This semester, I noticed that blue-haired students kept spawning. Intrigued, I approached nine of these students to find out how this trend came out of the blue.
Though there were shared sentiments among students — being blue helped them stand out, pushed back against stereotypes or brought them closer to themselves and others — everyone had a different story to share.
My first exposure to a blue-haired person at the Claremont Colleges was my first-year fall, when Phoebe Fogel SC ’28 and I took “Introductory Ancient Greek.” Fogel, a Classics and English major from Massachusetts, dyed her hair blue the summer before her senior year of high school. Her explanation: “I just think it looked cool.”
I soon found out that many of my blue-haired subjects are new to the 5Cs, including Miriam Allen SC ’30 and Walker Lewis PO ’30.
Allen and Lewis, who both hail from Berkeley, California, felt that changing their hair solidified their sense of selves in moments of instability.
Allen dyed her hair when she was feeling adrift the summer after her gap year.
“I was like, ‘I need a change, everything’s going crazy, nothing is real.’ And I’d always wanted to do something fun with my hair, but I couldn’t because it was easier to blend in with the things I was doing,” Allen said.
Similarly to Allen, Lewis dyed his hair blue during his gap year, while he was pursuing a music career in London.
“In high school, I was just kind of floating. I wasn’t really like a person. And then I get to London, and for the first time, I get to be whatever. I finally just really snapped into who I was,” he said.
After spending a long time not wanting to stick out in a crowd, dyeing his hair blue pushed Lewis to embrace standing out.
“I realized I am a bit weird. I will constantly try to fit in, because I hate feeling othered, but I suck at it. So part of the reason I dyed my hair blue is that I will never have the chance to then fit in like I could. I can’t slip in the background,” he continued.
The other first-years I encountered, Maya Blaylock SC ‘30 and Ren Barrett CM ‘30, began dyeing their hair long before they’d graduated high school.
Like Lewis, Blaylock noted that her hair allows her to stand out.
“I’m a very big personality, so I like to have my hair be kind of loud,” she said.
She began dyeing her hair vivid colors in middle school, when she got into the alternative music scene in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. She most recently dyed her hair blue due to a breakup a few months ago. Blue is her ex-boyfriend’s favorite color, and she wanted to stop associating it with him.
“You would think that dyeing your hair your ex’s favorite color would make you think about them more, but it’s really been helping me reclaim it at least a little for myself,” she said.
Barrett was first inspired to have colorful hair after watching the TV show “Victorious” in elementary school. He dyed his hair blue for the second time this summer. Now, all his college friends associate him with the color blue.
“I’m not as extroverted, so I think it helps to have something that’s easily recognizable,” he said.
Elena Gutierrez PZ ’27, an Opinions writer at TSL, is another blue-haired veteran, having first dyed her hair blue when she was 12. Though she’s tried out other colors since, she’s had it consistently blue for the past two years.
“As a political studies [minor], I kind of like the fact that it feeds into the blue-haired liberal stereotype. I’m not a liberal, I consider myself a leftist, so I think it’s almost countercultural or funny that my hair is blue considering the stereotype,” she told me.
Grayson Mickel PO ’29, who just dyed his hair blue this week, said the stereotype came to mind right away.
“I went to work at the Coop Fountain, and I was like, ‘Wait, I’m literally like the blue-haired barista,’” he said.
Mickel has been dyeing his hair frequently since his senior year of high school. He finds his hair to be less important to his identity than some of my other subjects do, partly because it’s not his first time feeling different.
“In some ways you get used to looking different or feeling different. Especially as a neurodivergent person, or Black person or queer person, a lot of the time I find myself the only one in the room who has my identity,” he said.
His buzzcut makes it easy to start over and dye it different colors every few weeks.
“I like being able to go through the process and then being able to see an observable change after I’m done,” he said.
The hair-dyeing process can also be a bonding activity, as it was for Anna Figge HM ’27 and Annika Larson HM ’27. Figge and Larson, whom I bumped into separately, dyed their hair blue together the summer before their junior year at Harvey Mudd College.
Figge likes how the blue matches many of her outfits, the color of her eyes and her friend Larson. Neither of them sought to stand out in the past.
“I feel like having dyed my hair has made me more comfortable with the idea of trying to curate an appearance, being willing to want my appearance to make statements or reflect stuff about me,” said Figge.
Having blue hair also seems to be less daunting in California and at the 5Cs.
“If I were in a place where I would be the only person with dyed hair and that would be viewed as a huge statement, I’m not sure I’d like that,” Figge said.
Like Figge, Gutierrez grew up in California, but transferred to Pitzer College from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where being blue-haired made her much more of an anomaly than on our campus.
Mickel likes how people are more comfortable in themselves at the 5Cs and care less about how others appear, especially compared to his all-boys high school in Maryland.
Conversely, Blaylock and Barrett said that colorful hair is rarer in Claremont than it is back home for them.
“Everyone in the communities I was in in Chicago dyed their hair, had piercings, or just looked alternative in some way,” Barrett said.
He especially sticks out as the only blue-haired student currently at Claremont McKenna College.
“It’s a little sad. I really like when people customize their avatar, like have something more interesting or unique going on,” he said.
Blaylock likewise said her hair is much more of an identifier here than before, considering Portland’s rich alternative scene.
“Everyone had bright hair and we would all change it a lot,” she said of her friends back home. Meanwhile, she is often referred to here as ‘Maya Blue.’
Are there certain traits that lead someone to dye their hair blue, or does the blue hair give rise to certain traits? Regarding the latter, some of my interview subjects described that blue hair can change the way you act, providing a feeling of freedom to explore paths that previously seemed closed.
“As soon as I did the blue hair thing, I was just like, the world is open. I can figure things out in a different way,” Allen said.
Gutierrez agreed, saying there is “a correlation between looking a very unique way and making unique life decisions.”
“You can get away with being odder because people expect it.”
Lewis remarked that blue hair gives you more wiggle room to be weird. “You can get away with being odder because people expect it,” he said.
Their hair doesn’t just affect how they act, but how others interact with them. Allen appreciates how the hair is a conversation-starter.
“I’ve made friends because of it, I’ve talked to so many more strangers because of it. I think it’s an invitation for interesting interactions with people,” she said.
On the other hand, Lewis noted that the attention he receives isn’t always desired.
“Every person I meet is like, I see you around campus, I’ve seen you five times and I know who you are,” he said.
He feels differently about getting attention for his art versus his appearance.
“People have attached [the hair] a lot more to my identity than I’d really like [them] to,” he said. “I’m a little miserable poking out, which is weird, because I’m a music artist. But getting attention for something that I made is different than getting attention for having blue hair.”
Maybe I’m part of the problem for fixating on this one aspect of them. Maybe I should have written more about the other things that make them interesting, like how Lewis likes to rap in a British accent, how both he and Fogel enjoy writing horror fiction or how Gutierrez is one of the leaders of the 5C tap dance club.
“Anybody can have blue hair,” Lewis said. But I found myself disagreeing. Theoretically, anyone could dye their hair blue, but clearly not everyone does, and even in a space like the 5Cs where it’s more normal to appear abnormally, my nine interviewees all still caught my eye.
Gutierrez believes it requires a certain quality to adopt the blue hair.
“I do think [having blue hair] takes someone who’s okay with being looked at funny sometimes. And I think it takes a very self-assured, more confident person to be okay with accepting those kinds of things,” she said.
Yet, from my other conversations, I gleaned that it might not always be that self-assurance comes first, but that the hair can bring about self-assurance. And oddly enough, it’s doing something that makes you stick out more that eases the discomfort of sticking out.
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