Mel B refused to straighten her hair for the Spice Girls' debut music video Wannabe.
Mel, along with her bandmates Emma Bunton, Mel C, Victoria Beckham, and Geri Horner, shot to fame in 1996 with the success of their debut single Wannabe, which was accompanied by a video in which they can be seen creating mischief at an eccentric bohemian party.
But in a new interview with Daily Star Online, the 45-year-old revealed she was told to straighten her natural hair for the shoot, but she pushed back against the suggestion.
"I remember when we first did the video for Wannabe we had a big styling team and one of the first things they said to me was: 'OK, so we need to straighten your hair,'" she recalled. "I refused point-blank because my hair was my identity and yes it was different to all the other girls but that was what the Spice Girls were about – celebrating our differences."
After the video was released, Mel received letters from mums and their daughters praising her for embracing her natural hair and she was thrilled by the feedback.
"I'd get really emotional letters from girls, and their mums, saying how incredible it was that they had someone to 'be' when they did dances in the playground at school and they were actually daring to wear their hair out and proud rather than scraped back or straightened... That was a big deal to me," the mother-of-three added.
The former America's Got Talent judge gave the interview to discuss her experiences with racism to support the Black Lives Matter movement and stand in solidarity with unarmed African-American man George Floyd, who died at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota on 25 May.
