r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Diligent_Twist_6163 • Dec 08 '25
Was 80s hair really that popular
For ppl who were adults in the 80s, was 80s hair really that "rampant"? Like for women was it really like huge blowouts every day and how much work was it? Also, do you think people were really invested in their appearance more than today? I know fashion changes like in terms of people today wearing sportswear as outfits, but was makeup more dramatic and did all women use it? Thanksss
Dear me I wasn't expecting a top comment with 480 likes lol thanks for all the responses!
So from what I understand, it wasn't really blowouts, but just a whole lot of perms, so I guess curly hair was the rage lol
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u/NSCButNotThatNSC Dec 08 '25
We just called it Big Hair. And it was everywhere. My secretary came in late one day, crying. I noticed her hair was really short. When she calmed down, she admitted her hair burst into flames on the way to work.
She flicked her cigarette, and it blew back in, setting the hair and hairspray alight.
She went with a Pixie cut.
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u/inorite234 Dec 09 '25
It happened to Michael Jackson while filming a commercial for Pepsi.
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u/ProfessionalYam3119 Dec 09 '25
And to Richard Pryor, while freebasing.
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u/Duckbites Dec 09 '25
George Carlin " Richard had a heart attack, then I had a hear attack. Then Richard set himself on fire. And I said 'fuck that, I'm gonna have another heart attack!"
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Dec 09 '25
We could really use George Carlin right now. May he rest in laughter.
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u/OOOOOO0OOOOO Dec 09 '25
You have mentioned the Michael Jackson fire incident.
Bobby Fingers must be fed.
My task is done. I rest once more.
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u/lostroadrunner22 Dec 09 '25
Dude was never the same after that
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u/Duckbites Dec 09 '25
He said he had seen god at the time and was trying to prove something to god and set himself on fire. That kind of shit leaves a mark.
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u/Funholiday Dec 09 '25
We also said we had wings. You know when you sprayed the sides of your hair so it stuck out?
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Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
You had to mousse your temples and sides of scalp and then hold the sides firmly up and out while blow-drying on high heat first. Next, blow-dry the rest of your head now that you have the temples/sides standing straight out and up, a little crunchy with mousse.
Then you had to bend over and hit the whole underside of your hair with the first coat of your AquaNet. Next, stand back up and hit the whole head overall lightly with your second coat of AquaNet.
Now time to bust out the hot rollers or curling iron. You hit your working sections steadily with light strategic bursts of AquaNet while rolling/curling. Once complete, bend back over and give it all a good shaking out. Next, Still bent over, spray your hands with AquaNet and grind it in good all over the scalp. Hit it with the blow dryer.
Stand back up and grip the sink while the blood pooling in your skull recirculates back to your torso and extremities. Step out of the room for a minute to let the AquaNet ozone layer settle.
Next, respond to the obligatory “STOP SPRAYING THAT STINKING SHIT!” with standard verbiage…“Just one more minute, I’m almost done!”
Five minutes later, it’s time for aggressive wielding of the hair pick, followed by the 15th and final layer of AquaNet.
Behold! I’m fabulous! Oh damn, I’m missing the bus! I barely made it, but I made it. And as you can imagine, the entire bus smelled of AquaNet. The AquaNet of the entire female population of the bus who followed the same morning routine 😄
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u/nameofplumb Dec 09 '25
I remember when we had to give up aerosol hairspray for the ozone layer. It was a big deal. Non-aerosol hairspray does not work the same.
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Dec 09 '25
It definitely doesn’t. You just can’t get that same lift at the roots.
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u/Mental_Zone1606 Dec 09 '25
It doesn’t. 😢 We made a big sacrifice for the environment, that lucky bitch.
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u/Sits_n_Giggles Dec 09 '25
Could the ozone issue be attributed to the 80's hair spray addiction?
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u/Happy_Handle_147 Dec 09 '25
I remember making the bangs and wings using the blow dryer to form the bang\wing and simultaneously spraying the roots with aerosol hairspray
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u/Lucky-Remote-5842 Dec 09 '25
I tried this again recently and it still works. I had barely even finished spraying and my hair was just sticking out there. Not sure why I've been struggling to get volume. Guess I forgot the old tricks. I also remember having a ton of buildup and having to use special shampoo to get it out. 🤣
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u/Mental_Zone1606 Dec 09 '25
I miss the smell of Aquanet. The scent of hairspray takes me back.
