It’s a tempting theory, particularly because it draws a neat conclusion from someone who was able to defraud a lot of very intelligent people out of very large sums of money. Many black women aren’t even given the option of sporting anything less than perfect hair at work without scrutiny, let alone having it be read as capability.” This, of course, only works if you’re white: As Bridget Todd notes in InStyle, “For a black woman, undone hair isn’t read as a marker of someone preoccupied with Serious Work.
Like a uniform of black turtlenecks and black trousers and a falsified baritone, a few noticeable split ends may have been Holmes’s attempt at communicating seriousness. In leaving her sloppily straightened hair unkempt when it was either down or twisted into a low bun, seemingly sans any sort of oil or conditioning treatment (expensive, sure, but certainly not for a woman worth billions), it gives the appearance of someone with more important things to worry about than hair, and who has stated as much. It is, of course, dyed blonde, an unexceptional quality for an American white woman to have, but made slightly more exceptional when noting that while just 2 percent of the population has naturally blonde hair, 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies do, which could have been Holmes’s way, conscious or otherwise, of attempting to become one of them.Įven the natural damage that comes with artificially lightened hair may have been intentionally exacerbated. It might not be a leap, then, to suggest that Holmes’s hair was just another calculated component of her aesthetic. Holmes at the Fortune Global Forum on November 2, 2015. She said that Holmes later stocked up on Jobs’s exact preferred brand of turtleneck, Issey Miyake, suggesting that her sartorial choices were modeled after the business icon. Yet in an interview for the podcast The Dropout, former Theranos employee Ana Arriola said that in the early days, Holmes wore “frumpy Christmas sweaters,” and that the black turtlenecks didn’t start showing up until Arriola told her about Steve Jobs’s famous uniform. I’m sure that translates into how I dress.” “It makes it easy because every day you put on the same thing and don’t have to think about it - one less thing in your life,” she told Glamour in 2015. Holmes has said that her uniform of black turtlenecks, of which she said she owns 150 and used to wear every day, was a way for her to expend less energy on deciding what to wear and more on the company. There are other aspects of Holmes that can feel contrived, too. The most obvious example is her baritone voice, which her family maintains is real but former professors and employees have claimed is put on in order to appear more commanding in male-dominated Silicon Valley.
We’re not supposed to notice these hairstyles - it’s why so many news anchors have the same one - whereas Holmes’s cowlicks and stick-straight flyaways attract attention.īut is the fact that we’re fascinated by Holmes’s bad hair because it defies our expectations of female public figures’ appearances too charitable of an argument? It’s an idea that becomes increasingly plausible as more evidence reveals the lengths that Holmes has gone to manipulate her image. Her notoriously fried hair, however, is a far cry from the sleek, tidy styles that are typically expected of powerful women in the spotlight. It’s not that Holmes isn’t - as a thin blonde, white woman with a naturally pretty face, she doesn’t have to do much in order to be considered so. Part of this fixation is that we’re not used to seeing such a public figure neglect what we’re often told is the primary duty of womanhood: making herself attractive. (Tavi Gevinson also posted a very on-point impression of Holmes, which included exaggerated flyaways.) Many on Twitter have wondered how, particularly as the head of a scientific company, Holmes allowed her hair to appear so chemically fried, and whether the look played into her larger grift. Holmes’s frazzled roots and bleached split ends have been the subject of much discussion ever since the Theranos founder saw her company implode, beginning with the damning reporting of Bad Blood author John Carreyrou in late 2015. We also know because so many people keep saying so. This we know from the highly public years she has spent as the biotech visionary turned disgraced ex-CEO behind the medical startup Theranos, as well as the footage seen in HBO’s recently released documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley. Elizabeth Holmes, we are told, has bad hair.