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#TBT: That Time Trans Model Tracey Africa Was on a Clairol Bottle Cover

At a time when trans women could be attacked on the street, Tracey's face was in drugstores nationwide.

Trans and gender nonconforming models are having a much-deserved moment in the spotlight now, but the reality is they've been a part of fashion and advertising all along.

One of the first was Tracey "Africa" Norman, a trans model of color whose face appeared on a top-selling box of Clairol hair color line in the 1970s. (No. 512, Dark Auburn).

Tracey's big break had come a few years earlier, when she snuck into a casting call for Vogue Italia and wound up being photographed by the legendary Irving Penn.

"He told me to smile with my eyes and I was confused about that, so I would just smile," she tells New York magazine. "Then he told me that my eyes were too big. I looked like a deer in headlights, so he told me to close my eyes and open them."

More success followed, but Tracey was always terrified someone would find out she had been born a boy. Even as Iman, Beverly Johnson, and Peggy Dillard were breaking the color barrier in the modeling world, women like Tracey hoped to just walk down the street without getting harassed or even attacked.

She couldn't come out as trans—it was unheard of at the time. Musicians and artists could blur gender lines in the '70s, and fashion plates could play with androgyny. But the models on the runway had to be "all-woman."

For a time, no one noticed—or maybe they did and didn't care.

And then Clairol came calling.

The company was looking for fresh faces to adorn the boxes of its new hair-dye line for women of color, Born Beautiful, and brought her in for a test.

Under the bright lights, her hair had reddish undertones. They snapped photos and labeled her hue Dark Auburn, Box 512, and concocted a hair color to match. She had never dyed her hair, but she had done a home perm to relax her curls, and the interaction of the chemicals and the sun had naturally lightened it to a shade women would pay money to re-create.

She signed a contract for two years’ use, with the agreement that she’d get paid more if they renewed, which they did, twice.

"So they used my box for six years, because they said it was the hottest-selling box," says Norman. "This is what I was told." Thousands of Clairol customers were emulating the look, and affirming the beauty, of a transgender woman.

But everything changed in 1980, while Tracey was on a shoot for Essence magazine.

At first everything seemed to be going fabulously. She was dolled up like Cleopatra and editor-in-chief Susan Taylor told Tracey how beautiful the pictures are coming out.

Then a hairdresser's assistant sauntered over and the entire vibe changed. "The whole situation felt negative to me."

The hairdresser spoke with Taylor, who stopped the photo shoot within minutes.

"She was asking me was I all right—standing behind me, looking at me in the mirror, rubbing my shoulder, complimenting me on how soft I was," she remembers. "That’s when I knew. The way that she looked at me through the mirror, it was different. She was looking for the person that this hairdresser told them that I was."

That Essence shoot never produced a spread, and Tracey soon stopped getting work.

"It goes through the grapevine really fast. Really, really fast. I kind of upset the fashion world for a while," she says. Other models stopped talking to her. "I had many black female models that I took jobs from super-angry at me," she says.

Eventually she moved to Europe, where she was an unknown, and was able to walk in the Paris showroom of Balenciaga for a few years, but her dreams of being the next Beverly Johnson were over.

"I just felt so upset about it because it was my people and my community that did this to me. The black community and the gay community."

While she never had the chance to come out on her own terms, Tracey believes she paved the way for models like Andreja Pejic, Geena Rocero, and Isis King that followed in her high-heeled footsteps.

"There was a perception that a transgender woman couldn’t be passable and work in fashion magazines and land contracts. I proved that wrong. I left the door cracked for other [transgender people] to walk through."

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