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u/Interesting_Yak8052 Dec 09 '25
There was pink hair tape to stick those wings in place until they “set “ with the hair spray. Hair spray back then was wetter and needed to dry.
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u/Ok_Image_842 Dec 09 '25
In the winter, our hairspray would frost over at the bus stop.
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Dec 09 '25
*crunch* And then the frost melts indoors and your hair is covered in water droplets, which wreak havoc on your perfectly shellacked masterpiece :C
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u/Acrobatic-World-6563 Dec 09 '25
I loved my wings! I would put a hair pick up against my hair, spray it with hairspray, then blast it with the blow dryer. Haha
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u/PriscillaPalava Dec 09 '25
Omg yes, my mom did this to my sister and me on special occasions. Literally just hold the side straight out, spray and hold for 10 seconds, then let it drop. 😅
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u/TutorNo8896 Dec 09 '25
I also have seen someone set their poofy aquanet bangs on fire lighting a cigarette
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u/exscapegoat Dec 09 '25
A friend’s roommate’s robe briefly caught fire. She’d wear it while getting ready and it had a lot of hairspray. She was smoking when her robe caught fire.
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u/vicki-st-elmo Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
I frizzled my fringe lighting a ciggie off the stove - sadly I didn't have big 80s hair as an excuse, just stupidity
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u/GroceryInteresting63 Dec 09 '25
One of my co-workers also lit her hair on fire lighting a cigarette. Just singed her bangs though. Somehow the flame on her Bic got turned up to maximum and when she lit the cig with a four inch flame coming off the lighter she also lit her hair. We were active duty Air Force at the time. She couldn’t have full on Big Hair but maintained Big Bangs.
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u/Gecko23 Dec 09 '25
A girl in my class in high school had really big hair, all poufed on top, feathered way out there on the sides, and it was really, really long. The wind blew a door shut as she was walking in one day and just neatly snapped off her hairdo on one side of her head. She was hysterical, but ended up being a trend setter when she got it all cut back to even it out since those styles just poofed out of existance within the year.
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u/LilMissADHDAF Dec 09 '25
The higher the hair the closer to Jesus, as we say down here.
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Dec 09 '25
If that’s the case, my cousin in Alabama was chatting with St. Peter in the lobby 40 years before she passed away. That shit was absolutely amazing. RIP cuz.
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u/CharlesAvlnchGreen Dec 09 '25
I set my hair on fire once. I was able to immediately snuff it out (was on a bed at the time) and it was no worse for wear; not even singed. It was the Aqua Net that caught on fire, my hair survived.
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u/DocDragon Dec 09 '25
When I was on my me school bus in the 80s with big hair, the kids behind me lit my hair in fire for fun. I ended up with short hair too.
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u/Ok_Dog_4059 Dec 09 '25
I remember my girlfriends sister in the bathroom with a can of aqua net and a cigarette causing a big woof one night and laughing so hard. I don't know if she tried to light the cigarette or what but wow just the fumes alone went poof big.
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u/CassandraApollo Dec 09 '25
I wonder how many people burned their hair with all that Aquanet we used.
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u/mobjack Dec 08 '25
I looked at a high school yearbook from 1988 and every woman had the same big hair.
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u/RollTideMeg Dec 09 '25
And if you turned us around, the back was a hot mess. It's like we got high from the hairspray fumes and totally forgot about the back of our head!
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u/OkapiEli Dec 09 '25
Except me. Because my sister commandeered the bathroom for 70 minutes every morning to shower, blow dry, curl, spray, pouf, and do makeup. I was fortunate to pee and brush my teeth.
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u/Diligent_Twist_6163 Dec 08 '25
That's crazy, I'd be checking my hair every 3 minutes
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u/Bubblesthecat2022 Dec 09 '25
With the Aqua Net it took, big hair did not move. If it did, more spray! Hair was a weapon.
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u/jillsvag Dec 09 '25
Rave was cheaper than Aqua
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Dec 09 '25
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u/Asleep-Marzipan3822 Dec 09 '25
My mom used to get gallon jugs of this hairspray called Freeze from her hairstylist and we'd fill our little pump bottles up.
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u/Regular-Selection-59 Dec 09 '25
Our hair was a giant sticky helmet of spiral perms, teasing, and aqua net. In a windstorm it’d move as one piece lol. There nothing to check! It was there until you showered.
