Five years ago, Jada Pinkett Smith, Hollywood actress and wife of Will Smith, announced to the world the illness she was suffering from. The movie star was suffering from alopecia and she made it public on the show ‘Red Table Talk’.
From then on, Jada Pinkett Smith has struggled in silence with a disease that, in women, has been highly stigmatized in terms of physical appearance.
Now, five years later, the performer has shown all her followers on Instagram how her hair has been growing over time in a post that has already accumulated more than a hundred thousand ‘likes’.
The moment Jada Pinkett Smith revealed her illness a lot of speculation as to why she kept her hair hidden, she eventually revealed all the details.
“A lot of people have asked me why I wear turbans. Well, I haven’t talked about it. It’s not easy to talk about it, but I’m going to. I was in the shower one day and I had a handful of hair in my hands and I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I going bald?” the American actor declared.
The moment at the 2022 Oscars Academy Awards, where Will Smith took center stage when he slapped Chris Rock in the middle of his monologue for insulting the actress on air, went around the world and put Jada Pinkett’s condition back in the spotlight, Jada Pinkett Smith appears to be working to change the narrative about her condition.
The 51-year-old mother is on a journey to defeat her raging battle with alopecia, a medical condition in which a person experiences hair loss.
Pinkett Smith took to her Instagram account to post two pictures of herself; the first shows herself bald and the second shows some dark hair sprouting on her head.
“This hair right here acts like it’s trying to come back. I still have some trouble spots, but we’ll see,” Jada Pinkett Smith wrote, sharing a before and a now photo.
Her family hasn’t taken jokes made about her medical condition lightly. Last year at the Academy Awards, Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock after he passed a joke about Pinkett Smith’s hair loss. The incident attracted backlash but raised awareness of Pinkett Smith’s medical condition. Though Will Smith has apologized for his actions, he has been banned from participating in the Oscars for the next 10 years.
Pinkett Smith has been candid about her struggle with alopecia. In a Facebook Watch talk show episode, she shared her distressing experience of finding clumps of hair falling out and how it prompted her to cut her hair.
Despite medical tests, the root cause of her alopecia remains elusive, though stress is a suspected factor.
