Forcibly cutting someone's hair off isn't the only way to control someone using their hair. Is your rebellious teen dyeing their hair crazy colors and spiking it up? Make them wash it out and flatten it down so they look more "presentable". Is your daughter's hair always a mess? Put it in tight braids and scold her if she complains about them making her scalp hurt. Are you the leader of a cult community and your followers are starting to individualize a little too much for your liking? Make all the men wear one hairstyle and all the women wear another.
In a nutshell, this boils down to repressing someone's individuality or otherwise controlling them by forcing them to wear a certain hairstyle. Styling, cutting, and sometimes dyeing our hair is one of the ways we express who we are and let our personality speak to the world. A character being forced to wear a hairstyle they don't want or that visibly doesn't suit them is an indicator to the audience that they're being controlled by someone else: a parent, an authority figure, etc.
Making girls and/or women wear their hair in braids seems to be a common one. Perhaps it's because braids are neat and practical, or because they're a modest "everyday" or "girl next door" hairstyle that doesn't draw a lot of attention, which is useful for making a group of people not stand out from each other.
In real life, this is also a means of suppressing culture and forcing a subgroup to assimilate, by making them wear the dominant culture's hairstyles instead of their traditional ones.
Variations:
- A strict parent forbids their child from wearing an "improper" or "uncouth" hairstyle.
- A boy isn't allowed to wear his hair longer than chin-length or so because it doesn't look "manly" enough.
- An Unwillingly Girly Tomboy is forced to wear a feminine hairstyle.
- Someone who usually doesn't care for looking neat (or cares about looking scruffy) has their Messy Hair forcibly smoothed down, combed, or styled for an important occasion.
- All the members of a tightly controlled community or group are forced to wear the same hairstyle.
- Restrictions on hairstyles are part of a school uniform, especially regarding hair length for boys.
- Someone's hairstyle changes or is changed for them when they're Brainwashed and Crazy.
- Someone with curly hair is forced to straighten it by someone else who thinks Curly Hair Is Ugly.
- Someone's hairstyle is magically transformed into an unflattering one as a form of humiliation.
Related:
- Expository Hairstyle Change: Hairstyle change signals a characterization change.
- Hair as Cultural Identity: Scalp and facial hair styles have cultural significance and are part of cultural identity.
- Important Haircut: New hair, new me.
- Individuality Is Illegal: Well, when you don't even let someone have control over their own hair...
- Long Hair Is Feminine. May overlap if a woman is forced to grow out her hair.
- Nobody Touches the Hair: Someone's personal Berserk Button is having their hair messed with.
- Real Men Have Short Hair: May overlap if a man is forced to cut his long hair.
- Sucky Salon Visit: An incompetent hairdresser gives someone a bad styling job.
- Traumatic Haircut: Anguish by forced haircut.
Indices: Hair Tropes
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Assassination Classroom: Nagisa has his hair long because his mother Hiromi Wanted a Daughter Instead of a son, so she has him grow out his hair and forbids him from cutting it. In the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, he finally cut his hair after gaining independence from his mother and becoming a teacher.
- In a flashback, Nagisa ties it a ponytail before Kaede came along and styled his hair into pigtails. At first, Hiromi didn't want him to tie back his hair, but she likes how it looked so she let it slide as long as his hair remained uncut.
- Castletown Dandelion: Downplayed example; Shuu tells his terminally shy sister Akane that he'll agree to take the chore of shopping for groceries from her if she'll agree to wear her pigtails higher for a month (in a style that imitates his recently returned Childhood Friend Hana, no less). After some weak-willed haggling on Akane's part, she gets it down to three weeks, and agrees to shift her pigtails in exchange for not having to go grocery shopping.
- Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu: In one episode, a stalker wearing a pony-head mask is stalking the girls of the city, forcing their hair into ponytails as the aesthetic of long hair but having the nape of the neck visible to him was his fetish. He uses wire and glue to ensure that they cannot remove the hairstyle easily. Kaname and Sousuke get involved in taking him down after he attacks Kaname's best friend, Kiyoko. She was physically alright, and while she admits it was scary, she was largely unaffected emotionally.
