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1. Just this week, Jamie Lee Curtis appeared on the Today show, where they surprised her with footage from her 1981 visit to the show. Fans were shocked to see the star's super cropped, blonde hair back in the day; Curtis shared the clip on Instagram, revealing in her caption, "My hair had been burned off my head after getting it bleached for a movie and then a perm." I'd theorize this movie to be Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story, as that's the only role from around that time where Curtis was blonde.
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2. For South of Heaven, Evangeline Lilly and the film's director decided that her character should be a natural blonde. To achieve the look, Lilly went through what she called an "arduous" process, especially considering her hair is "very, very dark naturally." Luckily, she had buzzed it the year prior, so she wasn't working with much damage to begin with. However, this came with its own challenges. "It was so short [that] if it grew out by even a millimeter, you could see it," she said of her roots. "I was bleaching my hair every 10 days, and by the end of the shoot, it was falling out."
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3. Ashley Tisdale said that she's "always been pretty brutal to" her hair; this began when she first bleached it blonde for a role. After that, "It was just a continual spiral of bleaching and extensions. ... I just wasn't thinking about the integrity of my hair." One particularly bad bout of damage came literally the night before beginning to shoot High School Musical. After stylists added lowlights during rehearsals for the teen musical, she and director Kenny Ortega agreed it didn't fit the character.
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"But we were supposed to film the next day. So we just bleached my hair, and it absolutely fried it. I have thick hair, so we had to put extensions up to the root to match the thickness, and people thought I was wearing wigs in the film." Nope; just thick extensions! Tisdale's abuse of her hair continued for many years, until she was diagnosed with alopecia in her 20s, at which point she realized she needed to "really start taking care of" her hair. She now limits heat styling and dye, and stays away from extensions.
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4. Ashley Benson dealt with major hair loss on the set of Pretty Little Liars. "I bleached my hair so much during season three, and it fell right off, and you couldn't even tell," she later revealed. Her fatal flaw appeared to be deciding to bleach it shortly after returning from filming Spring Breakers. "It all fell out. Literally, I was bawling my eyes out, and I called my hairstylist saying that I have no hair. What is going on?"
Freeform
The situation was so bad that Warner Brothers, who produced PLL, called her to inform her, "You need to do something with your hair." Benson wasn't surprised: "Well, duh, I'm bald!" They wanted her to wear extensions, but Benson was worried that what was left of her hair would fall out. "Like legit, it was strings," she remembered. "I mean, huge regret. That was horrendous. Horrendous."
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5. Jeff Bridges revealed to the Guardian that his hair suffered intense damage on the set of Tron. "I can't remember why, but I decided to curl my hair for the part. For the scenes of me inside the computer, I had to wear these white hockey helmets," he recalled. "My hair had been bleached to get the curl in, and I remember it falling out because of the helmet. The peroxide would get hot, and the roots would break."
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6. Patrick Dempsey debuted a shocking new look after his role in Ferrari: fully white hair, which he soon shaved. This wasn't exactly his choice. "Because we were still in the COVID era, I didn't have enough time to get a wig fitted," Dempsey said. "We dyed it, and we couldn’t get the color right. So we had one week [where] my scalp was just blistered because we had burned it, and then we finally got it right." However, this look didn't last long. "By the end of the shoot, I had a helmet on, and I had, like, a chemical cut because my hair was just destroyed. It started falling out and breaking off. So that's why I had to shave my head."
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7. Jonathan Bailey wore a toupée in Wicked after seriously damaging his hair through multiple roles. "I had to perm my hair for Bridgerton and straighten my hair for [Fellow Travelers]. I was like a teenage beauty advert, doing everything to my hair. I remember going on this holiday, and I got to the beach, I sat down in the sun, and my hair was just like floating, wisping off, like breaking away. And I looked completely and felt completely insane,” he said. Wicked's costume department had to make do with Bailey's new situation, putting him in a toupée. "I'm in the choreography, so it’s flapping about," he joked.
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8. Priyanka Chopra "ruined" her long, dark hair after dyeing it bright red for Love Story 2050. She could've opted for a wig, but was worried it wouldn't look natural. "My hair was ruined, as I had to color it twice within a few days. I had to completely bleach my black hair for the color to set in. Later, I had no option but to cut the damaged ends."
