The Model Who Became An African Princess

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Meghan Markle and Queen Letizia of Spain are not the only royals who have passed from show business and flashes to royalty. Learn about the story of Keisha Omilana, the Californian model who has conquered the heart of the Adekunle prince Adebayo of Nigeria.

After finishing high school, Omilana moved to Chicago to study fashion design and it was there that, after replacing a friend in a modeling job, she went from designing clothes or parading with her. And the rest is history…

In addition to parading in fashion capitals and becoming the first African-American model to star in three Pantene commercials in a row, she has also been the image of major beauty firms such as L'Oréal, Maybelline, Revlon and Covergirl and has appeared on television shows. like 30 Rock and SNL.

As she confessed to Essence magazine, the model met her now husband when she was lost on the way to a casting. “I was on the phone with my agent trying to find the address and she was in a meeting at the [hotel] W and she saw me from the inside. She left the meeting and went out into the street and waited 45 minutes to tell me “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my entire life. Would you do me the honor of giving me your number?”, He remembers.

After meeting her prince charming, getting married and moving to London where she now lives with her family, the former model has become an ambassador for natural afro hair. In 2017, she founded the project A Crown of Curls, a public workshop from which she teaches black, mixed-race men, women and children to take care of afro hair.

“My main clientele are women in interracial couples who don't know how to deal with their daughters' curls. And what I enjoy most is seeing a girl look in the mirror and love her hair, even if it is so different from her mother's. I firmly believe that loving yourself also involves loving your hair,”she explained in an interview published in the newspaper El País.

And it is that, as she has recognized in that conversation, the nature of her hair has always been an obstacle for her at work due to the lack of diversity that prevailed in the industry.

“My agent called me: 'The client wants to work with you, but they say that your hair is very wild. Can you do something with it? ' They constantly forced you to think that there was something about yourself that you had to change,”she recalls.