A professional hairdresser did this … Viv Groskop. Composite: Guardian Design; James Kirkwood
From bowl cuts to extreme mullets, punk dos to bad dye jobs, a terrible hairstyle can never be forgotten – even decades after it has grown out
‘It reminds me of the botched Jesus fresco’
‘If you squint it could be a trendy mullet’ … Kate Lloyd. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Kate Lloyd
It’s the late 1990s. Big, round, feathered fringes are a huge deal at my primary school. Most of my friends have one, influenced by Britney Spears or Emma Bunton. I, too, have a fringe. Mine, as you can see, appears more inspired by Kevin Keegan circa 1993.
Of course, calling what I’m sporting here “a fringe” is an incredible understatement. If you squint it could be a trendy east London mullet. Otherwise, I look a bit like a Knight Templar. Or someone wearing a hat made out of their own hair, on top of their own hair.
It may surprise you to learn this cut was not the result of a sleepover prank gone wrong. It was done by a professional – a hairdresser who lived up the road from my parents and came round to our house to cut my brother’s, my mum’s and my hair.
Not a sleepover prank gone wrong. Photograph: Courtesy of Kate Lloyd
When I first discovered these photos, I assumed the look must have been a one-off. Maybe I moved just as the hairdresser was trimming the top and the only way to salvage things was to evoke Pat Sharp. Or maybe it was the hair equivalent of that botched Jesus fresco restoration: every attempt to improve it only made it worse.
It turns out I actually wore this hairstyle for almost a year, according to my mum. I have a photo of me in a summer dress – with a forehead that resembles a city skyline – where I’m probably seven. And there’s another where I’m wearing a primary school jumper, aged eight.
My mum has no recollection of the hair being a problem. She was happy with the cut back then, she says. “You were a little girl!” is her defence now.
Thankfully, I have no memory of actually sporting it. I have, however, spent most of my adult life feeling disproportionately stressed about going to the hairdresser. As they say, the body keeps the score. Kate Lloyd
‘What has he done to his hair now?’
Rich Pelley goes full on Keith Flint. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Rich Pelley
They say you don’t appreciate something until you lose it – and that is never more true than with hair. After decades of treating mine as a disposable fashion accessory, it appears to have disposed of itself. Perhaps that’s why I look back so fondly on all the terrible things I did to it while I still had the chance.
Dreadlock days at university. Photograph: Courtesy of Rich Pelley
The first was a pudding-bowl haircut that my mum and I appeared to share in the early 80s. At school, I had shoulder-length curtains with a shaved undercut, held out of my face with an alice band – a look I imagined made me resemble a member of Radiohead, rather than a teenage girl waiting to wash her face. It required constant maintenance because the curtains had to fall at exactly the right angle: too far apart and you looked like a medieval monk, too close together and you couldn’t see where you were going.
‘It accidentally made me look like my mum’. Photograph: Courtesy of Rich Pelley
At college, it was a number one all over with a line shaved through one eyebrow, like Robbie Williams in Take That – or so I believed. I thought it made me look dangerous. In reality, I resembled someone who had lost a brief but intense argument with an electric razor.
At university, I had dreadlocks that made me look like Sonic the Hedgehog. For my first proper job, I went bleached blond, which accidentally made me look like my mum again, so that had to go. Then came a spiky mohawk: less Mr T, more startled parrot.
The problem is that, for the people around me, the dramatic effect diminishes each time. When I brilliantly shaved the top half of my head to look like Keith Flint from the Prodigy for a 90s-themed fancy-dress party, nowhere near enough people said: “I can’t believe what you’ve done to your hair!” Or: “You’ve won first prize.” Instead, they presumably thought: “What has Rich done to his hair now? What a berk.”
