From Britney Spears to Natalie Portman to Jada Pinkett Smith, a great many celebrities have made headlines by shaving off their hair — but Sinéad O’Connor’s symbolic buzzcut might be the most famous of them all.
“I don’t feel like me unless I have my hair shaved,” the legendary Irish musician, who died Wednesday at the age of 56, once famously said. “So even when I’m an old lady, I’m going to have it.”
In a 2017 interview with Dr. Phil, O’Connor revealed the heartbreaking reason she first opted for a short cut while growing up in Dublin.
“When we were children, my sister had beautiful red hair, glorious red hair. That’s why I’d be jealous of her,” she recalled.
“But my mother took it into her head that my sister’s hair was ugly and horrible and disgusting. And she started — when I had long hair — she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter. And that’s why I cut my hair off.”
Moreover, the “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer said it would’ve been “dangerous” to wear her hair in a more traditionally feminine style, adding, “I didn’t want to be raped. I didn’t want to be molested. I did not want to dress like a girl. I did not want to be pretty.”
O’Connor’s more androgynous ‘do wasn’t exactly embraced by record execs ahead of the launch of her debut album, 1987’s “The Lion and the Cobra.”
“They wanted me to grow my hair long, wear short skirts and high heels and makeup and write songs that wouldn’t challenge anything,” she told The Sun in 2022.
“I wasn’t going to have any man telling me what to do, or who to be.”
So instead of going along with the label, which wanted to market her as a “generic female,” O’Connor headed straight to a barber and shaved off what was left of her locks.
“They looked at Sinead’s shaved head and went, ‘Now we know what we are dealing with,’” the star’s first husband and frequent collaborator, John Reynolds, recalled in an interview with the same outlet.
“It was a powerful statement from a woman, because it said, ‘Don’t f—k with me!’”
In addition to establishing O’Connor as an artist with zero interest in adhering to society’s beauty standards, her shaved skull made her album covers, music videos and controversial on-stage appearances — as when she memorably ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992 — even more visually striking.
And she stuck with the style for the rest of her career. As recently as 2021, O’Connor was still shaving her own head “about every 10 days,” as she told the New York Times that year, despite often wearing a hijab following her 2018 conversion to Islam.
In recent years, a number of young stars including Demi Lovato, Saweetie and Iris Law have followed in the Grammy winner’s footsteps by debuting buzzcuts of their own. And at the 2023 Met Gala, Florence Pugh shocked fans by showing off her own super-short shave.
“I wanted vanity out of the picture,” the “Midsommar” actress told Radio Times of her daring ‘do.
“Hollywood is very glamorous—especially for women—and it’s hard for an audience to see past that. Whenever I’ve not needed to be glam or have a full face of makeup, I fight to keep it that way … The only thing that people can look at then is your raw face.”
O’Connor would surely approve.
