Although they\u2019re both hairstylists, Jude Bennett and Lexy Tippetts are from very different parts of the country. Bennett, 23, works in the Bay Area, home to some of the most liberal people in the<\/a> U.S., where he services a clientele<\/a> of mostly young, alternative, urban creatives. Thirty-one-year-old Tippetts, meanwhile, is located in Wyoming, one of the most conservative<\/a> states, where she serves customers<\/a> \u2014 some older conservative women, others artsy high schoolers \u2014 in Buffalo, a three-stoplight town of fewer than 5,000 people with the closest Walmart 30 minutes away. But despite their geographic difference, Bennett and Tippetts have carved out the same specialty as of late. They both frequently work with clients who want to color their hair a hue that\u2019s recently become laden with cultural meaning across the country and online. It\u2019s a color both stylists have applied to their own hair in the recent past, too, even if they have different feelings about whether the pejorative term associated with it applies specifically to them. We\u2019re talking about the blue-haired liberal.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the liberals do have bright, crazy hair color,\u201d says Tippetts, who identifies as politically down the middle. \u201cThat sounds worse than I wanted it to! But you do see them with those colors and a little less on the conservative side.\u201d<\/p>\n Bennett, on the other hand, embraces the stereotype. \u201cI\u2019m definitely someone like that; I\u2019m doing blue hair and pronouns,\u201d says Bennett, who uses she\/he\/they pronouns interchangeably. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing wrong with being blue-haired and liberal. At face value, it\u2019s an accurate description of what\u2019s going on here!\u201d<\/p>\n Roughly a decade ago, blue hair<\/a> emerged as a beauty trend<\/a> among millennials who might have brushed with the blue-hived Marge Simpson and Kate Winslet\u2019s electric-haired manic pixie dream girl<\/a> in 2004\u2019s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind<\/em><\/a> and were now suddenly surrounded by sexier, more mainstream blue-haired sirens like Katy Perry<\/a> or Demi Lovato<\/a>. In 2013, the steamy lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color <\/em>also won the Palme d\u2019Or prize at Cannes, becoming a global sensation and thrusting blue-haired actor L\u00e9a Seydoux to fame (and two different turns as a Bond girl). <\/em>Before that, blue had been more tepid than cool, a color associated with aging punk rockers and \u2014 in the U.K<\/a>., particularly \u2014 older, conservative women<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now, though, a blue \u2019do carries an entirely different meaning still, especially to those of the conservative persuasion. In right-wing corners of the internet, the blue-haired liberal stereotype is so pervasive it has earned its own definition in the Urban Dictionary<\/a> and on the website Know Your Meme (see: \u201cOf Course You Have Blue Hair And Pronouns\u201d<\/a>). On progressive TikTok, meanwhile, blue-haired users joke in viral videos<\/a> that going out in red states means being swarmed by people crowing \u201cTrump!\u201d at them like in a scene from Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s The Birds<\/em>.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not just online trolls who use the term. In January, the New York Post<\/em> ran a cover<\/a> featuring a stock image photo of a screaming azure-haired woman with nose and tongue piercings and the headline \u201cOUT OF THE BLUE\u201d to mock large liberal states potentially losing congressional seats after the upcoming census. That same month, a pair of straight hockey podcasters got in trouble<\/a> for texts in which they seemed to make fun of Heated Rivalry <\/em>fans as being members of “blue-haired Twitter.\u201d Never missing a chance to taunt the other side, the White House has also employed the caricature, releasing an AI video<\/a> in February that showed two overweight individuals with blue shags sweating in a hot car that used the fuel-saving auto start-stop function \u2014 in contrast to a lithe Sydney Sweeney look-alike enjoying her air-conditioned sports car nearby (caption: \u201cKeeping cool while Making America Hot Again. \ud83c\udfc1 Auto start-stop is officially dead\u201d).<\/p>\n \u201cMany conservative sites would articulate freedom and individualism as core principles of the American Dream \u2014 yet find individualism in the form of blue hair a source of mockery.