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Michelle Obama's Natural Hair Is Our Favorite Thing on the Internet

There is nothing like seeing former First Lady Michelle Obama enjoy some downtime. After all, she served our country for eight years, supporting initiatives to further the education of young girls, helping kids be healthy, and providing us with some memorable style moments to boot.

Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama out and about in New York City. (Photo: Getty Images)

And even now that she’s no longer in the White House, Mrs. O is still leaving her cultural influence on America. Just check Twitter, which has gone into a frenzy over this photo of Obama rocking her natural hair.

It’s still unclear where or when the photo, posted by user @meagnacarta was taken, but one thing is for certain — the Internet is eating it up like a skewer of grilled veggies freshly picked from MObama’s organic garden. And it’s easy to understand why. After eight years in office rocking slick-straight tresses, plenty of people yearned to see Obama’s hair in its natural texture. As hairstylist Johnny Wright told The Root in 2015, Obama has been rocking her natural hair for years — we just weren’t able to see what it looks like when it’s free from heat manipulation (he uses a flatiron to straighten her hair).

Obama recently set Twitter hearts aflutter when the Internet got hold of a photo of her sporting plaits on vacation, but this is oh, so much better. Plenty have fantasized about how awesome it would have been to see the first black First Lady with a voluminous ‘fro — by now, we’ve all seen that retouched picture and wished it was real. It would have made a huge statement about black hair, and little girls with curls and kinks would have had a woman with similar hair to theirs proudly flaunting her texture in the White House.

One Twitter user pointed this out, saying that perhaps she stayed away from wearing her natural hair while her husband was in office in order to avoid criticism for having hair that doesn’t conform to the mainstream standards. A study has shown that a certain group of people still holds strong biases against black women who choose not to straighten their natural texture. It’s possible that in a high-profile position like hers, in a country like this one, Mrs. O opted to stray away from what would have been a silly and unnecessary controversy for some people.

However, we’ll take this look as a consolation prize. A relaxed, glowing, and healthy-looking Mrs. Obama in a simple grey and white polka-dot headband, with her poof of hair thriving in a low pony tail.

Michelle, wherever you are, may your hair stay moisturized with the restorative powers of coconut oil, your curls be refreshed by rose-scented homemade leave-in, and your edges remain unmoved.

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