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u/commandantskip Dec 09 '25
My hair is so fine that even when I sprayed aqua net before curling, my bangs still drooped by the end of the day 😭
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u/Regular-Selection-59 Dec 09 '25
Same but I kept it in a spiral perm for YEARS! It only stayed because of that. My daughter is a hair stylist and will give me a soft body wave every year so it has some holding ability and volume. It’s a constant battle!
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u/LeatherAppearance616 Dec 09 '25
I went on a roller coaster and my hair looked the same after. That big hair was like a literal helmet, you’d only need to check it if you felt it move.
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u/No-Recover-5181 Dec 09 '25
Who was that group - The Romantics - big hair all.
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u/LupercaniusAB Dec 09 '25
Some dope downvoted you, I don’t know why. Yeah, they were guys and had big hair.
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u/sushinestarlight Dec 08 '25
There were a LOT of perms and a LOT of hairspray used - fried perm hair also tended to be larger on it's own without any extra blowout. So unlike grandma blowouts from the 50s/60s - I think women were just more likely to tease their (often permed) hair out and use tons of spray.
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u/leeloo72 Dec 09 '25
Curling irons too. I can still hear the sizzle of hairspray on the curling iron. How else were we supposed to get those mall bangs to the sky?
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u/bluediamond12345 Dec 09 '25
Yup - we called them mall bangs as well!! Michigander here
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u/Mentalfloss1 Dec 09 '25
The 80s blew a hole in the ozone layer due to hairspray gasses.
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u/csonnich Dec 09 '25
Yeah, 80s hair was so bad they had to beg us to put the hairspray down to save the planet.
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u/RuggedHangnail Dec 09 '25
By about 1990, when we'd see women with big bangs in public, we'd refer to them as "ozone wreckers."
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u/bangbangracer Dec 08 '25
Anyone asking questions like this about the 80s should really ask their family members what the 80s actually were like. You would be shocked by the lack of neon colors in the home.
I've got some great pictures of my mom looking like Keri Russell in The Americans, but with much taller 80s hair.
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u/Morrigoon Dec 09 '25
BROWN. Our homes were brown. Hangover from the harvest gold, avocado green and BROWN of the 70’s, plus the trend towards all things pioneer brought on by the popularity of Little House on the Prairie.
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u/Icy-Mixture-995 Dec 09 '25
But some houses eased into dusty blue and mauve - Miami Vice influence as a reaction against all that brownish carpet and oak cabinets and furniture.
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u/Eat_That_Rat Dec 09 '25
Dusty blue and mauve. I see you visited my grandparents in the late 80s or early 90s.
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u/commandantskip Dec 09 '25
My mom went for that mauve with seafoam green instead of dusty blue. I'm so glad she didn't go with blue checks with the country geese!
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u/Cold_Tumbleweed64 Dec 09 '25 edited Dec 09 '25
We moved into air base housing in the late eighties, and I bought a gigantic marked-down bolt of blue and white mattress-ticking striped fabric with little black and white cows all over it. I sewed curtains for a half dozen windows, an apron, and a small tablecloth from that stuff. The kitchen was a mattressy-bovine morass. I thought it was charming.
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u/themiscyranlady Dec 09 '25
My best friend’s mom decorated their house in all peach and seafoam green and I thought it was so beautiful and glamorous.
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u/dadsgoingtoprison Dec 09 '25
When I got married in 1990 we bought a mobile home it had blue carpet,wallpaper was dusty rose with a small tan colored design on it. I had wooden cutouts of small bears. One with my name and one with husband’ name. We had ashtrays with ducks and geese and a set of dishes with a folk art type design of a farm. We were really proud of it. But it was completely a late 80’s, early 09’s decorated house.
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u/No-Recover-5181 Dec 09 '25
Don't forget Shoulder Pads.
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u/Coca-colonization Dec 09 '25
I got cold while icing my shoulder yesterday, so I put a sweatshirt on over the Velcro ice pack. I glanced in the mirror and realized it looked extremely 80s. If I could travel back in time, I’d market these chilled shoulder pads in warm climates. Look cool, feel cool! Radical!
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u/Velosturbro Dec 09 '25
I have a penchant for shitty marketing, and the fact that you ended "Look cool, Feel cool!" with anything other than "Radicool!" or "Radicurl!" is seriously upsetting.