That, out of all the haircuts, was probably my worst, although it faces extremely stiff competition. Unlike my other terrible hairstyles, this one had only ever been intended to last for one night. The next morning, my Keith Flint costume had gone back in the wardrobe, but unfortunately my hair remained the same, so I was forced into another brief but intense argument with an electric razor – and this time the razor won. I thought I looked like Jay-Z, but in reality I looked more like an escaped convict. Rich Pelley
‘The technical term is: a terrible mess’
Jeffrey Ingold refused to get a haircut for three years. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Jeffrey Ingold
Meet Jeff at age 15 in 2006. Yes, you can laugh. I’d honestly be insulted if you didn’t laugh. My hair looks like a cross between a bird’s nest and tumbleweed. I believe the technical term for it is a “terrible mess”.
For about three years as a young teenager, I outright refused to get a haircut and just let my hair run wild. I would roll out of bed and without even so much as looking at a comb or a brush, walk out the door with an unkempt, knotty mess on my head.
I wasn’t trying to be edgy or cool. Believe me, I was teased mercilessly for my bad hair. Kids would come up and ask if there was something living in there or complain to the teacher that my hair was a distraction in class. Or they would “joke” that my parents were so poor they couldn’t afford to get me a haircut. One day when I was walking home from school, a group of students tried to throw pieces of chewed gum into my hair.
Still, I stubbornly brushed off any suggestions I should go to the hairdressers. That hairstyle was a masterclass in deflection and adolescent survival.
The summer before I started secondary school, a small group of classmates had spread a rumour that I was gay. News to me at the time. I didn’t even know what “gay” meant except it was clearly something bad and shameful. Friends whom I would once play with in the streets shunned me. No one would return my calls to hang out.
It was then that I decided to grow my hair. I walked into that first day of secondary school with the beginnings of my unruly, curly mane. I was almost unrecognisable to those who’d known me for years with an outdated mushroom cut.
The classroom whispers about my sexuality were drowned out by incessant questions and commentary about my ever-growing untamed hair. I didn’t know much back then, but something told me it was better to be the kid with weird hair than it was to be the gay kid. My hair became my armour.
I wore it proudly and only cut it when I got accepted to university in my final year of school. By then it reached the top of my chest. I could see the light at the end of a dark, lonely tunnel. I was finally getting out of my small town and going somewhere no one knew me. I no longer needed to hide behind my hair. Though the kids were right: I am gay. Jeffrey Ingold
‘Babe, we can’t bleach it any more’
Carys Afoko went blond for a summer. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Carys Afoko
Cast your mind back to June 2011. Beyoncé took to the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury for a historic performance. She was resplendent in a gold-sequinned cardigan and black ankle boots and had a cascade of honey blond curls. I had blagged my way to a bar job at the festival to see my idol and I was not disappointed. It was a near-religious experience. As I began the long trek home from Worthy farm in Pilton, Somerset, I knew one thing: I had to dye my hair blond.
I had attempted to dye my hair at home once, with disastrous results. This time, I made my way to a salon in east London with a picture of Beyoncé on my phone. My hairdresser, a lovely New Zealander called Vernon, understood the vision, and within a couple of hours I had been transformed. So began a summer to remember. My honey blond curls and I went to more festivals, parties and art openings than I had ever gone to before. Blonds, I decided, did have more fun.
Blond, it turned out, was also more work. My hair was weaker and drier than usual. It took only a couple of months for my very dark roots to peep through, then I was back to the salon to see Vernon. After a few months I noticed the warm, honey colour was morphing into something more brassy. A friend explained that I needed a special shampoo to maintain the colour, maybe even a toner. I bought a £4 purple shampoo from Boots and hoped for the best. I was already shelling out to get my roots done. I wasn’t made of money.
The breaking point came after a two-week beach holiday. One minute I was sipping rum out of a coconut, the next the tropical sun had bleached my curls white blond. I barely wore sunscreen in those days; it hadn’t occurred to me to protect my hair. It wasn’t the look I was going for, but I liked it, until I went back to see Vernon.
“Babe, we can’t bleach it any more. The condition is terrible,” he said, running his fingers through my fried curls. Instead, he cut my hair and sent me on my way with dark roots and a broken spirit.
