Lindsay Lohan's Worst Hair Transformations Over The Years
With Lindsay Lohan's career comeback came the return of her strong hair game — it's like she made an "Irish wish" to look like she stepped out of a conditioner commercial. But Lilo has put her long locks through the wringer in the past with bad dye jobs and torturous hair extensions that are so not fetch.
Fans of the OG "Mean Girls" had reason to rejoice when Lohan walked the red carpet with fetching red hair at the premiere of the movie's musical remake in 2024. There was nary a flyaway in sight, and her luxurious copper tresses gleamed like cold, shiny, hard plastic. "The inspiration for her beautifully sculpted soft waves revolved around channeling Hollywood glamour with a softer, sultrier touch," hairstylist Danielle Priano told People.
Lohan's hair always looks best when she wears it red, whether it's a warm strawberry blond or a rich auburn shade. The Falling for Christmas" star is also a fan of her festive signature color. "It makes me spunkier," she explained to Deseret News in 2005. It's when she tries to smother her follicles' fiery, feisty natural hue that Lohan risks mangling her mane. Unfortunately, there was a time when she seemed to have a hard time learning from her hairstyle mistakes.
It all started with a big bang
Her bangs were so big because they were full of secrets! Sometimes a gal just has to experiment with heavy fringe one time to discover that the hairstyle is not for her. Lindsay Lohan decided to try the divisive hairstyle on for size in 2003, which just happens to be the same year the "Life-Size" star and Aaron Carter called it quits. So, perhaps her fresh look was a post-breakup chop?
For the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, Lohan made the unfortunate decision to slightly curl her bangs. While they were razor-cut rather than blunt, the result was still very grade school picture day. Worse yet, she wore the rest of her hair styled in scraggly curls that were just screaming for a good finger combing. The underside of her hair was dyed a darker shade than the top (remember that early aughts trend?), which was strawberry blond with highlights. There was just way too much going on, so maybe Lohan should have just pulled those limp locks up into a topknot a la Tinkerbell and called it a day.
Lohan explained her peekaboo hair color in a 2019 MTV News interview. "I wanted to go blonde. I was filming, at the time, 'Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen,' so I was going through a drama phase," she shared.
It's hard to go back to red from black
Photos from Lindsay Lohan's raven-black hair era serve as an unwanted reminder of her gory 2007 horror movie "I Know Who Killed Me." The subject matter was dark: An exotic dancer gets kidnapped and mutilated. So, Lohan naturally had to shed the red of her child star days to prove that she was done with Disney remakes. However, Lohan's hair was so inky black at the 2006 Kid's Choice Awards that it was like there was a rip in the fabric of time around her head, revealing the eerie nothingness beyond. The void clashed terribly with the warm tones in Lohan's skin — a hint of sunkissed red would have softened the severe color.
In a 2023 interview with Allure, Lohan admitted that she regretted going so dark because it made it difficult to transition back to red. When she began this arduous journey, she learned the harsh truth about how other people felt about her experimentation with the blackest of black hair dye. "I would get from everyone that I worked with, "Oh, so glad you're going back to red. So glad.'" By playing around with various hair colors over the years, Lohan eventually came to the conclusion that they were right to be relieved. "I ended up realizing I loved my red hair the most," she said.
She hit the peroxide while on probation
Lindsay Lohan has been arrested six times, and there seems to be a correlation between her legal woes and her hair color: In five of her mugshots, her tresses are blonde. At a 2011 court appearance, Lohan's hair was a garish bottle-blonde color that could have used some toner. At the time, Lohan was supposed to be doing community service as part of the terms of her sentencing for DUI and theft convictions. But while she apparently was finding time to keep her roots touched up, she was not showing up to do her court-ordered work at the Downtown Women's Center in Los Angeles.
Lohan has had a few flings with being flaxen-haired. However, when she posed as Marilyn Monroe for New York Magazine in 2008, she wore a curly wig. Two months after her 2011 probation hearing, she channeled the "Gentleman Prefer Blondes" star again for Playboy. But while there was a time when Lohan preferred being blonde, the color just didn't work for her; it looked unnatural and washed her out. Her hair was also frizzy and didn't look like it was in the best condition when she got scolded by Judge Stephanie Sautner for violating her probation. Perhaps a court-ordered red dye job would have made her act more responsibly.
The Hollywood Reporter gave her hair color advice
In 2012, Lindsay Lohan made a change to her bright blonde mane that was not an improvement. While getting bangs again purged her of some of the damage from her dye job, it was no full-on follicular exorcism. Her fringe also hid her face-framing brows, and she sometimes wore her bangs long enough to partially cover her gorgeous green eyes.
Lindsay's flat, lifeless hair color was so unflattering that The Hollywood Reporter tried to stage an intervention. A writer for the industry publication compared her to mob wife Victoria Gotti and begged her to dye her "straw-like" blond tresses red. The Standard, meanwhile, opined that Lindsay had morphed into a doppelganger of her mother, Dina Lohan, when she stripped all the pigment from her crowning glory. However, according to Lindsay, her mother once advised her not to go blonde. Lindsay discovered that mother knows best, even if she was a bit hypocritical, when she ignored Dina's plea. "This is the problem when you go from red to blonde, and you do it in a rush, it goes yellow," Lindsay said in a 2022 "Life in Looks" video for Vogue. "This is the true hard fact." Making such a change can also be time-consuming: she spent 11 hours in a salon when she went from red to blonde in 2009.
Her hair extension misadventures
When Lindsay Lohan attended the Star magazine All Hollywood Event in April 2012, her hair looked glamorous from the front. She'd gone back to red by then, and her sleek tresses appeared to be glistening with health. But the back of her scalp told a different story; a hair extension attachment was visible, making it evident that she hadn't grown some of those luminous locks herself.
The hair extensions of the stars can cost as much as $1,500, so who can blame Lohan if she was trying to extend their life beyond the point when they were starting to look a bit tattered? Lohan lost a great deal of her money by spending it faster than she could make it, so she had to cut back somewhere. Knowing how much extensions cost also makes a 2010 Mirror report seem more believable; it claimed that Lohan cried when her extensions were removed ahead of her stint in jail. The actor also wore them until they fell out. When she lost one during a 2010 Vanity Fair interview, she quipped, "I'm literally falling apart." BTW, she hasn't stopped using them to lengthen and voluminize. For the 2024 "Mean Girls" premiere, hairstylist Danielle Priano told People she used 20-inch clip-in extensions when styling Lohan's hair.