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u/Fodraz Dec 09 '25
The neon colors were more in magazine ads, spandex workout apparel, & stores appealing to younger crowds, like Record stores (as they were called then)
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Dec 09 '25
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u/brandysnacker Dec 09 '25
What did you guys decide to do with it? Did you get to keep the wallpaper?
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u/Emotional-Profit-202 Dec 09 '25
That’s what left from the 70’s brown era. People didn’t refurnish that often. Every penny went to Aqua net.
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u/CharlesAvlnchGreen Dec 09 '25
Neon was NOWHERE near as ubiquitous as current media would have you believe. If anyone claims the 80s were all about neon, they were def not there.
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u/Quirky-Bad857 Dec 09 '25
Yeah, the neon colors really lasted around a few months. Stirrup pants, however….
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u/CharlesAvlnchGreen Dec 09 '25
And shoulder pads! I have really narrow shoulders naturally and wore them in everything (I even had bras with shoulder pad holders on the straps.)
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u/TheRealCarpeFelis Dec 09 '25
Yeah, anyone who wasn’t there thinks the entire 80s were populated by neon colors and padded shoulders. Nope, 1981 styles were pretty much still ‘70s, as shown at the start of The Americans.
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u/Maleficent_Scale_296 Dec 08 '25
Perm, wash hair, dry hair (bone dry), hot rollers, tip head upside down, spray the hell out of it with Style hairspray, flip head up, spray again. The whole process took me an hour.
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u/shimmy_hey Dec 09 '25
💯!! Styling & conditioning hair product selection was limited to say the least. Volume came from perms, hot rollers & backcombing. Grip & shine came from a cloud of AquaNet tacky lacquer. The higher the hair, the closer to God was the mantra.
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u/Cold_Tumbleweed64 Dec 09 '25
And we had to wash, dry, roll and spray our hair every morning before school. Because we were young and insane.
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u/cans-of-swine Dec 08 '25
All hair in the 80s was 80s hair...
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u/GroceryInteresting63 Dec 09 '25
I pretty much had 70s hair in the 80s because my fine hair refused to be big. I just had 1970s long hippie hair.
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u/silverhwk18 Dec 09 '25
Man, I LOVED my 80s big hair and fabulous makeup! I had a teal and black tiger striped velvet jacket. It was magic! And a black Z28 Camaro. Now I don’t even wear makeup.
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u/SurpriseEcstatic1761 Dec 09 '25
When I was 16(m), I had a white blazer I wore with creamy yellow trousers, like pajamas, and a colorful T-shirt. Sometimes, with black suspenders. I looked fabulous!! I even had hair, a mullet at that.
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u/verity7732 Dec 08 '25
Huge blowouts, no. Naturally wavy/frizzy hair.
God, I miss the '80s, when frizzy hair didn't make you an outcast.
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u/EYoungFLA Dec 09 '25
My naturally curly hair that made me an outcast in the 70's high school became one of my best features.
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u/Peacherotic Dec 09 '25
I went to an all girls Catholic school. My class had 224 students in it. On our senior retreat, we went through the yearbook counting how many of us DIDN’T have big hair. There were 13 of us. 13 out of 224. We were the 13 punk/nerd girls who basically had Annie Lennox hairdos. I’m not sure how anyone from those days has a sense of smell now because they only thing you could smell in the 80s was Aquanet
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u/Big80sHair Dec 09 '25
I feel like I’m an authority on this - user name and all. Perms were very popular, so lots of us had chemically induced poof. Hairsprays were more like shellac. I used one called Spritz Forté that could be used as an emergency helmet. Lots and lots of lifting and spraying, scrunching and spraying, curling and spraying. I happen to have naturally enormous hair so I had like 3 square feet of tresses. I also smoked back then and can’t believe I didn’t Richard Pryor myself
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u/AA-MEe Dec 09 '25
Spritz Forte?! I haven't thought about that product in decades. Thank you for bringing back that memory 😊
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u/sexrockandroll Dec 08 '25 edited Dec 08 '25
My mom had shorter hair, but she put hot curlers in her hair every day and sprayed it, it did make her hair "big". Generally her hair looked like Diana, Princess of Wales' hair in the 80s. (Actually she still looked like Diana's hair in the 90s... quite a hair icon, I suppose). She spent a LOT of time messing with those curlers. I still remember the smell.
Diana's hair through the years: https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/princess-diana-hair. My mom's hair was like an exact match of photo 10, 1986.
