With close to shoulder-length locs and a lean physique, Willow Smith, daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith seems like an old soul. While many are apt to assume 15-year-old is always super confident, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
After much success with her debut single and video for “Whip My Hair,” plus a UK tour, the young artist was forced to question who she was and where she was going. “During that time of figuring it out, I was lost and super insecure. But then I stopped trying to find myself in these other inanimate objects, people and ideas. I realized it isn’t about finding yourself—it’s about creating yourself,” she tells Teen Vogue.
Even her own personal fame and the fame of her parents isn’t enough to shelter Willow from the realities of being a black woman in a world where European beauty is accepted as the norm.
“Being a young African-American woman with dreads, it blows my mind that I’m a Chanel ambassador. Like, how am I a Chanel ambassador? It is so beautiful. I’m coming into a new part of my life that is completely unknown, and I’m jumping right in. All I can do from here is continue to shift paradigms and continue to push the envelope further and further. But I am doing it every day just by being myself,” she says.