{"id":2371658,"date":"2026-04-13T19:09:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-13T19:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2371658"},"modified":"2026-04-13T19:09:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-13T19:09:11","slug":"gabourey-sidibe-is-deinfluencing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/gabourey-sidibe-is-deinfluencing\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabourey Sidibe is deinfluencing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Gabourey Sidibe\u2019s recent response to backlash around her toddlers\u2019 hair arrives at a time as we\u2019re being less curated online.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a moment that felt like d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, because just last week Coco Gauff was talking down detractors of her natural hair<\/a>, Gabourey Sidibe found herself doing the same, only about her two-year-old twin toddlers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you comment, telling me to do my toddlers hair, I\u2019m blocking you,\u201d the 42-year-old actress began in a post on Threads<\/a>, as theGrio previously reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

She explained that the hair of her toddlers, Cooper and Maya, whom she shares with her husband, Brandon Frankel, does get brushed, and her daughter often wears braids, but they are children who romp. After a full day, or even five minutes, their hair becomes unruly. By the time a photo is snapped or a video is captured, no one has the time or energy to stop and restyle. This isn\u2019t an episode of \u201cThe Real Housewives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sidibe is a Hollywood actress, fully aware of image, glam, and the power of presentation. It is not unreasonable to assume she knows how to get her children together when it matters. But that\u2019s exactly the point.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t immediately rebraid it because I didn\u2019t have kids for the (a)esthetic,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her content, where her children appear as they actually are, smiling wide, hair free, pajamas wrinkled, bodies in motion and uncontained, is a work of what the internet has started to call \u201cdeinfluencing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whereas influencing is polished, highly styled, curated, and usually posted with a clear aim, deinfluencing is the exact opposite. Messy and cluttered bathroom countertops in \u201cget ready with mes.\u201d Unmade beds in the backgrounds of mirror selfies. Videos that start with \u201clet me de-influence you\u201d before cutting to the chaos of toddlers screaming and crying. Random photo dumps filled with unfiltered, unedited, weirdly angled random shots. Life as it is, not as it is often performed to be. And it\u2019s the kind of content we\u2019re going to start to see more of.<\/p>\n

Research into the trend published earlier this year<\/a> found it stems from desire, as there\u2019s growing fatigue with hyper-curated content, especially as companies, brands, and celebrities, to some extent, adopted influencer-style marketing en masse to move away from that ecosystem. Add in the rise of AI-generated content, where folks aren\u2019t even wearing or doing the things they are influencing us to anymore, and imperfection, any at all, becomes proof of life, that there\u2019s a real person trying to connect.<\/p>\n

However, for Black women, and especially Black mothers, that kind of authenticity comes with risk. Motherhood is policed. Black motherhood even more so. Black hair, maybe even increasingly so. So when Sidibe, or other Black mothers, post their children as they are, not styled for public consumption but for their actual lives, what is seen as \u201crelatable\u201d for others can read as \u201cneglect\u201d for them. The standards double right along with the scrutiny. But that doesn\u2019t mean the response has to be to conform and perform perfectly. If anything, it makes the case for why we need even more of this, not less.<\/p>\n

Gabrielle Union has long been doing this in her own way as well, whether through the now-viral \u201cShady Baby\u201d meme-turned-book-series with her daughter Kaavia\u00a0or by consistently showing both her own hair and her daughter\u2019s hair in all its stages.<\/p>\n

We can\u2019t ask for authenticity and then punish it when it shows up. We can\u2019t demand real life and then reject it when it isn\u2019t hitting some aesthetic ideal. And we cannot keep forcing Black children into boxes, especially when it comes to their hair. We should be able to wear our hair as it grows out of our heads. Our protective styles, which date back centuries, deserve not just trendy, fleeting admiration but real respect, and from us most of all.<\/p>\n

So, we should get used to seeing more Black children with messy heads. Not because something is wrong or someone is being neglectful, but because someone is being honest.<\/p>\n

More must-reads:<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gabourey Sidibe\u2019s recent response to backlash around her toddlers\u2019 hair arrives at a time as we\u2019re being less curated online.\u00a0 In a moment that felt like d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, because just last week Coco Gauff was talking down detractors of her natural hair, Gabourey Sidibe found herself doing the same, only about her two-year-old twin toddlers. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2371659,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[404340,43399,402740],"class_list":["post-2371658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-gabourey-sidibe","tag-hollywood-actress","tag-natural-hair"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Gabourey-Sidibe-is-deinfluencing.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2371658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2371660,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2371658\/revisions\/2371660"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2371659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2371658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2371658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2371658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}