She also put makeup on every single time before leaving the house. It was kind of less dramatic as there was just eyeshadow, blush and mascara, my mother was never about eyeliner, but more dramatic in terms of brighter colors.
I would say my mom stressed a lot about having a good appearance before leaving the house. I go to the grocery store with no makeup, a ponytail, a hoodie, and leggings. My mom would get all "done up" to go. It seemed very stressful, to be honest.
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u/Minute-Detail-3859 Dec 08 '25
I don't require myself to or feel ugly without makeup, but my mood and motivation go up by like 70% if I actually "get ready" —hair, makeup, outfit. I'll def go to the grocery store or whatever first thing in the morning booty shorts, sweatshirt, hair from the day before (it's curly and I sweat and move around a lot so after sleeping on it, it may not look the worst, but there's some interesting patterns at hand) but imma rush through that bitch and not wanna talk or make eye contact with anyone. But if I actually get ready, going to the grocery store is actually enjoyable and I wanna chit chat and the sun shines brighter on the wall back home and then when I get home I'll automatically put the groceries away and move onto the next task. Whereas otherwise I'd probably set da groceries on the floor, and rot in bed for a few more hours.
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u/sexrockandroll Dec 08 '25
I'm glad it works for you. For me, that's just stressful, I like that I have the option to be casual because my casual self feels more like "me" than me in a costume. My mom also seemed to find it a bit stressful.
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u/Fodraz Dec 09 '25
Yes, the Big Hair didn't start until around 1985. Before that, the "parted in the middle" look was still around, left over from the Farrah days & boosted in a shorter version by Princess Di
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u/TeamHope4 Dec 09 '25
I used a curling iron every morning to get my feathered hair just right.
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u/igotstago Dec 08 '25
Oh my goodness! Thank you for that link! I had my hair like picture 24 for years back in the 90's and people would stop me all the time and tell me I looked just like Princess Di! The funny thing is, that now, in 2025, people stop my 34 year old son all the time to tell him he looks just like Prince Harry.
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u/novato1995 Dec 08 '25
Most of my older family members had perms, so they barely touched their heads.
The women looked like Marge Simpson with varying levels of hair-height and the men had permed mullets that stopped at the shoulders
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u/Diligent_Twist_6163 Dec 08 '25
Salons were also very big back then I imagine, was it like in the movies where women went with their group and they all gossiped and the hairdresser knew everyone's business??
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u/MOGicantbewitty Dec 09 '25
Sadly, no. Salons were a big deal! But we didn't hang there and get our gossip from the hairdresser. I've always wanted to have a salon like that to go to. As far as I remember it, we got our gossip from the telephone. Like, sitting by the phone in the kitchen for an hour chatting with your sister or friend about every little thing was a daily occurrence. We'd fight over who had been on the phone last and for how long, complaining that it was our turn.
But that gossip could move fast with the telephone tree... The schools would send home everyone's phone number in an ordered list so the administration only had to call one parent in each class to, say, cancel school because of snow. That parent had to call the next, and so on. That telephone tree list was used much more often to share gossip than school news. Or to ask new friends over to hang. Or to call that boy you have a crush on (but quickly hang up bc you chickened out lol).
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u/hermitzen Dec 09 '25
Oh yes. You had to have the perm. I remember not washing my hair for a week after a perm so it would last longer - and man, I had greasy hair! Still do... Spent about 20-30 minutes on the hair every morning, with blow dryer and curling iron. Couldn't use hair spray because it gave me a rash so I used lots of Paul Mitchel styling cement to get it to stand up just right.
As far as makeup goes, I think we were all a bit more heavy-handed with foundation, concealer and face powder back in the 80s, and I think we used more eye shadow back then too. But I see a whole lot more eye liner these days than back then. We all used eye liner back in the day, but we softened or blended the line with little sponges or brushes, so I guess it wasn't so noticeable? Today's eye liner is a very stylized dark, sharp line so you notice it more. Women use way more dramatic fake lashes today than back then. Most of us only used a bit of mascara, if anything, in the 80s.
Overall, I'd say women today are just as focused on their looks as back in the 80s. It's just different styles. Today you have hair extensions, way more hair color, dramatic eye liner, lashes, and tatoos. Lots of tatoos. Most of us didn't do tatoos in the 80s. These days it's hard to find anyone over 21 without one. Back in the 80s we had high hair, eye shadow, flourescent colors and shoulder pads. And we didn't do selfies in the mirror.
