diff --git a/instagrapi/mixins/public.py b/instagrapi/mixins/public.py
index 24a6ba55..33baa895 100644
--- a/instagrapi/mixins/public.py
+++ b/instagrapi/mixins/public.py
@@ -80,6 +80,7 @@ def public_request(
         data=None,
         params=None,
         headers=None,
+        update_headers=None,
         return_json=False,
         retries_count=3,
         retries_timeout=2,
@@ -96,7 +97,7 @@ def public_request(
             try:
                 if self.delay_range:
                     random_delay(delay_range=self.delay_range)
-                return self._send_public_request(url, **kwargs)
+                return self._send_public_request(url, update_headers=update_headers, **kwargs)
             except (
                 ClientLoginRequired,
                 ClientNotFoundError,
@@ -123,18 +124,14 @@ def public_request(
                 continue
 
     def _send_public_request(
-        self,
-        url,
-        data=None,
-        params=None,
-        headers=None,
-        return_json=False,
-        stream=None,
-        timeout=None,
+        self, url, data=None, params=None, headers=None, return_json=False, stream=None, timeout=None, update_headers=None
     ):
         self.public_requests_count += 1
         if headers:
-            self.public.headers.update(headers)
+            if update_headers in [None, True] :
+                self.public.headers.update(headers)
+            elif update_headers == False :
+                pass
         if self.last_response_ts and (time.time() - self.last_response_ts) < 1.0:
             time.sleep(1.0)
         if self.request_timeout:
diff --git a/instagrapi/mixins/user.py b/instagrapi/mixins/user.py
index 65e01ce6..098ebe9a 100644
--- a/instagrapi/mixins/user.py
+++ b/instagrapi/mixins/user.py
@@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
 from copy import deepcopy
 from json.decoder import JSONDecodeError
+import json
 from typing import Dict, List, Tuple
 
 from instagrapi.exceptions import (
@@ -149,7 +150,10 @@ def user_info_by_username_gql(self, username: str) -> User:
             An object of User type
         """
         username = str(username).lower()
-        return extract_user_gql(self.public_a1_request_user_info_by_username(f"/{username!s}/")["user"])
+        temporary_public_headers = {'Host': 'www.instagram.com','X-Requested-With': 'XMLHttpRequest','Sec-Ch-Prefers-Color-Scheme': 'dark','Sec-Ch-Ua-Platform': '"Linux"','X-Ig-App-Id': '936619743392459','Sec-Ch-Ua-Model': '""','Sec-Ch-Ua-Mobile': '?0','User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/122.0.6261.112 Safari/537.36','Accept': '*/*','X-Asbd-Id': '129477','Sec-Fetch-Site': 'same-origin','Sec-Fetch-Mode': 'cors','Sec-Fetch-Dest': 'empty','Referer': 'https://www.instagram.com/','Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9','Priority': 'u=1, i'}
+        update_headers = False
+        data = extract_user_gql(json.loads(self.public_request(f'https://www.instagram.com/api/v1/users/web_profile_info/?username={username}', headers=temporary_public_headers))['data']['user'], update_headers=update_headers)
+        return data
 
     def user_info_by_username_v1(self, username: str) -> User:
         """