This It Girl’s Bleached Curls Are the Cure for Beauty Boredom

The 28,000-plus followers on Alexis Jae’s Instagram account most commonly remark on two things: her wholly original fashion sense and her headful of signature ringlets. “Sometimes I reconstruct an old thing that I’m tired of,” says the avid vintage shopper and aspiring stylist, who often snips and re-stitches her garments to personalize them—and takes the same approach to her bleached, tightly wound curls.

In the same way Jae crops a favorite sweater or patches up old jeans, she regularly takes hair matters into her own hands, calibrating at-home dye kits and combing baby hairs from the comfort of her New York bathroom—skills necessary to meet the demands of her ever-growing well of inspiration. When she’s not mining cult movies like The Dreamers, Pulp Fiction, and Buffalo ’66, she’s scrolling through Instagram for heart-racing photos from the ’70s and ’90s, then finding new ways to make them her own.

“I like Gwen Stefani; she had cool hair in the ’90s,” says Jae, who might be found adopting the singer’s affinity for sculpting Bantu knots and crafting high sprayed ponytails. Unlike Stefani’s fine, vertical strands, “my hair looks really thick when I do [those] styles,” she explains, referencing the corkscrew texture that owes a debt to her Puerto Rican heritage.

Highly individualized, era-specific beauty reduxes aren’t the only thing Jae has in common with Stefani. The pair shares a passion for the transformative impact of the right bottle blonde. For Jae, experimenting with her hair color has long been an avenue for self-expression, an early sign of the fearless spirit that marks her personality. “I started dyeing it in the beginning of high school, as soon as I was old enough,” she says of her chameleonic shifts from pink to purple to brown and, many times over, platinum. “[My mom and I would] go to a drugstore and pick out a blonde shade and she would just dye my hair in my bathroom.”

The risks have not been without a few bumps along the road. A lack of toner once led to an accidentally orange tint, hair damage that resulted in a regrettable pixie in 2014. “In the movies, people cut their hair and feel better,” she says, referencing the Hollywood trope of a woman changing her hair as a mechanism for changing her life. “I thought that if I cut all my hair off, it would make me feel better [too].” When the cropped look wasn’t what she’d hoped, however, Jae did what any proper It girl in her shoes would have done: She shrugged off the disaster and started looking for a fresh source of inspiration. “I get tired of a hairstyle easily,” she says with nonchalance.

What Jae doesn’t seem to tire of is her natural texture. “I love my curly hair. My mother always said, ‘If I had hair like yours, I’d never do anything to it.’ Eventually that sunk in,” she says of her ability to shirk the urge to straighten it, which could further damage the platinum that makes her feel anything but plain. (“I feel more like a movie star with blonde hair.”) To counteract the effects of regular bleach, she washes her curls once a week with drugstore shampoo that meets two criteria—it has to smell good and it has to say “extra repair” on the bottle; in place of daily conditioner, she sticks to rich masks.

Searching for ways to express her offbeat style has led Jae to experiment with face-framing bangs and draw waves around her hairline with the diminutive wisps of baby hair she wears when she pulls her curls back. These days, however, when boredom knocks, she reaches for a new beauty medium. “I like Lil’ Kim’s wigs,” says Jae, who, fresh off of an impulse trip to a Union Square wig store, feels that faux hair allows for a more dramatic and immediate change. “I bought two: one is iridescent orange, and the other is a white bob.” This new, easy route out of a bad hair day offers yet another quick-change benefit: “I just like looking different.”

“Dove Hair research found that 8 in 10 women feel pressure to wear their hair a certain way. In order to break down the beauty standards that prevent women from loving their hair, and celebrate all hair types, Vogue and Dove have teamed up with real women—not celebrities—to tell their inspiring hair stories. Discover more about Dove’s mission on Pinterest.”

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