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: One of Iino's proposed policies during the election arc is that all male students would have to have crew cuts and all the female students would wear pigtails under the logic that low maintenance hairstyles would cut down on tardiness (and because she has a crew cut fetish). This naturally does very little to endear to her fellow students. The fact that this policy isn't in place when she finally becomes president the following school year helps reflect just how much she's loosened up over the course of the series.
- My Hero Academia: When Bakugo interns under Best Jeanist, his new mentor views him as a rude, uncouth and aggressive person who needs to be straightened out to become a proper hero. He combs Bakugo's spiky hair into a smooth and presentable style, with the comment, "Your physical appearance, speech, and actions must be elegant if you're a hero." When Sero and Kirishima see it, they laugh at him and call him "side-part boy" (or "pretty boy" in the dub), which gets him so mad that his hair explodes back into its natural shape.
- Ranma ½: Principal Kuno insists on trying to inflict buzz cuts on all male students and bowl cuts on all female students as a form of pre-emptive discipline. He also offers a chance to score an exemption to the student that can defeat his bizarre gauntlet, but this is ultimately meant to Yank the Dog's Chain as he has no intention to follow through with it, and hopes to break the spirit of a successfully rebelling student by denying them this reprieve. While his bizarre scheme doesn't work out for him as the entire school then refuses to go along with the program, he continues to try variations on it for the latter half of the series.
Comic Books
- Persepolis: The fundamentalist authorities believe women's hair emits rays that arouse men, so they make all women and girls in Iran cover their hair with headscarves. Letting a few strands of hair show becomes a socially acceptable way for a woman to express that she doesn't agree with the new regime. In her teens, Marjane is accosted by two fundamentalist women who berate her for not covering her head all the way, yank her scarf down, and yell, "Lower your scarf, you little whore!"
Comic Strips
- Calvin and Hobbes: Any time Calvin's parents brush the spikes out of his hair, expect him to make a huge fuss about it.
- In one strip, Calvin's parents have a conversation over dinner about how people in public don't dress properly anymore, are rude, and swear all the time. Cut to Calvin with combed hair and wearing a dress shirt and tie, furiously yelling, "How come I gotta change the world?!"
- An arc from December 1988 begins with Calvin complaining about having to wear formal clothes and get his hair combed for Christmas card photos. He rebels by making an ugly face every time his dad tries to take his picture.
Dad: [looking through a series of photos of Calvin pulling faces] We can't send these in our Christmas cards. People will think it's sacrilegious.
Mom: Well, these do look like Calvin...except for the combed hair. - In an arc from February 1987, Calvin uses Crisco to style his hair into a single curl on the top of his head, but his mom makes him comb it out because it's class picture day. Hobbes reshapes it into two spikes on either side of his head so he looks like Astro Boy, which he is pleased with.
Fan Works
- Misery Loves Company: After stepping on too many of Hecate's magic booby traps, Gaz's short purple hair is turned into bright blonde, braided hair adorned with pink ribbons, the last hairstyle a tomboy like her would be caught dead wearing. With a few other changes to her wardrobe, she looks totally unrecognizable after her memory is wiped and she becomes Hecate's new daughter.
- polished
has Calypso throwing a fit over Odysseus cutting his hair chin-length, dumping a Rapid Hair Growth potion over his head because she thinks he looks more pretty like that. It serves as yet another way for her to establish control and he cannot properly defend himself since she's a goddess.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: Hilda's parents forced this on both Hilda herself and their adopted son Nate. When Hilda came out as a trans girl, her parents didn't take it well and responded by forcibly cutting her hair short along with her girls clothes to make her act like a boy again before kicking her out. After they feel guilty for kicking out Hilda and causing her death, they force Nate to grow his hair long, wear girls clothes and take the name "Rosa" to make him their Replacement Goldfish for Hilda.
Film — Animated
- Brave: Queen Elinor tries combing and brushing her daughter Merida's Wild Hair, to no effect, and eventually ends up stuffing it all inside a wimple and refusing to let one curl poke out, a perfect way of highlighting the conflict between a rule-abiding mother obsessed with making her daughter behave like she expects her to.
Film — Live-Action
- if.... (1968): The whip Denson regularly berates pupils for wearing their hair too long, especially the three main protagonists Travis, Wallace and Knightley, and sends them to have cold showers.
