It’s hard to say goodbye! Lupita Nyong’o unveiled a major hair change and revealed that the makeover made her “sad.”
“I chopped off my sisterlocks! Here’s how I said goodbye,” the Black Panther actress, 40, wrote alongside an Instagram video of her transformation on Sunday, April 16. In the clip, Nyong’o gushed about her strands before the trim, saying, “It’s time to let you go. It’s sad, it’s oh so sad.”
She continued: “You’ve been so good to me! You’ve been so thick … for the first time in my life. I’m going to miss you. Come back again.” The Little Monsters star then blew her crown a few kisses before pulling out a pair of scissors as the popular TikTok audio “girl, don’t do it,” played in the background.
“I’m not gonna do it, girl,” the Mexico City native mouthed. The recording later transitioned to show Nyong’o with a fresh buzzcut. “I did it,” she said while poking her head out of a car window.
Her fans and famous friends applauded the switch-up in the comments section. “Beautiful,” Michael B. Jordan wrote as Andra Day commented several heart eye emojis.
Nyong’o’s followers went on to share their experiences with big chops. “I did the SAME thing! Had shoulder length sisterlocks and did the big chop myself. It was so freeing! You look great, Lupita!” one fan gushed. A second social media user commented, “A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life,” as a third fan added, “Stunning either way, but on one rocks short hair like Lupita … Just in time for summer!”
While Nyong’o has been rocking the tiny-sized dreadlocks for some time, she is most known for her shaved head. She’s also tried out an assortment of other styles including towering buns, afro puffs, braided updos and more.
Despite being able to pull off almost any ‘do, the 355 star didn’t always have hair confidence.
“I didn’t love my hair when I was a child,” she told Allure in a February 2018 interview. “It was lighter than my skin, which made me not love it so much. I was really kind of envious of girls with thicker, longer, more lush hair … Now I love my hair. I love it because I’ve also been able to really embrace the stuff it can do. It’s like clay in the right hands. Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands, but clay can be art in the right hands.”