9. Susan Olsen was only 8 when she began starring as the youngest Brady child, Cindy, on The Brady Bunch. All the female Brady children were blonde, and Olsen had to dye her hair to look the part. "Every three weeks, they had to dye my hair. If you look at the third season, my hair is kind of a different shade of blonde every episode," she revealed. Her hair became so damaged it stopped being able to hold a curl, which was a signature part of her character's look. "They were trying out different things, but then my hair had started to fall out. With that, I went back to letting my mom do my hair, every Friday night." Her mom had her sleep in rollers in order to wake up with curls. "My mother was responsible for those ringlets," she said.
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10. Franka Potente had Elmo-red hair in the classic German thriller Run Lola Run — turns out that was her real hair. "When I came to do the movie, my hair was jet black. I changed it a lot back then. And they were like, 'Well, we did camera tests, and the decision is red.'" It took a whopping eight bleachings to get it to white, the only possible starting point for the level of vivid red required. Her hair was so damaged that the color didn't stick well, meaning she wasn't allowed to wash it during her six weeks filming the movie, as she'd be risking the color coming right out. She ended up rinsing it three times, but that was it. When she finally took a real shower, the color ran right down the drain. "It was like Lola was washed out of me," she lamented.
11. Jennifer Aniston has always been hair goals, so it's surprising to learn that at one point, her real-life hair wasn't doing so hot. After debuting a bob in 2011, Aniston revealed the true reason she opted for the 'do. "My real hair was getting thinned out again from all the extensions," she said. "It was starting to look fake." While she didn't name a role, she had recently been in movies like Just Go With It and The Switch, where she'd sported longer locks. However, the damage may simply have been from red carpet events.
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12. Margot Robbie also didn't name a specific role, but the constant styling and dyeing have taken their toll. "I've got really shit hair, so it's kind of hard to do my hair well. I really need a hairstylist to do my hair if it's going to look good. I have like three hairs left on my head," she said in one interview. "People are always like, 'How do you have such healthy hair?' I'm like, 'I don't.' My hair is snapped off, it's shit, it's gone, but hairstylists have suitcases full of fake hair, and they make it look amazing." She blamed dye, hot rollers, hard water in the UK, and styling for photoshoots. "If you're doing a photoshoot, and there's a very finite amount to do your hair, they're quick and rough."
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13. While she didn't name the project, Anya Taylor-Joy said one role caused her hair to fall out. "I did this one project where they bleached my hair from root to tip every Sunday for three and a half months," Taylor-Joy remembered. "Then I dyed it brunette, and the stylist said, 'Oh, that's so cute. You have an undercut.' She lifted up my hair and the whole bottom was completely fried off. I was like, 'Ah, OK, bleach is bad; good to know.'"
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It's unclear if this is the same project, but she also said she severely damaged her hair while shooting Morgan. "I did a movie called Morgan that required me to have silver hair and bleached eyebrows, and I learned that both are incredibly difficult to maintain," she said. "You cannot bleach your hair every week for three months and expect it to survive!" It was so damaged that she ended up giving herself a bob with kitchen scissors — "I could not take it anymore," she said.
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14. In 2024, Michael Cera appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers sporting a fairly frizzy, brassy 'do, and he wasn't shy about addressing it. "I kind of want to apologize for it a little bit," he told Meyers. "My hair is in a weird place right now. ... The thing is, I can't cut it right now because then I'll have, like, frosted tips. Or I dye it back to my own color, and that just feels wrong." He clarified it was for a movie, Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme — "I didn't just go crazy," he told the audience.
15. Linda Cardellini got a bald spot from shooting Legally Blonde. Cardellini has straight hair, but of course, a key aspect of Chutney's hair in the film is that it's permed. Cardellini did not get a perm for the role, but the daily curling came with a cost. "The curling iron burned a piece of my hair off, so for a long time I had a sort of bald spot," she later told Elle.