- The Last Samurai: Late in the film, Emperor Meiji passes a law restricting the rights of Samurai to display their social class in public, including a ban on the Samurai Ponytail. Shortly afterwards, Nobutada is arrested for wearing his hair in a ponytail and subjected to a Traumatic Haircut by the police.
- Orphan: First Kill: While initially posing as the Albrights' long-lost daughter, Esther, Leena wears her hair in pigtail loops. After Tricia gets Leena's real identity out of her, she makes her continue posing as the perfect daughter because it would break Allen's heart if she disappeared again. She makes Leena wear a fancy pink dress and ties her hair into two braids.
- In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018), Addison has supernaturally white hair, which wouldn't fly in Seabrook, where odd-colored hair is associated with the hated zombies, and so her parents force her to cut it short and hide it under a blonde wig. After she helps to make the zombies more accepted, she abandons the wig and starts growing her hair out.
Jokes
- A joke sometimes heard in the army:
Am I hurting you?
No, sir.
I should be, I'm standing on your hair! Get it cut.
Literature
- American Girls: Felicity: In Learns a Lesson, Felicity is about to begin her education as a gentlewoman, and her mother doesn't want her high-class English peers thinking they are uncivilized because they live on the edge of the wilderness. She puts Felicity through an intense styling session to make sure she looks like a proper young lady on her first day, including putting her hair in clay rollers and combing it through with pomade. Felicity finds it tiresome, but endures it as patiently as she can.
- For the first 4 books of The Baby-Sitters Club, Mary Anne wears her hair in braids, on orders from her overprotective dad, despite her being rather old (12/13) for such a hairstyle.
- Cookie: Beauty's abusive father Gerry forces her to wear her hair long and refuses to let her cut it, because he thinks it makes her look more feminine and pretty (Beauty isn't that conventionally attractive, something she often gets mocked or criticised for). He also forces her to get her hair styled into curls for a birthday party, which isn't too flattering on her and looks even worse when she accidentally gets her hair wet. After Beauty and her mother Dilly leave Gerry, Beauty says she wants to get her hair cut short; Dilly automatically starts to say her father "won't let [her]", only for Beauty to remind her they don't have to do as he says anymore. Beauty gets her hair cut into a pageboy near the end of the story and is all the better for it, not only because the pageboy suits her more than her previously long hair, but because it symbolises her breaking free from Gerry's control.
- The Giver: All young girls in the Community wear their hair in braids tied with ribbons, starting from age three. At age nine, they lose the ribbons, and at age ten, their hair is cut short.
- The Grace Year: Garner County is a No Woman's Land where the general point of view is that Magic Is Evil. Women are forbidden to do anything that might suggest they are hiding magic, like humming. They must also wear their hair pulled back in plaits so that their faces are exposed and they can't hide anything.
- Haruhi Suzumiya: Downplayed example. Kyon, in the closed space that will overwrite the world with Haruhi, has been given clues by Mikuru and Nagato about how to return to reality with Haruhi (i.e. he has to kiss her). Bracing himself to do just that, Kyon tells Haruhi that one time she wore her hair in a ponytail and it looked so good on her it should have been criminal, right before kissing her, and waking up in his own bed, alone. When he goes to school the next day, Haruhi claims to have had strange dreams the night before and is tired, but seemingly influenced by the dream, she's wearing her hair in a ponytail.
- I Am Not Esther: The women of the Children of the Faith must always wear their hair long and braided; any other style is considered ungodly and immodest. Kirby at one point rebels by cutting off her braid, leaving her hair short.
- In Jane Eyre, the girls at Lowood School are ordered to keep their hair plain and "modest." When the reverend who runs the place comes by to inspect, even a simple braid is too much of a "top-knot" for his liking, and it's suggested he has everyone's hair cut short. Since his own wife and daughters are dressed fashionably, with the wife wearing false curls, it's clearly just hypocrisy on his part.
- The Long Secret: Beth Ellen's Rich Bitch mother, Zeeney, calls Beth Ellen's blonde curls "unspeakable" and drags her to a beauty parlor to get her hair straightened.
She remembered that she now had straight hair. Zeeney had left instructions that Beth Ellen's hair be brushed out as hard as possible to make it straight. She had even discussed the possibility of straightening the hair by a new process, but Jimmy had advised against it.
