Meghan Markle's Boxed Hair Dye Disaster During the Pandemic Left Her Looking "Elvira-Esque"
"I thought, ‘I'm gonna look just like she does on the box.'"
Like many of us, Meghan Markle struggled with at-home beauty treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that included how to dye her own hair. Last November, she attended the launch of close friend Kadi Lee's Highbrow Hippie haircare and wellness line, admitting, "I was using boxed dye when I met her!" Now, Lee has become the latest guest on the Duchess of Sussex's new Lemonada Media podcast, "Confessions of a Female Founder," and Meghan elaborated on her terrible drugstore dye experience.
Lee—who colors hair for a number of famous faces, including the duchess—first met Meghan through mutual friend and hairstylist Serge Normant during the pandemic. "It was very much 2020," the Duchess of Sussex said with a laugh, explaining she "became friends" with celebrity stylist Normant after he her hair for her May 2018 wedding to Prince Harry.
"So my family had just moved to California," the duchess continued. "We were staying in our friend's home. And because it was the pandemic, I kept ordering boxed hair dye. And I thought, 'I'm gonna look just like she does on the box.'"
The reality, however, was quite different, and Meghan found herself with "this very inky, almost Elvira-esque black hair." Fortunately, she "texted Serge," who told her, "'You need to see Kadi.'"
The Duchess of Sussex posed with Kadi Lee and Serge Normant at the launch of Lee's haircare and wellness line in November 2024.
Lee, who appeared on Meghan's new podcast, is one of the Duchess of Sussex's close friends.
Lee came to the rescue, visiting the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's house to fix her color. "I mean, we were masked and all the things. It was such an interesting time, but I remember that day so well," Meghan recalled.
The Duchess of Sussex also discussed what it was like to care for her hair as a biracial woman in college. "When I was at Northwestern, and I moved into Kappa—our sorority there—I don't even think they made plug-in flat irons at the time," she shared. "If they did, I didn't know where they were, because I had the little stove with the flat iron that would go in and have a paper towel on the side."
Meghan continued she remembered "most of the girls in the sorority who were not black saying, 'What's that smell? Is hair burning?' And it was just what you would do to figure out how to grapple with this texture of hair."
