(Vogue Beauty) An Ethiopian-Eritrean Bride on the Quiet Power of Her Wedding-Day Braids
Posted by: Semere Asmelash
Date: Thursday, 25 September 2025
The Makeup of a Marriage
An Ethiopian-Eritrean Bride on the Quiet Power of Her Wedding-Day Braids
By Ruhama Wolle
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
Hair braiding tells a story. Of womanhood. Of age. Of what it means to be Habesha and find your way back to rituals that almost disappeared.
For Brehan, a 37-year-old bride-to-be in Dallas with both Ethiopian and Eritrean roots, the decision to get her hair braided for her mels, or reception, wasn’t about vanity—it was about return. About honoring who she is, what was passed down, and the deep, sometimes aching, love she holds for both sides of her culture.
“I told my bridesmaids, everyone’s getting braided,” she said, half laughing but dead serious. “No excuses. No ‘my scalp is tender.’ We’re doing this together. We’re honoring something.”
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
To test the look ahead of the big day, Brehan and her braider did a practice run: four hours seated on the floor, her braider’s hands swollen by the end. The style she chose is called Asa Shuruba, asa meaning fish, shuruba meaning braids directly on the scalp. Worn by women in Ethiopia’s Amhara region for weddings and rites of passage, the braid mimics the silhouette of a fish, with a raised center formed by the Dirib (or Albaso) technique—one braid layered atop another—and delicate cornrows fanning toward the back and sides. But this wasn’t just a trial. It was a glimpse of what’s to come: the plan to gather, all together, on the morning of the traditional ceremony. One room, with everyone getting braided. Henna applied nearby. Women seated in a circle, laughter drifting through the air. A scene that felt less like preparation and more like home.
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
“It was worth it,” Brehan said. “Hair tells people who you are.” And hers does. Brehan was born in Gonder, Ethiopia, to an Ethiopian mother and an Eritrean father. Her grandmother, an Eritrean woman who spent most of her life in Ethiopia, helped raise her. “In our home, we never separated the two,” she said. “Religion, ethnicity, language—it all flowed together. The focus was love.”
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
Brehan arrived in the US at age 12, alone, without her parents, who wouldn’t join her until 2003. She landed in a mostly white suburb of Dallas, placed into a new school, a new language, a new way of moving through the world. The transition wasn’t just hard, it was disorienting. “Middle school is already hard,” she said. “Add being an immigrant with no English, and it’s survival mode.”
She was taken in by her aunt and uncle, who would later become her adoptive parents. They raised her, grounded her, gave her a version of home while the rest of her family remained thousands of miles away.
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
At the time, though, the disconnection was real. Her family didn’t know many other Habesha families, and slowly the quiet markers of assimilation crept in. Relaxers replaced braids. English overtook Amharic. She learned to blend in, a survival instinct familiar to so many immigrant kids trying to make it in a world that doesn’t reflect them. But like many of us, she would find her way back—back to the language, the food, the music, and the braids. Back to the culture she didn’t lose, just left waiting.
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
One thing that never left? Sundays.
“Sundays in Dallas felt like a flood of culture,” she said. Church in the morning. Shiro in the afternoon. Coffee ceremonies at her aunt’s house. Family would pour in: Amharic, Tigrinya, debates, laughter. It didn’t matter who was Ethiopian or Eritrean. “It was just us. Just family.” And by evening, braids. Sitting cross-legged on the floor while her scalp was parted and pulled by a cousin, an auntie, someone who loved her. Her butt would go numb. Her head would ache. But this was how you belonged in a Habesha household.
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
It wasn’t until she began planning her wedding that she consciously returned to those roots. As an ob-gyn nurse practitioner, she’d spent years holding space for other women. Now she wanted her wedding to hold space for the woman she had become: Ethiopian and Eritrean, daughter and firstborn, American and not. Her fiancé, also Habesha, “defied every stereotype I believed,” she said. “He cooks, cleans, loves deeply. I used to laugh at the idea of marrying a Habesha guy. Now I can’t imagine anything else.”
Photographed by Elizabeth Lavin
The wedding spans 3 ceremonies, 16 planners, and 1 loud, love-soaked braid-and-henna session in a Dallas hotel suite. “I want people to look at our photos and feel the culture in them,” she said. “Our parents gave up everything to get us here. We owe it to them—and to ourselves—to stay rooted.