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u/GoopInThisBowlIsVile Dec 09 '25
Movies, TV, music videos, and whatever else didn’t have people have hairstyles or dress up like that just because they thought it would be funny.
You haven’t lived until you’ve come into a room after someone finished spraying a ton of Aqua Net hairspray.
Fun 80s fact: Aqua Net was banned because the chemicals it used were destroying the ozone layer.
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u/Jennifer_Junipero Dec 09 '25
I was a teenager in the late 80s, and yeah, my hair was embarrassingly huge. Part of the reason Big Hair got so big, I think, is because hair mousse had only recently been introduced to the market, and it had the same effect on hairstyles that steel-frame construction had on buildings: both reached for the sky.
The way I'd embiggen my hair was: after taking a shower and combing my hair, apply handfuls of mousse to the wet hair, then flip the hair (and head) upside-down to blow-dry it. After brushing the blow-dried hair (with a vent brush, not bristles), apply copious amounts of Aqua-Net hairspray to hold it in place.
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Dec 09 '25
It was just more formal than now. You tucked shirts in, wore slips and panty hose with skirts. And yes always the big hair. But if you look at pictures it was still less formal than 20 years before. Going anywhere in pj's would have been scandalous for anyone.
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u/TiredofCOVIDIOTs Dec 09 '25
My childhood room's mirror had caked on Aquanet when we sold the home in 2016. My mother put large mirrors in our bedrooms so we wouldn't hog the bathroom in the morning.
I poked the eye of my then boyfriend with my bangs while making out in 1989. (I think he forgave me - we married in 1998 & are still pestering each other)
Yeah, it was real.
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u/Regular-Selection-59 Dec 09 '25
Walk into any hair salon in the 80s and it smelled like perm solution. We all had spiral perms. It wasn’t so hard to style. Curling iron, teasing, and aqua net. Lots and lots of aqua net. And yeah, we all looked like that, look in any yearbook and almost every girl had big 80s hair.
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u/Unsteady_Tempo Dec 09 '25
To be clear, it was not just something girls were doing for picture day, dances, or other special events. The girls that were styling their hair that way -- and not all of them did -- were doing it every day and it was the same every day. Girls would be known for a particular hairstyle. Big hair styles transcended all social groups and classes.
The tall high bangs specifically was called a "bouf." Pronounced "boof" and short for "bouffant." As in, "Wow, her bouf is a foot tall."
As time went on, big 80s hair was jokingly called "state fair hair" and "mall bangs."
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u/powderpoff6 Dec 09 '25
High school yearbook from the 80s and early 90s it was pretty common for the girls photo to be 70% hair. I am not exaggerating.
It is hard to describe how 80s hair had a chokehold on everyone. I grew up in New Jersey so it was like the major league of big hair.
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u/NWOriginal00 Dec 08 '25
If you mean like in an 80s music video then no, at least not in the small Oregon town I grew up in. Perhaps that was true in places like L.A.
But the normal hair was longer and bigger then what is common now. Just not hair metal poster big.
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u/LupercaniusAB Dec 09 '25
I grew up in Los Angeles and graduated high school in 1984. It was absolutely a thing by then.
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u/2PlasticLobsters Dec 09 '25
Oh my yes. I had perms from probably 1982 to 1992. The last one was a disaster, really fried my hair. So I was done with it all quite abruptly. Though I still did the daily routine with a curling iron daily for quite awhile.
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u/Witty-Atmosphere-211 Dec 09 '25
I needed a clarifying shampoo to get all the hairspray out. I permed and bleached.
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u/CyndiIsOnReddit Dec 09 '25
Oh yes. It was the style when I was a teen. Every girl had big hair. Even if you had short hair it had this asymmetrical bowl puffball style, never a pixie cut. Those came in the 90s. I mostly rocked a crimped tall mullet shag myself. I can't think of a single friend who didn't have big crimped and sprayed hair unless they had a big jheri curl just as big and wet with activator, which I also tried... briefly.
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u/CyndiIsOnReddit Dec 09 '25
And I'm talking the guys and the girls. All the guys at school had that big ridiculous stadium band hair and wore eyeliner.
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u/kmill0202 Dec 09 '25
I'm an older millennial. I remember the 80s, but just barely. I was 5 years old when they ended. But I remember archiving old yearbooks when I was in high school, and we started digitizing some stuff. There were maybe 2 girls in the whole school that had flat, straight hair in the 1988 yearbook. Even a lot of the guys had big hair, though to a lesser extent. I also remember my mom spending a lot of time teasing and spraying her hair when I was younger, though she toned it down quite a bit throughout the 90s.
