then you go outside, the sun is shining, and it feels like this warm hug around your head—just deliciousness,” she explained. And raindrops? They “felt like a billion, million kisses from God,” she added. “And I could feel every raindrop go through my whole body.”
As someone who is committed to being her most authentic self, the big chop just felt right. “When I was trying to be something I wasn’t, my soul was screaming at me: What are we doing? This is not who we are. Stop it!’” Haddish said.
The watershed moment carries similar themes to her new children’s book, Layla, the Last Black Unicorn, which follows Layla as she learns to embrace her uniqueness as the new student at school. Haddish told People that Layla’s journey represents the same one she’s been on for “40-something years.”
“I think everyone grapples with, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? What’s my purpose? How do I fit in here?’” she said. “And just being able to take a moment and say, I’m okay the way I am. Even if somebody else doesn’t agree. As long as I feel good about how I am, then there’s nothing that I need to change.”
And there’s certainly nothing about Haddish that needs to change. She’s an icon—with or without hair.
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