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Not since the \u201cdumb blond\u201d has a single hair color been used so pervasively to slander a person\u2019s character. So when and how did blue hair become MAGA\u2019s favorite insult, leveraged by everyone from Kid Rock<\/a> to Whitney Cummings<\/a>? Is it just another way for conservatives to express misogynist, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric? And amid signs that blue hair may be coming back<\/a> in vogue (see: recent looks from Cardi B<\/a> and North West<\/a>), can it now ever be divorced from politics? \u201cI just roll my eyes,\u201d says the turquoise-maned Danica Lamb, a 51-year-old artist who works with animal bones<\/a> in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and currently boasts a head of hair that\u2019s half blue, half magenta. \u201cYou should not listen to what other people say about your hair color.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not like hair dye is as new to the scene as Zohran Mamdani. People have been coloring their hair practically since the dawn of time, according to Rachael Gibson, a London-based hair historian<\/a> set to release a book on the subject, Roots<\/em>, in 2027. Using minerals from the earth, plants, and animals, our ancestors often color-coated their hair for religious or ceremonial reasons, but also just to hide gray hairs and maintain a more youthful appearance. Blue, though, has its own unique history. In ancient Egypt, the gods were thought to have hair made from a rare deep-blue mineral, lapis lazuli<\/a>, and pharaohs were often depicted accordingly<\/a> in Egyptian art. It wasn\u2019t until 18th-century France, though, that people inspired by Marie Antoinette and her coterie in the court of Versailles began using powders with fantastically unnatural colors like pink, green, and blue in order to match their wigs to their outfits in the name of fashion.<\/p>\n In the 20th century, Gibson says, blue and other bright, unnatural colors rose in popularity. By the 1920s and \u201930s<\/a>, fashion designers were dyeing models\u2019 hair blue as a provocation, while the invention of aerosol technology helped pastel colors become popular<\/a> for certain young women in the 1950s, even just as temporary looks. (Think Frenchie\u2019s pink coif in Grease<\/em>.) It wasn\u2019t until the arrival of the punk movement<\/a> (and the invention of semipermanent hair dyes) in the 1970s that these outlandish colors became part of an anti-fashion, countercultural movement. \u201cIt\u2019s hard for us to imagine because it\u2019s not unusual to see someone with green hair now, but people had literally never seen anything like it in their lives,\u201d Gibson says. \u201cPeople were quite horrified and offended by it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fantasy hair color in the queer community. If you felt you couldn\u2019t live your life the way you wanted for a long time, you probably want to be quite experimental with your look.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Blue hair persists today in part because of this punk ethos. In a MAGA culture dominated by traditional gender roles and the perfect, mostly blond \u2014 though hardly natural \u2014 blowouts we see all over Fox News, dyeing your hair blue can be a signal that you\u2019re rejecting conservative standards. \u201cNot being boxed in is super important,\u201d says Lamb in Wyoming. \u201cThe media is always doing this, that, and the other with how women should<\/em> be.\u201d<\/p>\n Emily Crosby, a professor at Virginia\u2019s University of Mary Washington who studies digital rhetoric and feminism, says this refusal to conform to \u201cnatural\u201d ideas about hair \u2014 you know, those of God\u2019s hair palette \u2014 has proved upsetting to some right-wingers. For them, Crosby says, \u201cblue hair invokes the supposed pitfalls of feminism, when women question and possibly reject beauty ideals.\u201d (That the people who complain about \u201ctriggers\u201d would be so, well, triggered is not the only irony of the blue-hair trope: \u201cMany online conservative sites would articulate freedom and individualism as core principles of the American Dream yet find individualism in the form of blue hair a source of mockery,\u201d Crosby says.)<\/p>\n The roots of the right\u2019s obsession with the blue-haired liberal trope began circa 2014, around the time of another landmark moment in teal tresses: Kylie Jenner\u2019s iconic dye job.<\/a> On social media apps that rewarded colorful photos like Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest, the blue hair trend<\/a> was suddenly everywhere. These platforms and hair colors were also particularly popular with young members of the LGBTQ community, who were enjoying a boom in visibility during the new, feel-good era of marriage equality. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of fantasy hair color in the queer community,\u201d Gibson says, \u201cbecause if you felt you couldn\u2019t live your life the way you wanted for a long time, then finally feel able to do so, you probably want to be quite experimental with your look.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI have had conservative ranchers comment on my hair \u2014 about how we need more blue-haired people around.