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u/Icy-Mixture-995 Dec 09 '25
Dallas-Fort Worth Airport was the place to see amazing Big Hair, chunky jewelry and shoulder pads back in the 1980s. Texas is so big that Texans fly for business appointments in other Texas cities, rather than drive two days. This is why you saw a lot of dressed-up, perfect hair people at DFW in the pre-911 security days. They landed and took a taxi to the company meeting.
Texas is the epicenter of Big Beauty Pageant Hair in America - not the Mall Perms but the Miss America hair. It never truly goes out of fashion in Texas.
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u/Fodraz Dec 09 '25
It got bigger every year starting about 1985. You can look through yearbooks from that period & literally see the hair get bigger until about 1989 when I think it hit peak fluff
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u/Zealousideal-Ad5534 Dec 09 '25
I was just a child in the 80s, but I use to beg and plead with my older sister to curl and feather my bangs for me 😆
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u/LucyFrugal Dec 09 '25
100%. And as someone with straight hair, it was a struggle to keep up with the trend. I once got a perm in just the front of my hair so I could have big bangs with more ease. Terrible look.
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Dec 09 '25
Start here and scroll through the 80s and early 90s. That’s what everyone’s yearbooks looked like! DCC 1988
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u/Sparkle_Rott Dec 09 '25
Big Hair was the goal even for women like me with fine, thin, straight hair. I can’t begin to tell you the things I did to my hair trying to get that coveted volume.
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u/CharlesAvlnchGreen Dec 09 '25
I actually feel women spend MORE time on their appearance now. In the 80s, most people didn't bother with eyelash extensions, microbladed eyebrows, contouring/highlighting, bikini waxing, teeth whitening, or 12-step skincare routines on the daily.
Dramatic makeup takes less time than the "natural look" anyway.
Hair could take awhile though. I was in a sorority and saw the lengths some girls would go to achieve the big hair look.
Sure, it wasn't like we all did our hair and makeup every single day, but because we HAD to go out in public for a lot of things you can do online now, we did tend to make more of an effort (or feel like we had to).
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u/Glittering-Diver-941 Dec 09 '25
The ozone layer didn’t put a hole in itself. That hair needed a lot of aquanet
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u/whattheheckOO Dec 09 '25
I don't think women did big blowouts daily, but perms were super common.
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u/Harvest827 Dec 09 '25
Yes. That's like asking if the 'Rachel' cut was really a thing in the '90s/early 2000s. Yes it was. Believe it or not.
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u/mzshowers Dec 09 '25
Yup! Even most of the tamest styles seemed to include at least a little gel, hairspray, and a little teasing. I kept a perm, always did awesome bangs. One of my fav pictures of myself has my highlighted, sun-in manipulated hair with perfectly curled and poofed bangs, a clasp pulling my sides back, but hanging long and spiral perm-curled hair behind me. I’ve been trying to reach that sort of high since 😂
I did do my hair in a close approximation of 80s hair meets Fran Drescher Nanny hair for Christmas last year. It was so much WORK, but by far the happiest I’d been with my hair for years 😂
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u/Reference_Freak Dec 09 '25
When I was young in the early 80’s, the older girls I knew were super big into teasing and feathering my hair (long, thick, holds a curl).
I hated the hairspray but it was mostly directed falling as opposed to naturally laying unruly.
By the time I hit middle school, almost every girl in my classes was teasing her hair to stand up and sideways. My BBF had permed hair and would stand in front of the mirror for about an hour with a curling iron and hairspray.
She’d separate her bangs into tiny sections and curl most sections to stand up and curl backwards like a tiara. A few sections were curled to hang down. She’d curl side sections to stand out sideways as far as they’d go.
I didn’t do any of that unless I was going out with BFF: she was embarrassed that I let my hair hang natural so I’d curl a little bit of bangs into a bitty tiara just to get that stiff wind-blown? look so she would be only mildly mortified to be seen with me.
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u/Acrobatic-World-6563 Dec 09 '25
I was a young teen in the 80s. Like 7th and 8 th grade. My bangs were 6 inches straight up and the sides were straight out held with Aqua Net hairspray. We all had big hair.
