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SHEAR HORROR

Oprah Says Shocking Hair Makeover Left Her Bald and ‘Devastated’

The legendary talk show host said “all of my hair came out” after the doomed salon visit.

Tamilore OshikanluContributor

PublishedAug 4, 2026, 1:24 PM EDT

UpdatedAug 4, 2026, 2:11 PM EDT

Updated Aug 4, 2026, 2:11 PM EDTPublished Aug 4, 2026, 1:24 PM EDT

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Oprah Winfrey’s first major hair makeover was so disastrous it drove her into hiding for weeks.

In an interview with Glamour this week, the 72-year-old media mogul recalled being pressured to chemically alter her hair while working at a Baltimore television station in her early twenties.

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

The future queen of daytime television had thick hair that she washed and set herself, but her bosses claimed it was interfering with the station’s chroma key—the technology used to place graphics behind a presenter.

“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.”

One of the newsroom’s only other Black employees eventually pulled Winfrey aside to deliver the brutal truth.

“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 shaved off the damaged hair that remained. The former anchor stayed away from work until her hair began growing into what she described as a “teeny, teeny, weeny little Afro.”

Winfrey has been telling versions of the hair horror story since before she became one of the most powerful women in media.

During a 1986 appearance on the roundtable program Dinner at Rona’s, she said the ordeal began after a “horrible” boss criticized nearly every part of her appearance when she was 22.

“‘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 telling her. “‘You need to do something about it.’”

Winfrey said she was “devastated” by the comments and confused because the station had hired her while she already looked that way.

Despite the salon workers’ assurances that she was in good hands, she left the horrifying visit worse off.

“They said, ‘Oui, madame, we do Black hair,’” she recalled. “And in a week, I was bald.”

Winfrey said losing her hair forced her to reconsider how much of her identity she had placed in her 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 shorter styles in her Baltimore days, Winfrey appeared on her talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show with a towering, experimental cut created by her longtime hairstylist Andre Walker.

She later cycled through sleek bobs, feathered layers, curtain bangs, ponytails, and shoulder-length curls.

Oprah’s longtime friend Gayle King has not always been enthusiastic about the media mogul’s many hair evolutions—and has never hesitated to share her brutally honest opinions.

During Winfrey’s 2020 Vision Tour, King recalled calling her friend after seeing the gravity-defying hairstyle she wore for her infamously awkward interview with Elizabeth Taylor.

“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 bold style as “fashion,” but later admitted that King had been right. Looking back, she called the Taylor sit-down her worst interview “for many reasons—including my bad hair.”

Winfrey eventually embraced her natural texture, appearing on the September 2012 cover of O, The Oprah Magazine with a full, curly style that required neither straightening nor blow-drying.

She said wearing her hair naturally made her feel “unencumbered”—a dramatic turnaround from the young anchor once ordered to change it for television.

Tamilore OshikanluContributor

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