16. James Marsters didn't lose his hair, but he did suffer scalp damage from his constant bleaching for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. "They told me repeatedly my hair would fall out, or rather, they were not sure I would have hair by the end," he said. "Right on the bottle of bleach they used, it said, Only do this every six weeks. Not safe to use more often. And we did it every eight days, because a vampire is dead, so your hair doesn't grow, so you can't have roots." Marsters was only meant to appear in a few episodes of the show, so it seemed like NBD to go through the bleaching for a few weeks. However, he quickly became a fan favorite and was brought back to be a series regular, meaning he had to maintain this schedule for around seven years.
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His hair shockingly survived. "My hair didn't care. It sloughed it off, but then my scalp did not like that," he remembered. In fact, he got blisters on his scalp from the constant bleaching. "We were pouring bleach on top of the open wounds from the last bleaching," he recalled, noting it was not "the most glamorous part of the job."
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17. Miles Heizer also had scalp issues after bleaching his hair for a role. His character on 13 Reasons Why had peroxide blonde hair for the first season of the show. Sharing a photo of the bleaching process, he joked, "I'm glad everyone’s enjoying 13 Reasons Why! I don't have a scalp anymore, but it was well worth it." Luckily, they opted for a more natural look for Season 2.
18. Tati Gabrielle implied she had lost her hair over bleaching, which she began doing after a time jump in The 100. The star quickly became known for the look, even after she'd shaved it off. When she was asked to go back to it in Uncharted, she refused, requesting a wig. "I was trying to explain to them, 'I have black hair. You can't bleach my head every other week—you will have no hair to film with by the end.'"
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19. The late star Hayden Panettiere also dealt with damage from numerous roles. "My hair was so damaged from all the bleaching and color changes — not to mention all the heat from styling," she wrote on Instagram last year. "Hours in the hair and makeup chair on set had also taken its toll." One role in particular had caused disproportionate damage, though she didn't name the part: "For the film, I had kept my roots [high on my scalp], but I bleached my hair Barbie-blonde. [It] zapped my hair off." She'd also lost hair after giving birth and dealing with postpartum depression.
Curmudgeon Films
Looking at her IMDB, the role may have been Amber Alert, Sleepwalker, A Breed Apart; it looks brightest in A Breed Apart.
20. Tia Mowry said Sister, Sister led to her hair losing its curl pattern, as it was constantly straightened on set. "You could see that when we became teenagers in the show, we ended up straightening our hair. It was such a pivotal moment in the series because it was also a reflection of what was being pushed as 'beautiful' in society." Her use of a flat iron damaged her hair, and it took a long time (and a haircut) before she was able to restore its natural texture. Getting it back was a healing process: "Seeing it grow and grow and grow; it's very liberating. It's really just self-love to be able to embrace that part of me."
The WB
21. Shalita Grant claimed her hair was damaged on the set of NCIS: New Orleans over the course of about a year and a half. She said the wigs she wore in the crime drama, along with the styling, damaged her hair. "Anybody who was a fan of the show, you knew Percy’s ponytail looked different every week — sometimes within the episode. What you didn’t know was what was going on with me, with my natural hair." She said she ended up with a "bald spot from season 2," and that by Season 4, her hair was "threatening baldness." This ultimately contributed to her decision to leave the show after feeling there was a double standard between her and white costars.
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22. You might think that Lili Reinhart's hair wouldn't have suffered much damage on Riverdale, considering she almost always wore a simple ponytail. However, the style required a deceptive amount of heat styling. "It takes a long time [to style], longer than you'd think, and it's really annoying and very frustrating," Reinhart revealed, saying the updo caused her "stress." On set, her hair would be curled before even being put up, and that's not even to mention the constant dye jobs she needed to maintain Betty's blonde hair. "My hair is damaged as hell from being on my show and just from heat styling in general," she said. "So I try to take really good care of my hair." That meant requesting the use of extensions on Riverdale, so her real hair could reset.
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23. Reinhart's Riverdale costar KJ Apa also had to dye his hair frequently for this role, that of the redhead Archie. Apa, who's a natural brunette, called the upkeep "pretty gnarly." He told Vulture, "I had to go to the salon every two weeks to get it dyed and bleached and stuff. So yeah, it's not my favorite thing to do, but obviously I've got to do it because the roots keep coming up and my hair grows really fast. So, two weeks max I can go shooting, and then I have to get it dyed again." While his hair has held up, his eyebrows weren't so lucky. "It was really painful the first and the second time I got it done because they do my eyebrows as well. They ended up bleaching my eyebrows, and I had two holes — they burned into my skin."