Over the months that followed I endured the worst hair days of my life, growing out the blond and returning to my natural dark brown. My hair broke easily and I learned the hard way that colouring your hair is a commitment: the only low-maintenance way to have blond hair is to be born with it. Carys Afoko
‘I looked like a stage magician’
Joel Snape or a futuristic pirate? Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Joel Snape
It’s hard to remember, in our post-God-of-War, post-Jeff-Bridges-from-Iron-Man era, that growing a massive beard, if you’re bald, was once not considered the cranial topiary slam-dunk it’s now assumed to be. Back when Shrek 2 was the hottest thing at the box office, skinhead-plus-facial-bush had a faint whiff of desperation about it. It looked a bit villainous, and opened you up to comparisons with those toys where you use a tiny magnet to drag iron filings across an eerily hairless man’s face. I simply wasn’t prepared to risk it.
And so, dear reader, I experimented. Forced to shave my head in my early 20s after losing most of my hair terrifyingly prematurely, I riffled through a variety of looks. I tried stubble, I tried shorter beards, I tried the Van Dyke – named after the 17th-century Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck, whose subjects often sported the same sort of chin-patch. Think Cyrus the Virus, the baddie from Con Air. Once, in a dating profile, I tried a big hat (I am, I should say to any ladies who felt misled when I showed up, sincerely sorry). And then I tried this.
Quite honestly, I don’t know what I was going for here, with what I believe is technically an extended goatee. Stage magician? High-end jewel thief? Futuristic pirate? I do remember that around this time I wrote a feature where I went undercover in a group of pickup artists, and so maybe their penchant for “peacocking” (having something distinct and memorable about one’s appearance, even if it’s ridiculous) rubbed off on me. It certainly draws the eye, like a bluebottle on a birthday cake. I just can’t believe I thought it looked good.
In this photo, I’m at a press event on a boat in 2003. Within hours of getting back to shore, I also came back down to earth: reminded by friends and flatmates that having a head like an egg is still preferable to looking like someone Jason Bourne would threaten to throw off a balcony.
The good thing about beards is that you can experiment with impunity: I got rid of this one the morning afterwards, and stuck to the full buzz cut – no facial topiary in sight – until the late 2010s. That’s when the beard plus bald combo started really coming into its own. With the odd blip for Halloween outfits, I’ve had a full-bore beard ever since: they’re perfect for the shaving-averse, and surprisingly easy to shape.
In a sense, I’m very lucky – I have friends who’ve gradually gone just as bald as me over the intervening decade, but remain unable to grow more than the wispiest facial fuzz. And so, to any twentysomethings staring at their emerging scalp with horror right now, I’d like to say: keep the faith, it will improve, as long as you can grow a proper beard. Just don’t forget what Jeff Bridges did for us. Joel Snape
‘My parents paid money for this’
This illustrates why virtually no one is allowed to cut my hair … Viv Groskop. Composite: Guardian Design; James Kirkwood
Everyone knows that it’s a bad idea to get your hair cut on the same day that you are having your photograph taken. This picture operates as a public health reminder of this fact. On a personal level it also illustrates why virtually no one is ever allowed to cut my hair. In 40-plus years of adult life, only three hairdressers have gained sufficient trust to be allowed to use scissors in my vicinity. You can see why.
This photograph must have been taken around 1977, when I was about three or four. I remember the photographer coming to set up at the house. Most people didn’t own cameras, and photographer home visits were just one of the exceptionally weird “normal things” people did in the 1970s.
Another key recollection I have from around that time is an overriding fear of the Daleks and of Tom Baker (who was then the Doctor in Doctor Who). The photograph was taken in the room that housed the place where terror resided: the television. Now, a new, chilling dimension was added to the horror already contained within those four walls: the immortalisation of this haircut.
This was the era of the fashionable “Purdey” or “pageboy” cut. It looked stunning on Joanna Lumley in The New Avengers. It was slightly less stunning on a moody toddler old enough to know how awful she looked but too young to do anything about it. Around this age, I must have learned about the idea of bowl haircuts: a cut-price, kitchen-table haircut achieved by putting a bowl on someone’s head and cutting around it. I knew I looked as if I had one.
