The Reason Billie Eilish Disliked Being A Blonde Is Depressingly Relatable
Blonde ≠ more fun.
Don’t expect a blond “Billie Bossa Nova” moment anytime soon. According to the currently raven-haired pop star herself, Billie Eilish’s blond hair era wasn’t the fairy tale it appeared to be when she posed on the 2021 Met Gala steps. The When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? singer has spoken candidly about how dyeing her hair blond wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but quotes from a new interview reveal just how much Eilish’s blond hair messed with her head. Her reasoning behind steering clear of this particular hair color, while relatable, is ultimately pretty sad.
In a Thursday, Dec. 1 interview with Highsnobiety, Eilish opened up about how having blond hair negatively impacted her life. “When I was blonde, people treated me differently,” the Grammy winner revealed. “People completely changed their demeanor [around me].”
Eilish’s experience with blond hair was so bad, holding your breath for her next blond era is a pretty much a guaranteed fatal mistake. “People saw me as this 15-year-old, a kid, who wore this kind of stuff, looked this kind of way... I felt like I couldn’t change. That’s why I went so far to the other side,” she said of her switch from black-and-slime-green-haired teen to blond beauty.
The Happier Than Ever crooner’s desire to be seen as evolving and capable of serving both big masculine and feminine energy is relatable — who wants to be stuck in a single aesthetic forever? — but it’s disappointing to hear that her shift toward a more femme vibe got such a poor reaction. Eilish declined to elaborate on exactly how she was treated differently as a blonde, but did provide a clue to her blond era experience later in the interview.
When discussing her meteoric rise to fame, the Oscar winner said, “I think that people have taken me more seriously because I’ve had this more masculine [way of dressing]. If I had been more feminine and girly, people would’ve been a lot less respectful of me.” Reading between the lines, it definitely sounds like Eilish’s dip into the so-called blonde bombshell waters might have resulted in the kind of less-than-respectful treatment famous blondes throughout history often experience.
