The first-ever winner of America’s Next Top Model (ANTM), Adrianne Curry, is claiming that the makeover Tyra Banks gave her on the show has damaged her hair permanently.
She spoke about her experiences on the modeling program nearly two decades after it aired in an Instagram video shared Thursday. In the video, she told followers why two parts of her head, which she pointed to, were “partially bald,” with hair allegedly no longer growing there.
“The reason is, when I was on Top Model, Tyra Banks told them to put a weave in my hair,” she claimed. “Now, the Black stylists that were putting it in pulled her aside. I heard them tell her, ‘This white chick’s hair is too fragile for this.’”
Curry claimed Banks was insistent on putting the hair into the former model’s head and told the stylist to “just do it.”
“Fast-forward, halfway through the show, I had an oozing wound from the braid. Half my hair had been ripped out here,” she continued, pointing at one spot of her head and pulling out the little bit of hair that grew there.
She said that when she finished filming the show, the stylists there didn’t “take the weave out.” So when she returned to her hometown in Illinois, she had to go to an Afro hair salon to get it properly removed.
“It took hours and hours for them to get it out,” Curry said. “I was left with a horrific mullet, scabs all over my head. [The workers] were so sweet. They just couldn’t believe this was done to me.”
She then claimed that her scalp is now “permanently damaged from that weave.
“I remember Kesse on the show was trying to teach me how to itch it, but I didn’t know,” she said, referring to another contestant on the first season of the show. “I didn’t know any of this. Before that, she saw me [scratching it] with a fork.”
The Independent has contacted Banks’s representatives for comment.
During the third episode of season one of ANTM, Curry confessed that she had a difficult time with her makeover.
“The whole process with the weave is very long and pretty painful, but I don't like to show anybody I'm going through pain, so I didn't say anything,” she said at the time. “It was definitely worth it, you know? I look a million times different.”
Curry has previously reflected on her time on ANTM. During an appearance on the Just B with Bethenny Frankel in June, she addressed the backlash Banks faced in 2020 when controversial segments of the show were going viral.
“If anyone has a right to be mad at her, it’s me. And I’m over it. I don’t give a s*** anymore. What she taught me was the truth of entertainment,” Curry said. “It’s cutthroat. You can’t trust everybody and everyone is lying to you. So she actually gave me a great lesson, and the show was just an avenue for her to propel herself into something else after she aged out at modeling.”
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