The truth, however, was worse. A professional hairdresser did this in a salon and my parents paid money for it. I recently asked my mum for more details of this historic misdemeanor and she replied: “It was done very badly.” You think? Viv Groskop
‘My fringe was a dark heavy clump’
Catalogue of disasters … Paula Cocozza with her Freemans-inspired fringe. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Paula Cocozza
When I was 10, I decided to do the unthinkable. I asked my parents for short hair. Being a girl, this went against the traditional beauty ideals I was growing up with in my family. As a child of the 70s, I had artless long hair and no fringe. One of my happiest childhood memories is of sitting on my dad’s lap on Saturday evenings after my weekly hair wash and having him comb and dry my hair while we watched Starsky & Hutch.
But I was increasingly fashion-conscious. I found a picture of a model with the hair I wanted, and tore it out of our Freemans mail order catalogue. She had a fringe and a brunette version of the style made famous by Diana, Princess of Wales, with slightly less layering.
We picked the salon for practical reasons. It was halfway between school and home, in a parade of shops next to a chemist and a butcher’s. Mum took me in with my picture. We showed it to the hairdresser, who looked at it and nodded. I sat in the chair and soon chunks of long brown hair began to land on the floor. I was amazed by how much of it there was, and how sad it looked lying there. Possibly tuning into the momentousness of the occasion, for the duration of the appointment, the hairdresser’s hands didn’t stop shaking.
Afterwards, while I was still in the chair and she held up the mirror for me to survey the results, I tried hard to work out how come the hair I saw on my head looked so unlike that of the model in the Freemans catalogue. My fringe was a dark heavy clump. There wasn’t much in the way of layering. In fact, it looked pretty much like the haircut my mum gave my younger brother every couple of months.
“Did you see her hands were shaking the whole way through?” my mum said when we were back on the street. I made the best of it with a sequined headband worn around my forehead, but I started growing it out right then.
I haven’t had short hair, or a fringe, or a change of colour, or asked a hairdresser to cut off more than a couple of inches since. My hair never strays far from my shoulders. Sometimes, I think there might be another version of me – had that experience gone better – wandering around with a pixie cut. Paula Cocozza
‘A hushed silence came over the salon’
Don’t take hair advice from your frenemies … Polly Hudson. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Polly Hudson
There is never a good time for a hair disaster, but having one during peak awkward, self-conscious teenage years was a test of character and resilience I could have done without. My makeover had seemed like a logical decision. At the age of 14 in 1989, I had elbow-length, thick, glossy hair in perfect condition, which I always wore pulled back in a ponytail. My best friend helpfully suggested I might as well have a short back and sides, because it would look really cool. Side note: this was how I learned about frenemies.
The hairdresser thought I was joking when I told her what I wanted, which I should have paid more attention to, but my friend’s mind was made up: I was doing this. “Yes, I am sure, really,” I insisted.
I knew it was a mistake from the first snip of the scissors, just a millisecond too late. I remember a hushed silence came over the whole salon, but maybe that’s just in my head. There was definitely no chat from my chair, no discussion of forthcoming holiday plans – I sat in shellshocked silence while the stylist followed my instructions, and scalped me.
My mum came to collect me – and pay the bill – and announced her arrival with a piercing scream from the doorway. I looked over to see her hands clasped over her face in horror. “Your beautiful hair!” she cried, although not as much as I did when we got home.
Styled by the hairdresser, my new ’do was horrendous, but at least had some bouncy life to it. When I tried myself, it was flat and positively Hitler-esque. To clarify: this was not the look I was going for.
Somehow there was worse to come, though. “It’ll grow,” was how every conversation about my new hair ended, even those that had begun with people saying it wasn’t that bad. And yes, it did grow, but only the top. The sides stayed stubbornly short. It was like a mushroom, and I started having to put the long part in a little ponytail, which stuck straight up. Now I looked like a sumo wrestler, another image that was not centre stage on many teenage girls’ mood boards. The ends became dry and split – I should have had a trim, but this was tricky seeing as I was never, ever letting anyone cut my hair ever again.
