Photo by Alicja Brodowicz/Millennium

Ramona Flowers might have been the last cool person to have blue hair. In 2010, when Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World was released, Flowers’s blue hair marked her as free-spirited, laid back and sexy – a classic “manic pixie dream girl”, the free-spirited female characters that dominated romantic comedies of that era. Another famous manic pixie, Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), also used blue hair to show her rebellious side. And before both of them there was Suicide Girls, a pornographic website founded in 2001 and named after the “social suicide” that supposedly happens to alternative girls who break societal norms. Its models had tattoos and piercings; and many had blue hair. The site was wildly successful. In the noughties, blue-haired women might not gain your mother’s approval, but they might be the mad stranger you’d secretly pine over.

How times have changed. Ask anyone now to describe the stereotypical social justice warrior, and they’ll probably say: university age, usually white, a woman, some flavour of queer and, most importantly, blue haired. The blue-haired lady has become the high priestess of woke in the collective imagination: she is easily offended, acts in bad faith and is generally annoying. She could cancel you with a single look and wields BlueSky as a weapon against micro-aggressions and linguistic missteps. YouTube is full of videos with titles like, “Charlie Kirk Destroys Blue-Haired British Socialist”, “This Is Why Your Kids Are Turning Into Blue Haired Libs”. How did the meaning of blue hair sour so quickly?

Like many young women, I was on Tumblr in its golden age of 2011 to 2014. I reblogged gif sets of Ramona Flowers looking effortlessly cool while walking in the snow. Emma, the blue-haired lesbian in Blue is the Warmest Colour, was a regular feature on my page, among the roses, cigarettes and Anais Nin quotes.

Dyeing your hair is an easy way to rebel. It is less committal than a tattoo; more noticeable and cheaper than a piercing. You can do it with friends in a fit of giggles over a sink in a student flat. Girls wanted to emulate pop idols like Gwen Stefani, Grimes, or Hayley Williams, and at university they were no longer under the watchful eye of mum and dad. So it made sense that springs of blue haired women appeared to dominate campuses.

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But teenage girls on Tumblr hadn’t only been looking at melancholic-yet-pretty pictures. The manic pixie dream girls-in-waiting were developing a kind of internet-led class consciousness. With like-minded women, who also listened to the Smiths and read Sylvia Plath, they raged against misogyny and began to build a new feminist movement.

The aesthetics and the politics were a perfect storm. With a hipster’s desire to like something before it’s cool, and a teenage girl’s propensity for black-and-white thinking, they created a new, radical ideology. Students experimenting with progressive ideas is, of course, nothing new. But this time, there was a Daily Mail reporter lurking in the corners, ready to complain about this new breed of woke young woman.

The panic about “woke” students began in the 2010s. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign gained prominence in Oxford in 2015; around the same time, students started talking more about campus “rape culture” in the lead-up to #MeToo. And yes, some of these students had blue hair.

But “woke” has changed meaning now. The term is used more to complain about any left-seeming policies: new corporate etiquette and diversity quotas, not radical change. This definition of “woke” includes the National Trust implementing land acknowledgements and an insistence on announcing pronouns in a Zoom meeting. And this ideology doesn’t have an obvious image, because it is mostly a bureaucratic, anonymous exercise. While on the internet there is an increasing animosity towards HR departments, a multi-part system is much harder to target than an annoying, blue-haired feminist. So she remains the face of woke.

There’s a whiff of misogyny at play here. The blue-haired woman is the subject of cringe compilations posted by the likes of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, warbling unconvincingly about decolonising a curriculum. Her beliefs are often inconsequential to the point of being outlandish. Maga has its iconic red hats, and it seems the left has been assigned blue hair.

It is, of course, an inaccurate stereotype. These days, as social media churns through trends and subcultures disintegrate, blue hair doesn’t even mean someone is necessarily progressive. The original blue-haired feminist shared a lineage with hippies, bikers and emos all of whom aesthetically rebelled against a status quo. The young women trying on a seapunk blue rinse for a week for a TikTok does not.

And the right is also quietly trying to reclaim alternative aesthetics. Formerly blue-haired MTW tattoo artist Kat Von D has recently claimed Donald Trump is the “new punk rock”. Overly online young men of all political stripes thirst for a “goth gf”, referring to a certain look rather than an encyclopedic knowledge of Siouxsie and the Banshees b-sides.

One of my favourite groups on Facebook is “Goths Against Cancel Culture”. One goth posted that he was dying his hair blue in defiance. He saw blue hair as a reclamation of the libertarian spirit at the heart of being a goth. A lot of people in the group agreed with him. “My hair is blue,” one commented. “But my pill is red.”

[Further reading: CMAT’s subversive hoedown]

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Topics in this article : Woke