This is a survival manual for anyone wishing to tackle the path to pink hair, from someone who has had it for over six years. I always thought that the pink colour of my hair was reminiscent of my mother's red hair. Even though my mother is actually a brunette by birth. One day when I was around five years old, she showed up at home after work with fiery red hair, looking the prettiest ever. It triggered the displeasure of her father and mine, but I was obsessed with the Little Mermaid at the time. So, when I dyed my hair pink for the first time, without anyone being warned beforehand, I had the extraordinary feeling that I had managed to bend time, returning to one of the most pivotal moments of my childhood. It happened in the summer of my freshman year of college (in a conservative Catholic environment). I did it the way I do all the most important things in my life: without thinking about it too much. I didn't do it to mark some coming-of-age moment in my life, but because I hoped that a pink dye could help me redesign a world of my own.
Years later, I think I wanted to project onto my hair what I had been able to do with my small bedroom over the course of my adolescence, changing the colour of the walls and furniture according to the phase I was going through. All green, all pink, all fuchsia (a nightmare), then green again but diluted into a very boring and comforting beige. Much like with that room, in which I turned into a young woman from being a child, I had to readjust my environment so that it could become the manifesto of my dreams and everything that bothered me. In my 20s, more than anything else, I felt the need to switch up something that had always been mine, my very long blond hair, and yet it had always been a bit of other people's, treated almost like a relic.
I never had too much decision-making power over my hair. No blonde child has that. If you want copper hair, you simply forget about it, even if your reddish highlights only show up once a year when the Sun reaches its maximum declination. Trying to justify changing your hair to your parents was next to impossible.
A psychological reason
A few years ago, on social media, we started talking about the "pink hair theory ," a theory that dying your hair pink is a visible sign of a personal transition; the beginning of a new, more confident, creative and intentional era. A form of self-expression that communicates a change and a kind of empathy toward oneself. I don't know if Hailey Bieber, Kim Kardashian, Kaia Gerber, Florence Pugh, Kristen Stewart and all the others who between 2017 (the year of rose gold) and 2024 dyed their hair pink did so for the same reason, but I like to imagine that each of them was in a phase of regaining their self-identity.
Beyond self-identity and fashion, cultural beliefs around the world echo that pink tends to reappear during periods of heightened stress. The colour has been shown to reduce aggression to the point that historically, it has even been used in prison cells and for uniforms for particularly violent inmates. A pop-cultural illustration of this can be found in the prison scene of Paddington 2. Pink is also thought to regulate mood and stimulate our capacity for wonder, as it is closely associated with childhood innocence and uninhibited play.
A colour back in trend
Pink, on hair and beyond, is back in the conversation at the start of this year as we already find ourselves wondering whether 2026 might have become our 2016, which in turn echoed 2006: the years of Indie Sleaze. Back then, we saved images in our folders of Kate Moss with pink hair from the 1994 Chanel show and the 1999 Versace runway. She would later return to the shade in 2022 for the Marc Jacobs Resort 2022 campaign. Pink has surfaced again very recently during Haute Couture Spring Summer 2026 in Paris, appearing pale or tinged with lilac on long bangs in Jonathan Anderson’s first Christian Dior couture show and in the set design of Chanel. That show, Matthieu Blazy’s first since his September debut, transformed the Grand Palais into an enchanted forest washed in shades of pink.
Everything I've realised in six years
After I dyed my hair pink, I kept it that way for more than six years with only brief interruptions. I always returned to it when I felt I needed it most and each time, it felt as though I could conquer the world. Pink had the power to push everything that was not working into the background, to contain and loosen its grip within a single afternoon of bleaching and tinting.
Over those years, having pink hair taught me many things. Not only that I would never own a white towel again, but also that it takes very little to recalibrate what feels overwhelming. That I had to be ready to welcome the unexpected and new versions of myself, given that the result of a pink dye job is one of life’s great unknowns. And that even if it turned out to be a disaster, it would never be the end of the world.
Pink dye, fortunately and unfortunately, never lasts through too many washes. Another lesson followed: the best things are often those that last the least. It requires patience and time, days of coexistence between you and your new hair, before it begins to feel natural. It also taught me that, in the end, I would always be a millennial, complete with millennial nostalgia and that I would spend more consciously, constrained by the limited colour palette that pink demands (brown leather jackets were banned for years).
Above all, pink hair taught me a form of self-compassion, one still closely tied to self-deprecation: the ability to take nothing too lightly and never everything too seriously.
The nicest comment about my pink hair was very consistently made by a little girl. As I walked in front of her, I heard her ask her mom why she was not born with pink hair like mine. It happens inexplicably even now, despite having red hair for a few years. There's always someone who says they see a slightly odd, pinkish-tinged glow now and then. And I say it's all natural. That I get it from my mother.
This article first appeared on Vogue.it
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