The breathless reactions to J.Lo’s look on this cover often took on a tone of thinking she actually did cut her hair. But… do we? I don’t. Her hair stylist hasn’t gone on the record with whether it’s a wig or his own handiwork, and she might have shot this as far back as before the Inauguration; that slicked-back pony did not look like a piece tacked onto a secret pixie. I vote wig, although I’d love to see her do it for real and then style the HELL out of the grow-out. Imagine J.Lo with a punky gelled-up Mohawk. Oooh.
The interview talks far less about J.Lo Beauty than I would have expected; mostly it’s about J.Lo’s quarantine experience, some comments about the Black Lives Matter marches that are similar to those she gave Elle, and a bit about coming into her celebrity life with a body that didn’t match the templates of the time. I had some issues with the piece — it flat-out never mentions Shakira’s equally impactful presence in that joint Super Bowl show, in a way that I thought was weird (maybe no one asked J.Lo about the power of that partnership, but why?!?) and there are a couple strange asides in there. It’s… unusual. But I also get that it’s a challenge: There is a magazine cover story of J.Lo once every couple months, and I imagine the pressure to make each one different is both immense and at times impossible. Maybe that’s why they went with the pixie.
