Gigi and Bella Hadid displayed head-swiveling transformations for Marc Jacob’s collection last month — their power-packed strides were accompanied by very bleached sets of eyebrows descending upon their foreheads inconspicuously; blunt-cut micro-bangs; and half-shaved heads. And while their close-to-bald ‘dos were statement-making, they were temporary, and were created with bald-caps.
But the subject of celebrities shaving their heads had piqued our interest — while some do it just for the aesthetic, many do it for a role, as an act of rebellion against today’s standards of beauty, or for charity. And, today, we’re looking at some of our favourite women and non-binary celebrities who’ve gone through with shaving their heads — and the reasons backing their decision.
How These Celebrities Empowered The World By Shaving Their Heads
Halsey
Halsey recalls feeling liberated after shaving her head. She remembers her aesthetic not aligning with her music — she sported long electric-blue-ish hair for one of her albums, and realised that the ‘do wasn’t working for her next line-up of songs. She said to Glamour, “I felt a little too soft — too glamorous — to be singing such worn and weathered music. So I cut all my hair off.” She explains that shaving her head was something she’d been wanting to do for a long time — but she never went through with it because she feared how others would perceive her, “Nothing was stopping me except for everyone else’s opinion.”
The singer revealed that she feels most confident when she’s bald, and credited her decision of shaving her head to being a woman of colour as well. She told Nylon in 2016, “Hair has also been a big indicator of racial issues in my life. It’s one of the ultimate symbolic struggles for women of color. Shaving my head was important to me because I needed to be able to prove that I could still love myself if I did it.”
Kristen Stewart
Kristen Stewart might’ve shaved her head for a role in a movie, but going bald was something she’d always wanted to try. The Twilight actress revealed on The Today Show, “I’m doing a movie in a couple of weeks called Underwater and I play a mechanical engineer who is working on an oil rig on the bottom of the ocean floor, so for me it’s practical.” She continued, “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time for novelty’s sake — just because at some point in your life you want to be able to do that. It feels amazing — I just want to head-bang all day.”
Cara Delevingne
Cara Delevingne decided to shave her head for a role — she was playing the role of a character who who was undergoing chemotherapy for Cancer, and felt like it was important for her to understand what it’d be like to have no hair at all. The model revealed that her managers and agents weren’t quite sold on the idea of her going bald.
She said at an event in Cannes in 2017, “Before I even got the project, I said to the director, ‘I want to shave my head for it.’ My agents and managers were like, ‘Please don’t! Why would you do that?’ When it’s a part like that — especially when it’s about Cancer — I needed to feel what it would be like to have no hair. The way you look, I think, it’s so important to feel beautiful, no matter if you have hair. It doesn’t matter at all.”
Amandla Stenberg
Amandla explained in an essay for Instyle her decision to go bald. She wrote about how her afro had become a ‘symbol of my self-acceptance’, and how it was all about ‘loving my blackness’ — and as soon as she got tired of that look, she cut her hair shorter. She continued, “I was curious how that might affect people’s perception of my gender too, so I kept cutting it shorter and shorter. I wanted a hairstyle that felt less feminine.”
And when she was cast in a movie that required her to chop her hair off to play a biracial teen in Nazi Germany, she did just that. “I wanted to truly connect with my character, and that meant understanding firsthand what it was like to live without hair.” And the decision almost revolutionised her personality, “Shaving my head was wild. I felt a sense of complete neutrality. It was so freeing. This summer I came out as gay, and I must say, having no hair made me feel even more comfortable with my gender and sexuality,” Stenberg explained. “My hair is still short, but I let it grow out a bit to give myself more options. Sometimes it’ll be a more masculine look with little-boy curls, or I’ll part it in the middle and slick it down to look more feminine. The best part: It’s totally up to me.”
Jessie J
Jessie J’s decision to go bald was charitable. She shaved her head on live T.V in a bid to raise money for Comic Relief — a U.K-based charity that aims at tackling poverty, discrimination, and violence. She described the experience as liberating, and retained the look for about three months. She told Glamour, “I want to keep it like this for a bit. I look like this on my album cover. I wanted to make a statement. I feel like there’s no point in shaving your head for charity if you’re then going to just grow it back the next day.”
Jada Pinkett Smith
Jada has always been candid about her experience with with alopecia. The actress first revealed her struggle with hair-loss in 2018 on her talk-show Red Table Talk, and in 2021, she decided to shave her head after years of dealing with hair-loss caused by the condition — refusing to let it distort her sense of beauty and confidence. She showed off her newly-shaved head to her followers with the caption, “Willow made me do it because it was time to let go BUT … my 50’s are bout to be Divinely lit with this shed.” While hair-loss is experienced by many, it’s affirming and empowering when a celebrity shares their experience with the same.
Regardless of the reason, these celebrities sure as hell looked glamorous in all of their bald-headed glory — so much so that it kinda made us want to retrieve a razor, and give ourselves a buzz-cut.
Featured Image: Instagram