Jack Rowand / The CW / courtesy Everett Collection
He eventually stopped letting the show dye his eyebrows. "The amount of shit that has been put in my hair is unbelievable." KJ added, "I wouldn't be surprised if I go bald in a couple years." However, it seems Apa got lucky; the show has completed its run, and his brown hair and eyebrows both survived.
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24. Emilia Clarke wore a wig to play the icy-haired Daenerys for the first seven seasons of Game of Thrones, but for the last season, she decided to actually go platinum and forgo the wigs. However, the bleach it required ended up severely damaging her hair, causing her to cut it into a chin-length bob. “My hair was, like, dying!" Clarke told Harper’s Bazaar UK. I’m honestly trying to grow out the blonde, because it's just killed my hair, and I miss having nice hair!
HBO
25. Her GoT costar Sophie Turner also dealt with a hair disaster. A natural blonde, Turner was constantly dying her hair red for the show and then blonde again — and one of these times, her hair never recovered. "A few years ago, I was trying to go back from red to blonde, and it destroyed my hair to the point that I had to use a wig for Game of Thrones," she told Glamour. "They wouldn't let me dye it back red, or my hair would've fallen out." She later clarified that it was not the GoT red they were stripping out, but red from another role that "ruined" her hair.
HBO
26. Robert Pattinson had to change his hair up multiple times during the filming of Good Time, and as a result, his bangs in particular started falling out. "Some scenes they peroxided my bangs. They changed my hair color so many times that some of my hair fell out," he told Page Six of the "exhausting shoot."
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27. British actor Danny Dyer actually threatened to sue the network after losing his hair due to dyeing it ginger for All in the Game. "I couldn't get it out of my hair. It took me six months. I couldn't f***ing get it out. I kept washing it. ... I'm receding a bit but it only started after I dyed it," Dyer claimed, saying that he was considering suing Channel 4.
Mike Marsland / WireImage via Getty Images, Channel 4
Dyer didn't end up suing, and he later spoke about possibly beginning to wear wigs.
28. Keira Knightley didn't have a particular film to blame, but she did say dyeing her hair constantly for different roles damaged her hair so much that she had to wear wigs for five years. “I have dyed my hair virtually every color imaginable for different films. It got so bad that my hair literally began to fall out of my head!” She called wearing wigs "the greatest thing that’s ever happened to my hair.”
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29. January Jones similarly had issues with her hair as a result of multiple films and dye jobs, including Sweetener. "I have been every color and now my hair is falling out in clumps," she said at Sundance in 2013. "I've been blonde, red with extensions for this film [Sweetener], then blonde, then black, and now blonde again. I'm going to have to shave it off and wear a wig."
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It looks like Jones' hair mostly recovered, though, as other pictures of her from that year show her with various stages of a bob.
30. We all know Ariana Grande for her signature high pony. Well, it turns out it's because of her many years of dying her hair red to appear as Cat on Victorious. Apparently, creator Dan Schneider didn't want all his main female cast members to be brunette, which explains why Cat was a redhead and Jade had black/streaked hair, despite both of them being natural brunettes.
Lisa Rose / Nickelodeon / Courtesy: Everett Collection
"I had to bleach my hair and dye it red every other week for the first 4 years of playing Cat… as one would assume, that completely destroyed my hair. ... I wear it in a ponytail because my actual hair is so broken that it looks absolutely ratchet and absurd when I let it down," Grande wrote in a Facebook post.
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31. A similar thing happened to Hilarie Burton in One Tree Hill. After two seasons of intense curling and bleaching, her hair was so damaged she had to cut her hair and return to a more natural color for Season 3.
