The Gist

• Though she has long been known as a blonde, Heidi Klum is actually a natural brunette.

• Photos from her childhood and a new photo shared by Klum on October 20 of her early modeling days capture the supermodel with brunette locks.

• Klum previously said that she went blonde for a 1997 Givenchy shoot and liked the way it looked, so she kept it around.

The world largely knows Heidi Klum for her blonde hair, but the supermodel is a natural brunette—a look she showed off on her Instagram Story, rendering her almost unrecognizable.

In the photo Klum shared on her Instagram Story on October 20, a younger version of the bombshell we know today poses in a one-piece swimsuit covered in ladybugs, a smoldering look on her face. Klum has spoken out about going from brunette to blonde in past interviews, and has shared photos of herself from her childhood and young modeling days when her hair was still brunette.

After kickstarting her modeling career in the early 1990s, Klum shared previously that she first went blonde after she landed a shoot with Givenchy in 1997.

“My hair is heavily colored,” Klum said. “One of my first big jobs was a perfume campaign for Givenchy, and they actually wanted a blonde girl with blue eyes, so they colored my hair blonde and gave me blue contact lenses, which at the time was a very unusual thing to do. It took forever for me to get the [contact lenses] in and out because I don’t wear contact lenses.”

“When you do this for jobs, then you start seeing yourself in the mirror, and you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” she continued. “You’re young, and you do all these different things. And then I kind of liked myself better as a blonde. I felt more special, just to look different. As a model, you think it’s great when you look different from what you normally look like, so I kept it blonde.”

Klum previously told Harper’s Bazaar, “I am not defined by my hair, but I definitely think people recognize me and associate me with blonde.”

The Project Runway host went on to go platinum blonde for an Elle cover at the request of photographer Gilles Bensimon, and really liked the look. “I don’t know if blondes have more fun,” she said. “But as a blonde you do stand out more and it’s just because I think that the eye naturally is attracted to brighter things than it is to darker things.”

Color isn’t the only part of Klum’s hair that’s changed, particularly after Klum started having kids. “After having children, the back of my hair went curly and the front is still straight, so now I have to deal with both,” the mom of four said.

Klum typically keeps her hair long, but loyal fans will remember when she sported a bob around 2010. As to whether she’d ever cut her long hair short again, it seems unlikely, as she said in an Instagram Q&A that her husband Tom Kaulitz “loves long hair on me, so for him, I will keep it long.”

She also shared a surprising tidbit about her hair habits, saying in the same Q&A, “I wash my hair twice a day. I wash my hair every morning, and I wash my hair every night before I go to bed.”

Read the original article on InStyle