“That time I went blonde,” Keke Palmer captioned the photo she uploaded on July 29. In the pick, Keke, 29, was living her full Mary J. Blige/Barbie fantasy with golden locks. The photo, seemingly taken on the set of a professional shoot, showed off the work of Tamika Gibson (@thehairdiagram) and the line of The Hair Diagram products. Keke also gave props to Kenya Alexis, the celebrity make-up artist, who made Keke’s eyes, skin, and lips pop!
The look comes nearly a month after Darius Daulton Jackson, Keke’s boyfriend – and the father of the baby boy she welcomed in February – publicly shamed her for wearing a black bodysuit under a sheer dress while attending an Usher concert in Las Vegas. The look wasn’t risqué, but it was provocative enough for Darius to tweet a discouraging comment. “It’s the outfit tho..you a mom,” he tweeted. The comment faced an immediate backlash, and Darius, 29, doubled down.
“We live in a generation where a man of the family doesn’t want the wife [and] mother to his kids to showcase booty cheeks to please others [and] he gets told how much of a hater he is,” he wrote in a second tweet. “This is my family [and] my representation,” he added in that second tweet, “I have standards [and] morals to what I believe. I rest my case.” However, the public response to his criticism was too hot to handle, and he deleted the tweets.
Keke spoke about the discourse surrounding her body when chatting with The Cut. “I’ll be honest, I think before I even had the baby, I was really actually quite self-conscious,” she told the publication. “After having my baby, I’ve gotten so much more powerful. We’re going to lean into this new body, and I think that is the whole aura of what’s happening with me in this big boss era as I come into my 30s, and I have my baby boy, and I’m just continuing to spread my wings as a young woman.”
“I’ll be honest, I think before I even had the baby, I was really actually quite self-conscious,” she said. “After having my baby, I’ve gotten so much more powerful. We’re going to lean into this new body, and I think that is the whole aura of what’s happening with me in this big boss era as I come into my 30s, and I have my baby boy, and I’m just continuing to spread my wings as a young woman.”
“Do you, new moms. Do you,” she added. “Girl, if there’s one person on this earth that loves you for sure, it’s that baby. Be happy because there’s no love like it. Somebody loving you like that, hell, who cares?” Since the clash, Keke and Darius unfollowed each other on Instagram and Twitter.
Around the time this was happening, Keke published an episode of the Baby, This Is Keke Palmer podcast in which they talked about the strains of their relationship. “At first, it definitely was hard because it could all be very overwhelming. It was definitely overwhelming and intense at first,” Darius said about going public with the relationship.
“And it’s like, you almost feel that pressure of needing to be perfect,” he added. “And so, it really confused me and infiltrated my mind because not only did I have to hold myself to that perfect standard, I was also holding [Keke] to a perfect standard as well. So, any moment of flaw on my side or on your side, it was World War III.”