Fourteen years after the debut of her Harajuku Lovers fragrance collection, we asked Gwen Stefani about the praise, the backlash, and the lessons she’s brought into her most recent beauty venture. What she said stunned us.

Gwen Stefani has been many people over the last two decades. There's pop-punk Stefani with baby blue hair and bindis. Ska-era Stefani with platinum blonde hair, a bikini top, and cargo pants. And Harajuku Stefani, who we'll get to in a minute. (If you want to review all of these personas at once, they came together in the 2021 music video for her single "Let Me Reintroduce Myself.")

The last year ushered in another phase of Stefani’s career with the launch of GXVE Beauty, a vegan line that features her signature red lip color (along with her platinum hair, it's one of the only near constants in her aesthetic history) and a few other beauty staples, such as shadow palettes and gel eyeliners.

GXVE isn’t Stefani’s first beauty brand, though. Before that, there was Harajuku Lovers. The fragrance line launched in 2008, four years after the release of her solo album Love.Angel.Music.Baby., which took inspiration from Japan’s Harajuku subculture for its visuals and marketing (and subsequently Stefani’s own personal style).

The fragrance collection included five scents and each was housed in a bottle shaped like a doll caricatured to look like Stefani and her four "Harajuku Girls," the Japanese and Japanese American backup dancers she employed and named Love, Angel, Music, and Baby for the promotion of her album. The perfumes gained industry recognition, winning The Fragrance Foundation’s Fragrance of the Year Award in 2009, and spawned generations of flankers. Magazines (Allure included) covered them extensively. Meanwhile, I, a first-generation Filipina American teen in New Jersey, starving for Asian representation in pop culture, begged my mom for the "Love" fragrance. She consistently responded with a hard no, always pointing to its price tag: $45 for one ounce of perfume at Macy’s.

I desperately wanted that little perfume bottle on my dresser because it made me feel seen in a way that I never did in fashion or beauty or really any mainstream media or marketing. I honestly didn't question, or even really register, that the woman behind this Asian representation was white. As an adult, however, I have come to examine Stefani's Harajuku era — and I have not been alone.

In recent years, the "L.A.M.B" universe, along with some of Stefani’s other projects, has been the subject of many conversations surrounding cultural appropriation. So when I recently sat down to interview Stefani at an event celebrating GXVE’s latest collection, I asked her about her new brand’s mission — "I wanted to create a community of makeup lovers like me" — and what went into its newest products, which include lipsticks that are a departure from her signature red: "We all have different color skin and all have different things that we wear different colors for." But I also included a question about what she felt she may have learned from Harajuku Lovers — considering its praise, backlash, and everything in between. She responded by telling me a story she’s shared with the press before about her father’s job at Yamaha, which had him traveling between their home in California and Japan for 18 years.

"That was my Japanese influence and that was a culture that was so rich with tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me," she said, explaining how her father (who is Italian American) would return with stories of street performers cosplaying as Elvis and stylish women with colorful hair. Then, as an adult, she was able to travel to Harajuku to see them herself. "I said, 'My God, I'm Japanese and I didn't know it.'" As those words seemed to hang in the air between us, she continued, "I am, you know." She then explained that there is "innocence" to her relationship with Japanese culture, referring to herself as a "super fan."

"If [people are] going to criticize me for being a fan of something beautiful and sharing that, then I just think that doesn't feel right," she told me. "I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a time of the ping-pong match between Harajuku culture and American culture." She elaborated further: "[It] should be okay to be inspired by other cultures because if we're not allowed then that's dividing people, right?"

It’s a sentiment similar to one Stefani shared with Paper magazine in May 2021, when asked for her current perspective on her "Harajuku Girls": "If we didn't buy and sell and trade our cultures in, we wouldn't have so much beauty, you know? We learn from each other, we share from each other, we grow from each other. And all these rules are just dividing us more and more."

Like Stefani, I am not Japanese. But I am an Asian woman living in America, which comes with sobering realities during a time of heightened Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) hate. I am a woman who has been called racial slurs because of her appearance, feared for her father’s safety as he traveled with her on New York City subways, and boiled with anger as grandparents were being attacked and killed because they were Asian. I envy anyone who can claim to be part of this vibrant, creative community but avoid the part of the narrative that can be painful or scary.

