She may have helped Taylor Swift kick off her Eras Tour last month, but Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams has had her own fair share of eras — particularly when it comes to her famous hair.
Over the years, the Grammy winner’s locks have been dyed red, blue, yellow, green and every hue in between.
“I love feeling like I look loud, because sometimes that helps my introverted self kind of feel a little bit braver,” Williams, 34, tells Page Six Style.
In Paramore’s early days, the singer would enlist her male bandmates to color her hair in hotel rooms “using a boxed red dye from Walgreens” — but in 2006, she met hairstylist Brian O’Connor, then an apprentice at the Pink Mullet Salon in Franklin, Tennessee.
“If it wasn’t for Brian, I would not be known for my hair,” Williams says, adding that the pair “pretty much immediately got creative together.”
O’Connor created the star’s iconic “matchstick” ‘do (“darker red” on top, with “yellowy tips”) for Paramore’s “Emergency” and “Misery Business” videos, and has been her mane man ever since.
The duo’s relationship extends beyond music, too; in 2016, they launched Good Dye Young, a line of vibrant semi-permanent color, and in 2022, the pair opened a salon called Fruits Hair Lab
in Nashville.
“I’m always wanting to tell a story with Hayley’s hair,” says O’Connor, who most recently teased the pop-punk icon’s tresses into a towering bouffant for the opening night of Swift’s tour in Glendale, Ariz., on March 17, “packing” the style with faux pearls and sparkling clips to ensure Williams stood out on the enormous stage.
“Hayley is a tiny human being — she’s a full-ass grown woman, but she’s just very petite. Anything that sparkled or caught the light basically went into that twist that first night,” he explains.
O’Connor tells us that when brainstorming new hairstyles and shades for Williams, he often starts with her music.
“I hear a song or a snippet or lyrics, and that’s when my mind really starts painting this picture that coincides with what she’s trying to convey — not only through her music, but through herself,” he explains.
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Over the years, that’s translated to everything from a bright bubblegum pink look with bangs in 2010 to a two-tone yellow-and-teal bob in 2014.
Most recently, Williams returned to her roots with an orange-red dye job — just in time for Paramore’s massive upcoming arena tour, which starts in May.
If history’s any indication, fans can expect plenty of headliner-worthy hair moments from the star in the months ahead; after all, when it comes to experimenting with color, Williams says she and O’Connor “aren’t too precious about all this sh–t.”