Emmy Rossum is stepping into her authenticity with her natural curls.
The actress, 40, opened up about embracing her textured hair while walking the WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards 2026 red carpet last week. When the outlet Style playfully pressed her on whether humidity makes her hair frizzy, Rossum pushed back with conviction.
“Yeah, but I like that,” she said. “I embrace my wholeness, my whole ethnicity, my specificity of texture. I think it’s important to step fully into who we are and not, you know, make ourselves smaller than we need to be.”
That red-carpet moment caps a years-long evolution for the “Shameless” alum, who spent much of her career chemically straightening her locks. In a 2022 Instagram video for Vogue, Rossum traced how her relationship with her hair transformed.
“What I love about curly hair, I think that it projects a confidence,” she said. “For so many years, I straightened my hair. I keratin-ed my hair. I would flat-iron and blow-dry and try to kind of contort this into a different ideal of beauty.”
“And finally, embracing my natural hair is something that now makes me feel so unique,” she added.
Motherhood helped spark that shift. Rossum, who welcomed a daughter with husband Sam Esmail in 2021, said she reconsidered her styling choices after becoming a parent. She shared that realization during an appearance on Kelly Clarkson’s talk show.
“I also had a daughter, and I was like, you know, I should just start wearing my hair the way it is,” she told Clarkson. “Why should I tell her that she should make her hair look [like] anything other than how it grows out of her head?”
Rossum’s natural curls are now on full display in her professional work as well. She has been sporting the look while promoting “Furious,” the Hulu series in which she stars. At the show’s premiere in July, she connected the aesthetic choice to a deeper personal mission.
“There is an emotional intent there for me to be able to be more of my private self in public,” she said at the event.
“I think it’s important for me to feel empowered in my authenticity and my uniqueness,” she explained. “And every time someone says that they like it, even though that shouldn’t be making me feel better, it does.”
The actress arrived at the WSJ Magazine Innovator Awards in a black sparkling Hermès gown, her curls styled out. The appearance marked another public moment in what has become an ongoing statement about self-acceptance.
Rossum’s comments come amid broader conversations in Hollywood about representation and beauty standards, though she has framed her own journey in intimate rather than political terms. The through-line, across interviews and platforms, has been consistency: a decision to stop conforming to an “ideal of beauty” that required constant processing and heat damage.
She has found that the public response has reinforced her choice, even as she works to internalize that validation. The feedback loop between audience approval and personal confidence remains something she acknowledges openly.
Rossum continues to promote “Furious” as the series streams on Hulu.