- Matilda: Miss Trunchbull loathes pigtails and orders a young girl named Amanda Thripp to cut her pigtails off and throw them in the dustbin. She grabs Amanda by the pigtails and swings her round in circles before throwing her over the playground fence. Matilda notes that Amanda's mother will not believe this tale, and will not cut Amanda's hair, so Amanda will do it herself.
- The Queen of Water: The Doctorita always makes Virginia, her indentured servant, wear her hair in a practical ponytail and never lets her wear it loose, so she doesn't look too pretty.
- Sherlock Holmes: In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches", governess Violet Hunter is hired by Jephro Rucastle to take care of his young son with the stipulation that she cut her hair short, among other requirements. It's later revealed that Rucastle had Violet cut her hair in order to impersonate his daughter from his first wife from afar, and prevent said daughter's fiancé from approaching the house by making it appear that she had no more interest in him.
- Sword of Truth: The length of a woman's hair is limited by her social standing. When Rachel is assigned as a playmate (read: slave and beating girl) to Princess Violet, the latter chops her hair all jagged as a sign of her power. Later, Richard cuts it even when he meets her, and it is viewed akin to removing a slave's mark.
- The Wheel of Time:
- Hairstyle is a mark of rank in the Seanchan Empire — if you're bald and not part of the imperial family, wear a wig or die. Nobles in conquered territories are required to style their hair according to their new place in the regime; conversely, when the Princess expels Egeanin from the nobility in a fit of pique, she's forced to cut her hair short.
- The Aiel Wise Ones punish Egwene for breaking the terms of her apprenticeship by putting her in Girlish Pigtails — a hairstyle for someone too young to be held to their word, since she didn't honour hers.
Video Games
- Fallout: New Vegas: Strongly implied to have happened to the Twisted Hairs, a tribe of Dreadlock Warriors who attached great cultural significance to their dreadlocks. They learned how to use their own hair as tourniquets during first aid, and used different braids as the basis for their tribal language to communicate their social status to each other. They were eventually betrayed by and absorbed into another tribe, Caesar's Legion, and since the Legion has a policy of destroying anything that could connect an assimilated tribe to their previous identity, it's likely the Twisted Hairs' heads were shaved as part of their initiation.
- Strongly implied in Life Is Strange 2. When Sean finds Daniel in the Haven Point church in "Faith", Daniel's typically messy hair has been reshaped into a bowl cut, indicating just how much of a hold Reverend Lisbeth Fischer has on him.
- Pokémon Sun and Moon: When you first meet Lillie, she wears a fancy white dress, a sunhat, and her hair is done up in two braids on either side of her face. Her mother Lusamine became obsessed with Nihilego as a result of its neurotoxin affecting her brain, and made Lillie dress and wear her hair like that so she would resemble it; her braids resemble the Ultra Beast's front appendages. After going through some Character Development, Lillie does a Significant Wardrobe Shift into a more casual dress and styles her hair in a high ponytail.
Web Animation
- A wig variation in Disventure Camp: Lake lost all her blonde hair because her parents put her on an extremely strict diet and studying regiment, making it fall out from malnutrition and stress. Not wanting the world to know she's bald, her mother took her to a wig shop to buy her a wig. Lake saw a red wig she loved,but her mother wouldn't let her have since she's upset her daughter lost her hair. Instead, Lake's mother bought her a light blonde wig that resembles her hair.
- Eventually, Lake found a red wig resembling the one she wanted so she replaced her blonde wig with her new red one as an act of rebellion towards her controlling parents.
Webcomics
- Magical Boy: Max, a trans boy, was forced by his mom Hikari to grow his hair out since Long Hair Is Feminine and all of the Goddesses before him expressed their powers as feminine, Magical Girl-like Henshin Heroes. Hikari is horrified when Max gets it cut without her permission and tries to force him to conform to his assigned gender because she believes it's necessary for Earth's safety.
Western Animation
- The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Egg," Nicole is making everyone dress in fancy clothes because Felicity is coming to dinner. Gumball grumbles about having to comb his hair, which is sticking up ("It's like trying to groom a coconut!"). Nicole gives it a Death Glare and cracks her knuckles, and it immediately falls into place.
Gumball: [with a nervous smile] Yes, of course. You've made that point very clear.
