The Duchess of Sussex said her sorority sisters who weren’t Black didn’t understand her hair styling routine
Meghan Markle’s hair styling routine in college came as a surprise to her sorority sisters.
The Duchess of Sussex, 43, shared the story in conversation with her close friend and hair colorist Kadi Lee on the latest episode of her podcast Confessions of a Female Founder, released on April 22. Kadi co-founded and runs the Highbrow Hippie salon and product line in Los Angeles, and they spoke about learning to care for their natural hair when they were young women.
Kadi recounted her empowering experience of attending Spelman College in Atlanta, one of America’s two all-women Historically Black Colleges and Universities, sharing that “no one’s even surprised” she is known for “blonde highlights” today, seemingly referring to her extensive celebrity clientele.
“Well, especially because you were doing hair at 11 is when you realized in Connecticut, there weren’t a lot of people there that could do your texture of hair, so you started experimenting on your own. I can’t imagine what that was like,” Meghan said.
“It kind of reminds me of when I was at Northwestern, and I moved into Kappa, our sorority there,” she continued. The Duchess of Sussex was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma while enrolled at Northwestern University, where she studied from 1999 to 2003 and graduated with a double major in theater and international studies.
“I don’t even think they made plug-in flat irons at the time,” said Meghan. “They couldn’t! If they did, I didn’t know where they were, because I had the little stove, with the flat iron that would go in, have a paper towel on the side. I mean, probably half the people listening to this are going, ‘What is she talking about?’ ” she said.
“Or you’d pull it out, it would have the little scorch marks. And I remember most of the girls in the sorority who were not Black say, ‘What’s that smell?’ Is hair burning?’ And it was just what you would do to figure out how to grapple with this texture of hair,” Meghan remembered.
The Duchess of Sussex, who is biracial, previously spoke about struggling to find the right products to care for her hair when she was a young girl. Meghan previously untangled the topic with Mariah Carey on an episode of her first podcast Archetypes, released in September 2022, where the Duchess of Sussex recounted the feeling of being “shellacked” by “so much heavy hair grease” when her hair was in unfamiliar hands.
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Sharing an anecdote from her childhood, the Duchess of Sussex said that because her hair is “so curly and so, so thick,” her maternal grandmother Jeanette styled her hair.
“She’d go, ‘Just hold on to the sink,’ and I would grip my little hands on both sides,’ ” she said on Archetypes, adding that there was “no luxury of being tender-headed” when her grandma had the brush.
Meghan welcomed Kadi to the second episode of podcast Confessions of a Female Founder from Lemonada Media, where they talked about building a brand (Meghan unveiled As ever this spring and its first line of food products has already sold out), the slim statistics on Black female-owned businesses, how Meghan became a Highbrow client when she and Prince Harry moved to California in 2020 and, naturally, hair care.
The Duchess of Sussex said that her royal wedding hair stylist Serge Normant was the one to make the connection after a box dye job during the pandemic turned her hair “this very inky, almost Elvira-esque black hair.”
“And I texted Serge, and he said, ‘You need to see Kadi,’ ” Meghan recalled, and the rest is history.
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