Back then, she always wore her hair slicked-back in a bun with pearl earrings. “That was my look then,” she says. “Historically, Western classical music is conservative. It’s very European, Caucasian-looking, so being a Black woman in the orchestra was already an anomaly. A woman playing trumpet is uncommon, but then to be a Black woman playing trumpet is extraordinarily uncommon. I wasn’t trying to stand out all the time.”
Bibbs straightened her hair all throughout high school and college, but around 2022 she began experimenting with her natural curl pattern while working on Styles’ Love on Tour, which ran from 2021 to 2023. Back then, she was still trying to figure out her style. “I was in my early 20s, and I was so scared of everything, and I didn’t want to do much. I didn’t even really know how to put makeup on,” she says. “I was just caking glitter on my face, I was doing a lot of braided styles, and I fried my hair, too.”
That happened in 2022, when Bibbs received “a very bad balayage,” where her natural color was lifted to an extremely light blonde in one session. “It was devastating,” she says, and that experience sparked what she calls her “curly journey.” “About a month later I had found a stylist who helped me recover my curls through some Keratin treatments. Despite all the damage, he revived my curl pattern. It was the first time I appreciated what I had,” she recalls. That specific stylist taught her a few techniques to style her hair, including using a dime-sized amount of gel with a quarter-sized amount of leave-in and running it through her curls.