- Futurama: In "A Bicyclops Built For Two", Leela ends up in a relationship with Alcazar, a man who she believes to be the last male of their alien species. Not only does he turn out to not even be her species (he's a shapeshifting alien) but he's a toxic lover who forces Leela to do housework for him while he insults her and controls how she looks, even forcing her to do her hair in a specific way. She only stays with him because she believes procreating with him is the only way to save her species, and dumps him the second she learns the truth.
- King of the Hill: In "Pigmalion", Trip Larsen, the new controlling boyfriend of Luann, persuades her to wear her hair in pigtails to start. When she leaves and moves in with him, he dyes her hair red in her sleep, and when she says she doesn't like it, he says she can just shave her head then — which she doesn't want to, as it'd fully grown back from her traumatic hair loss in the propane explosion. His ultimate goal is to make her look like the woman in the Larsen Pork Products ad that hung in his bedroom as a child.
- Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023): Mimi was forced to straighten her naturally-curly hair during her time in the government, as was common for black women back then.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- In "The Cutie Map – Part 1", ll the stallions in Starlight Glimmer's cult commune have short-cut manes and docked tails, while the mares have their manes tied into a bun, two braids or simply hanging straight down. During the musical number "In Our Town," one mare's braids are untied, but Starlight reties them so she looks like the other mares standing next to her. Notably, Starlight's own mane and tail aren't styled exactly the same as her followers' and are slightly curled at the ends, hinting that she doesn't completely adhere to her own philosophy of being identical to everypony else in the village.
- In "Boast Busters", as part of Trixie's magic show, she challenges the townsfolk to step up to the stage and defeat her, declaring, "Anything you can do, I can do better." Rarity uses magic to style her mane and create a beautiful outfit from Trixie's stage curtain, but Trixie casts a spell that turns her mane dark green with two rat's tails and a stick poking out.
Rarity: No! Green hair! Not green hair! Such an awful, awful color! [runs off in tears]
Golden Harvest: [who has a green mane in this scene, even though it's usually orange] Well, I never!
- The Owl House: One of the most obvious signs of Odalia's Control Freak tendencies are reflected in Amity's appearance, with her forcing her daughter to both wear a Hereditary Hairstyle and making her dye it green so she'll be color coordinated with her elder siblings. After Amity starts asserting her individuality, she has her older sister Emira cut and dye it lavender.
- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: When Catra becomes a mind-controlled slave of Horde Prime, her wild mane of hair is cut short and slicked back. After she's freed, her hair goes back to being messy, but stays short for the rest of the series.
- 6teen: Nikki is a tomboy with short hair who loathes anything remotely girly. In "Employee of the Month," she gets brainwashed into acting like an ideal Khaki Barn employee and dresses in a more conventionally feminine style. She removes her nose piercing, starts wearing pink, puts on makeup and does her hair in a high ponytail with a butterfly barrette. Her friends are horrified.
Wyatt: Look at what they've done to you!
Caitlin: You're wearing pink! And butterfly clips! Pink butterfly clips, Nikki!! - Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Flying Princess Pony Head is a Rebellious Princess who usually wears her mane loose. In "St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses", Star and Marco break into the reform school to rescue her. She's been Mind Raped into a Proper Lady and given a makeover with her mane done up in curls and tied into a tight braid with a ribbon bow.
Real Life
- After their conquest of China, the Manchu Qing Dynasty mandated that the male population under their control wear the queue, as a way to impose a Manchu tradition on the majority-Han population and determine those who were living as outlaws by flouting the mandated hairstyle (they did provide a religious exemption for monks, who shave their head completely).
- One of the ways the residential schools in the US and Canada that took young natives from their families tried to forcibly westernize them was by cutting their hair short, especially boys. In many indigenous American cultures, long hair has religious and cultural significance.
- In North Korea, the approved range of hairstyles limits men and women to a strictly regulated range of cuts, and dictates that married women can only wear certain styles.
- Addiction recovery group turned Cult Synanon forced its female members to shave their heads.
- Truth in Television. A lot of abusive partners will invoke this, to the point where hairdressers are taking courses to identify signs of Domestic Abuse. They've reported incidents where clients have indeed reported having their hair cut off by abusive boyfriends angered because "I didn't give you permission to do that!", "You must be doing that to impress some other guy!", etc.