I spent 32 minutes in conversation with Stefani, many of them devoted to her lengthy answer to my question about Harajuku Lovers. In that time, she said more than once that she is Japanese. Allure’s social media associate (who is Asian and Latina) was also present for the interview and we were left questioning what we had heard. Maybe she misspoke? Again and again? During our interview, Stefani asserted twice that she was Japanese and once that she was "a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl." Surely, she didn’t mean it literally or she didn’t know what she was saying? (A representative for Stefani reached out the next day, indicating that I had misunderstood what Stefani was trying to convey. Allure later asked Stefani’s team for an on-the-record comment or clarification of these remarks and they declined to provide a statement or participate in a follow-up interview.)

I don’t believe Stefani was trying to be malicious or hurtful in making these statements. But words don’t have to be hostile in their intent in order to potentially cause harm, and my colleague and I walked away from that half hour unsettled. I wanted to better understand why.

Stefani told me she identifies not just with Japan’s culture, but also with the Hispanic and Latinx communities of Anaheim, California, where she grew up. "The music, the way the girls wore their makeup, the clothes they wore, that was my identity," she said. "Even though I'm an Italian American — Irish or whatever mutt that I am — that's who I became because those were my people, right?" I asked Fariha I. Khan, Ph.D., codirector of the Asian American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania, to help clarify the line between inspiration or appreciation and appropriation. "Simply put, cultural appropriation is the use of one group’s customs, material culture, or oral traditions by another group," she said, and raises two important factors to consider: commodification and an unequal power relationship.

In terms of commodification, Stefani has certainly made a lot of money tapping into other cultures for inspiration. "A hit is a hit," Stefani told me, referencing the success of her Harajuku Mini children’s clothing line in Target from 2011 and her fashion line L.A.M.B. from 2003. "A hit is what makes me tick. The more people I reach, the better." And she has reached an enormous amount of people. As a solo artist and as part of No Doubt, Stefani has sold more than 50 million units (one album or approximately 10 songs) worldwide. Beyond her music, as of 2019, Stefani’s brands have brought in more than $1 billion in retail sales — brands that include L.A.M.B., Harajuku Lovers, and Harajuku Mini. Stefani has taken some of those profits and made charitable donations, including $1 million (plus proceeds from a special-edition Harajuku Lovers T-Shirt) to Save the Children's Japan Earthquake-Tsunami Children in Emergency Fund in 2011. (In March 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed more than 18,000 people in Japan and left more than 450,000 unhoused.)

And then there’s the power part: "When a group has been historically marginalized and/or racialized by another group, the issue of power is central to cultural appropriation," explains Dr. Khan. "The dominant group has the power to take (or appropriate) the marginalized group’s customs and practices and give these traditions meaning — without the original context or significance."

And the unequal power relationship between the person with the power (often a white person) and the group they claim to be part of can create negative repercussions for the latter — no matter the intentions of the former. "While I think [lack of awareness] is a valid reason, I don’t think it’s a valid excuse," says Angela Nguyen, MSW, a therapist at the Yellow Chair Collective, a psychotherapist group with an emphasis on serving the Asian American community.

"A white person doesn’t have to face the racism, prejudices, or discrimination that a Japanese, Mexican, or El Salvadorian person would have to face," continues Nguyen. "They can put on those bits of culture sort of like a costume." And that can lead to a diluted perception of the minority group, Nguyen explains. When it comes to the AAPI community, she says, "It can affect, first, how AAPI people are perceived and, second, how AAPI people perceive themselves."

Nguyen also brings up one very critical aspect of being Asian American: We’ve had to fight for every aspect of our identity. "We’ve had to fight to speak our languages at home and outside and say that our foods are good," she says. "And then to see people paint us simplistically, that feels really painful."

And that pain is even greater when Asian Americans are also fighting just to feel safe in their communities. Between March 2020 and March 2022, there were 11,467 reported hate incidents against Asians across the United States, 917 of them toward Japanese people. Stefani has often spoken about her deep love and appreciation for Japanese culture, but to Allure’s knowledge, she has not publicly expressed outrage or made any statements of support during this cycle of anti-AAPI hate. (Her representatives did not respond to Allure’s inquiries on this point.) But she did reintroduce her take on Harajuku style — wearing nothing but Kanzashi hair pins — in that 2021 music video. "I’m still the original-riginal old me," she sings, as multiple versions of her image flash across the screen.

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