Sanaa Lathan has debuted her natural hair on Instagram after growing it for three years.

Lathan cut her hair for the 2018 film Nappily Ever After, in which her character shaves her head on her own natural hair journey. Three years later, Lathan has shown her hair flourishing after using, as she wrote on Instagram, “[p]rotective styles, braids and almost no heat.” She also used the hashtag #nappilyeverafter.

In a 2018 Entertainment Weekly interview about her hair, in which she revealed that she kept cutting her hair after her Nappily Ever Aftershave.

“I actually continued shaving my head for four months after we finished the film because it felt so freeing, so good,” she said. “I really didn’t want people to feel like we were saying, if you don’t wear your hair natural, you’re doing a bad thing.”

She elaborated on how Black women have claimed hair as their own tool for expression.

“…[W]eaves, wigs…[i]t’s part of my job, but I also believe that at this point in history, yes, it kind of came out of conditioning that maybe our kinky hair is not as beautiful,” she said. “[B]ut now we’ve kind of claimed it as our own and wigs, weaves, straightening your hair, wearing it curly, wearing it natural, it’s all an expression of all who you want to be that day. It’s almost like hair can be an accessory.”

Lathan is currently lending her vocal talents to Harley Quinn as Catwoman and Family Guy as Donna Tubbs and various characters. She is also starring in a COVID-19 anthology film called With/In, which is currently in post-production.

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Photo: Paras Griffin/Getty Images