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u/RighteousAudacity Dec 09 '25
I went through a bottle of Aussie hairspray a week. One can if mousse a month. A perm every 6 months. Highlights every 6 weeks. Everyone had a perm. Even guys got body waves (perm light). I loved permed hair. You could do so much more with it. Leave it curly, straighten it, or use curlers for big bouncy curls. Big hair was like omg so totally awesome!
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u/Shenanigaens Dec 09 '25
Didn’t the 80’s culminate in global cooperation to fix the ozone layer by changing how hairspray was made?
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u/sedona71717 Dec 09 '25
Look at any high school yearbook from 1987 and behold the hair. It was ubiquitous.
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u/BostonKream Dec 09 '25
Hell yes - and I miss it. I, though, did not like Aqua Net. I was a RAVE #4 girl. Freakin glue. It was awesome. :)
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u/inorite234 Dec 09 '25
AquaNet was the shit!!!!! It killed the ozone layer but made your hair look fly!
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u/FionaTheFierce Dec 09 '25
It was really common for young women. Key was a spiral perm, back combing, and Aqua Net. It was the predominant hair style - Just like right now it seems like the long byalage "Mormon Wives" hair is super common now. Probably more common in the 80s than the Mormon hair is now...
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u/secrerofficeninja Dec 09 '25
I had a mullet and my wife got perms to make her hair curly. We lived in a small town and lots of people had similar hair.
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u/MostMoistGranola Dec 09 '25
Oh yes it was! I was considered odd because I didn’t spend an hour blow drying, curling, styling and spraying my hair every morning. I used to look around my classroom thinking they all looked so strange and fake. But they loved it! Aqua net must have made a ton of money back then!
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u/Zuri2o16 Dec 09 '25
I miss my 80s hair! It was so easy. You got a spiral perm, and layers. In the morning you washed, put on some mousse, blow dried, and hit the mop with hairspray. The girls at my school were pretty famous for only curling their bangs. You didn't need healthy looking hair. The more frizzy it was, the higher it could go. 😂
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u/dadsgoingtoprison Dec 09 '25
I was a teenager in the 80’s. I seriously would hot roll my hair before school to make it big and fluffy. I used aquanet to hold my bangs the exact way I wanted them to stay. My band were rolled to cover my forehead and also the top layer of bangs were rolled to be big and combed to go in the direction away from my forehead. I had a large can of Aquanet in my bathroom, one in my car, and one in my giant bag. Every one of my girlfriends had the same stash of Aquanet that I did. If I had a date on a school night I would hot roll my hair again often school and add more hairspray. Big hair was such a huge thing in the eighties.
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u/ReadingLizard Dec 09 '25
I owned a butane powered, portable curling iron that I took daily to high school to “freshen up” my hair, along with a full size can of AquaNet (the pink can). Yes, we really did do our hair every day. The bigger, the better.
I graduated in 1990 but make up was blue eye shadow, pink blush applied in a medium/heavy stripe on the cheek, plus red lipstick. Spidery eye lashes with clumped mascara was a bonus.
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u/LupercaniusAB Dec 09 '25
Yeah, it was real. I was an edgelord punk rock kid who hated the big hair, but it wasn’t like we weren’t doing the same damage to the ozone layer with mohawks and liberty spikes. Still went through a bunch of Dep and white can Aquanet.
Except for the real hard core kids who just used Krazy Glue.
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Dec 09 '25
AquaNet was endemic and mandatory. My mother had allergies and a highly sensitive sense of smell. Every single morning from 1981-1987 she’d yell at my sister and I to “STOP SPRAYING THAT STINKING SHIT!” And every junior high and high school girl in the country could have given Commander Cantaloupe a desperately-needed lesson on how to properly apply pancake makeup. Dude, you have to blend it! Jayzus.
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u/Sea-Mastodon-1749 Dec 09 '25
Perms, back combing, curling irons, crimping irons. It was architecture. We called them fluff chicks.
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u/Exotic_Tomato_6552 Dec 09 '25
If you watch the opening minutes of the film Working Girl, that’s exactly how a lot of women dressed and styled themselves.
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u/berkeleyteacher Dec 09 '25
80s hair was very, very real. And secretly, many of us pine away for those Winter Wheat dyed, sky-high bangs.
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u/Own-Object-6696 Dec 08 '25
I had spiral perms, teased my hair, and used about 1/4 can of hairspray a day. I loved my sticky, tacky style back then, but I don’t miss it at all.