It took a full five years to look anything approaching normal again. I will probably be scarred by the experience for ever, but sometimes it’s an advantage. Every Traitors viewer is biannually tempted by fringe influencer Claudia Winkleman, and most live to regret it. Of course I’m not immune to the lure, but I remember too well the snail’s-pace pain of growing out a mistake, so will never succumb. I’ve learned the hard way. Polly Hudson
‘Mum’s sneaky salad-bowl trims’
Daniel Lavelle sported far worse styles in his teens.
When I was six, in the early 90s, I was like a pinball pinging around restlessly, which meant getting me to sit still on a barber’s chair was as likely as an accidental death in Midsomer Murders.
Even if my mum could have plonked me down in the hot seat, there is no way a barber would have risked taking his scissors to my permanently oscillating head.
Consequently, my mum resorted to cutting my hair herself. On the rare occasions when she could get me to sit still, she would plonk a bowl on my head and cut any hair that poked out around the sides. This usually happened when my attention was focused on playing Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Mum would approach with the stealth of a super assassin: “The Shadow Hairdresser, Operation Haircut”. If she was lucky, the trim would happen without me noticing.
I wish I could say these were my worst haircuts, but I did far worse things to my hair than my mum’s sneaky salad-bowl trims ever could. When teenage hormones kicked in, so did a demoralising preoccupation with my appearance.
In my early teens, I boarded the Beckham bandwagon with the rest of my male peers: curtains, floppy fringe, baby mohawk, buzz cut and several others, until I finally understood what putting a silk hat on a pig meant.
After that, I shifted from attempts to look attractive to making a statement. That statement was mostly, “No, teacher, I won’t do what you tell me”, in the form of shaved-in patterns and hair dye.
Sadly, the only statement my hair makes now is that it’s had enough and doesn’t want to stick around. Daniel Lavelle
‘An egg that’s grown some cress’
Don’t get your haircut when you are drunk …Alexi Duggins. Composite: Guardian Design; Courtesy of Alexi Duggins
I’ve essentially had the same haircut since I was 17 years old, so I am no stranger to intrusive thoughts about it being out of date – particularly given the style I have chosen. Now that the 00s are well and truly gone, do I just look like a human bog brush? Or as though I’ve jammed wet fingers into a wet plug socket? Or like someone left a Sid Vicious waxwork too close to a radiator? Like I said: intrusive thoughts.
So obviously, when I came across a hairdressing stand at a London festival in 2013, I was very taken by it. It offered “hairdressing inspired by music”, with cuts themed to different musical playlists. “We create styles that make you stand out, not fit in,” it said, in promotional documentation that also required you to sign an “extreme cuts contract” (sample text: “We would like to make you aware that we have had no professional training in hairdressing”). This, I decided, was exactly the change I needed.
‘A disco-era King Midas’. Photograph: Courtesy of Alexei Duggins
I had drunk quite a lot of beer by this point.
Fifteen minutes later, my hair had undergone a rough hacking. My stylist, for some reason, felt that what my coiffure chiefly required was to unevenly lose the hair at the sides and have the front teased up to delicately emphasise my receding hairline. Even through the beer, I was not impressed.
“Honestly,” said the scissors wielder, “you’ll look at this cut tomorrow and think: ‘Wow, this is really good.’ Then she sprayed it so liberally with gold glitter that it looked like I had been styled by a disco-era King Midas.
“Jesus!” laughed a friend the next day – once I’d washed the glitter out. “You look like an egg that’s grown some cress out of the top.” Other pals developed a fondness for poking their fingers into the patchier bits. My ears, I was repeatedly told, now stuck out in a way that would make me the bookies’ favourite to star in a Dumbo remake.
All in all, it was not the finest bit of coiffure I’ve ever had. I did learn something, though. It turns out that there are worse things than looking like a human bog brush. Namely, getting your hair done while drunk. Alexi Duggins
