Never the same! Miley Cyrus — and her hair — have changed a lot since she became a household name as a teenager.
The singer had a classic child star look when she made her debut on Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana in 2006. She was 13 at the time that the hit show premiered, and she grew up in front of the world as it aired for four seasons until 2011.
After leaving the kid-friendly network behind, Miley made her mark on the music and film industry under her own name rather than the fictional pop star’s. As her work became more mature, her appearance did as well, but she shocked some in 2012 when she chopped off her locks and dyed what was left platinum blonde.
Five years later, the “Wrecking Ball” songstress explained why she decided on the drastic makeover. “I still really want to be an entertainer and show up in my own way and I don’t want to look like anybody else,” she told NME in December 2017. “With the short hair thing, it was an androgynous, sexy feeling, which is what I want people to feel like. I don’t wanna be over-feminized, but I’m not masculine either — I’m just myself. [What] people don’t really understand [about] gender fluidity is by feeling nothing, I feel everything.”
Miley continued to change up her hair in the years that followed her blonde pixie, eventually growing it back out. She opened up in December 2020 about how the public perceives her ever-evolving look.
“My hair is some sort of reflection for my sanity, my sexuality, my sobriety,” she said on SiriusXM’s The Howard Stern Show at the time. “The public really makes my hair, I guess, the kind of monitor of how I am doing.” She added that when her hair was long and blonde, people assumed she was sane, while they believed she was on drugs when she had it painted.
Miley blamed the mentality on Hannah Montana, on which she played a character who switched her hairstyle to take on a different persona. “It’s really not [the public’s] fault that they associate my hair and my identity and my well-being so closely,” she noted. “Because basically, we drilled that into their brains for eight years of a series.”
Scroll through the gallery below to see photos of how the Last Song star’s hair has transformed throughout her years in the spotlight!
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