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Seemingly overnight, blue hair wasn\u2019t just associated with aging punk rockers but with trendy young women, queer people, and trans or nonbinary internet users. Or, in the eyes of the increasingly extreme right wing festering on misogynistic sites like 4Chan<\/a>, the enemy. During the first Trump administration, people with brightly colored hair became caricatures for social-justice warriors<\/a>. And by 2022, this rhetoric was being weaponized<\/a> by anti-LGBTQ activists like Chaya Raichik (aka @LibsOfTikTok<\/a>) and Christopher Rufo<\/a>, who were then at the peak of their cultural influence<\/a> as they railed against drag and the increased visibility of trans and nonbinary people in a bid to unwind the progress<\/a> of the LGBTQ movement as a whole. The right had stumbled upon an umbrella term that could swiftly dismiss the left as cartoonish figures not to be taken seriously.<\/p>\n For Daniel Taylor, a 40-year-old software developer in northern Kentucky who identifies as agender, coloring their hair blue can indeed feel like an act of LGBTQ pride. (They once, for example, dyed their hair half-blue, half-pink in order to pay tribute to the Transgender Pride flag.) Taylor says rocking blue hair in spite of the right-wing caricature is about showcasing their self-confidence and signaling to others that they are a safe person to approach about issues of gender or sexuality. \u201cI want [young people] to be able to see that you can grow up and be happy and successful,\u201d they say. \u201cI don\u2019t mind if people see my appearance and think, \u2018Oh, yeah. Liberal<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Lamb, the Wyoming bones-forward artist, says that she, too, thinks of her hair color as a way to express herself and make herself happy, as opposed to trying to situate herself as a member of a leftist tribe. Bright, colorful hair reflects the joy she says she\u2019s felt since a massive weight loss years ago. \u201cI just wanted to be the person I felt like I kept in a cage for so long,\u201d she tells me. \u201cI don\u2019t really care what people think. I don\u2019t do it for anybody else but me. I just like how it looks.\u201d Still, it\u2019s not like she minds <\/em>if people make (largely correct) assumptions about her politics based on the color of her hair. After all, she\u2019s just as guilty of making assumptions about others based on their appearances. \u201cIt\u2019s likely somebody is going to see me out there and be like, \u2018Oh, there’s a crazy liberal,\u2019 just like if I saw a guy out on a horse with a cowboy hat I\u2019d be like, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s a conservative rancher,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s the kind of bias that we have in life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard for us to imagine now, but people had literally never seen anything like it in their lives. People were quite horrified and offended by it.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Despite the ubiquity of the blue-haired liberal trope online and in right-wing media, perhaps the real world is a different beast. \u201cPeople usually feel a lot more comfortable saying that about a faceless group of people, rather than saying it directly to someone they know,\u201d Taylor says. Both Lamb and Taylor have found that, as blue-haired people in red states, they\u2019ve actually only ever received compliments about their hair, not criticism. \u201cI have had conservative ranchers comment on my hair \u2014 about how we need more blue-haired people around,\u201d Lamb says. \u201cEvery single day I get comments about my hair here, and it\u2019s never negative.\u201d<\/p>\n Similarly, Bennett, the stylist in big-city California, and Tippetts, in small-town Wyoming, both say that blue hair\u2019s enduring popularity is proof that what people are really angered by is politics in and of itself, not pigmentation. More often than not, dyeing your hair blue can just be a statement about fashion, not fascism. \u201cThey do it because they want to do it, not to put a political point on it,\u201d Tippetts says. \u201cThey want to express themselves and how they\u2019re feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, there\u2019s one color combination Tippetts draws the line at because of what it represents. \u201cThe only colors I haven\u2019t done are blue and orange together,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause I will not be associated with the Denver Broncos.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Katy](\"https:\/\/imgix.bustle.com\/uploads\/shutterstock\/2026\/4\/4\/9fd44591\/shutterstock-1191492af.jpg?w=300&h=400&fit=crop&crop=faces&dpr=2\")
<\/div>![\"Demi](\"https:\/\/imgix.bustle.com\/uploads\/shutterstock\/2026\/4\/4\/766a07c6\/shutterstock-10218130du.jpg?w=300&h=400&fit=crop&crop=faces&dpr=2\")
<\/div>![\"Adele](\"https:\/\/imgix.bustle.com\/uploads\/shutterstock\/2026\/4\/4\/42feb21c\/shutterstock-5882033l.jpg?w=414&h=233&fit=crop&crop=faces&dpr=2\")
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