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32. A natural blonde, Jennifer Lawrence had to dye her hair dark brown to play the brunette Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games series. Preferring her blonde hair, Lawrence would go back to blonde between films — but her second time doing so, things didn't go so well. "She wanted to go back to blonde for award season, but her hair had so much color build-up that she decided to cut it off to her shoulders," Catching Fire hair designer and head stylist, Linda Flowers, told Cosmopolitan.
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"I tried to lift the brown pigments out of her hair twice with a base-breaking formula, which helped, but then Jennifer went to her personal colorist and spent eight hours there, bleaching it," Flowers said. "The entire process really damaged her hair, so that's when she went full pixie to get her hair back to a healthy state." After this, Lawrence wore a wig for the final two movies.
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33. Kate Winslet initially loved the idea of going bright red for Titanic, but the hairstyle brought on a little more trouble than expected. "I hadn't counted on how hard it would be to go back to my natural hair color after filming," she told Elle. "It took almost two years." She also expressed frustration with her curls in the film. "My hair isn't naturally wavy, so it had to be curled every day and was impossible to maintain because there was water all around us," she said. "We were filming in a series of tanks, so the water was always in the air, and it would create a problem for everybody's hair."
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34. Charlize Theron famously rocked a buzz cut for her iconic role as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. It wasn't that role that ruined her hair, but actually, the press tour she'd done prior. She said her hair had become "fried," and she suggested Furiosa have a shaved head. The last two projects she promoted before filming Mad Max were Snow White and the Huntsman and Prometheus, which she promoted around the same time (the two were released a week apart) — making them to blame for Theron's fried hair.
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35. For his brief role on The Flash, Mark Hamill dyed his hair purple, for some reason opting for permanent dye. It was fun for a bit, but proved miserable — it took him three months and three dye jobs to get his hair back to blonde.
36. Pauley Perrette, who played Abby on NCIS, had to dye her naturally blonde hair black for years for the role. While there's no word on whether her hair itself was damaged, her health was — she dyed her hair so often that she developed a potentially fatal allergic reaction to the dye and was rushed to the ER.
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Afterward, she said she'd change to natural hair dyes or use a wig (though no word on which she chose).
37. Tricia Helfer dyed her hair bleach blonde for her role in Battlestar Galactica, but in the second season, they had to keep cutting it shorter to deal with how damaged her hair was becoming. "When we started the second season, every episode my hair gets thinner and thinner and thinner, and shorter and shorter and shorter," Helfer said. "And then finally it started falling out in chunks and they had to give me a wig."
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38. Nikki Reed had a reallllyyyy bad experience dyeing her hair blonde for Twilight. “It took 36 hours initially to make me blond, and every other day, I was bleaching my head and my skin," she told MTV. Eventually, it got so bad that her hair started to fall out — so Reed, a natural brunette, opted to wear wigs for the rest of the series.
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39. Milla Jovovich had to do the same thing for The Fifth Element. Keeping her orange-hued style with bright white roots required bleaching her hair constantly, leading to her hair falling out in clumps just a few weeks into shooting. She, too, had to switch to wigs. "We had to make the Leeloo wig because I literally had only, like, half...like, clumps of hair. It was really awful," she told Vogue.
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40. Carey Mulligan has become known for her short blonde pixie, but as it turned out, it wasn't her favorite. "I hate my hair," she said. "After An Education, I had a small part in Michael Mann's film Public Enemies, and he wanted me to dye it white blonde, and it wrecked my hair."
Universal Pictures
"Literally, ruined it. It was falling apart, fried. So, I had to cut it off. I cried," she revealed. "I got stuck with the short hair thing," she also later explained, rebutting comments from an interviewer that suggested she did it as a statement. "No! No statement. I loved having long hair."
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41. Finally, Anna Paquin was contractually obligated to keep dyeing her hair blonde to play Sookie on True Blood. Answering what she didn't like about playing the character at Comic-Con in 2009, Paquin said she wished Sookie weren't blonde, claiming the constant dye jobs caused breakage that meant she couldn't grow her hair long. "I would be spending a lot less time in the hair salon getting my roots retouched, and my hair would probably be a little bit longer because it's gradually getting shorter as the ends break off because I'm a fake, fake, fake blonde," she told the crowd.
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She dyed her hair as soon as the series finished filming, opting for mermaid blue, purple, and green.
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