Numerous celebrities, including Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and Jada Pinkett Smith, have grabbed headlines for shaving off their hair. However, Sinéad O’Connor, who passed away at 56, remains one of the most renowned in this category with her symbolic buzzcut, which she proudly wore when she rose to stardom in 1990 and kept until her death.
In a 2017 conversation with Dr. Phil, O’Connor disclosed that she had always wanted her head shaved primarily because of the abuse she suffered as a child. “When we were children, my sister had beautiful red hair, glorious red hair. That’s why I’d be jealous of her, but my mother took it into her head that my sister’s hair was ugly and horrible and disgusting. And she started — when I had long hair — she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter. And that’s why I cut my hair off. It was dangerous to be pretty because I was getting raped and molested everywhere I went. That was a huge part of it. I didn’t want to be raped or molested, I didn’t want to dress like a girl, I didn’t want to be pretty. Other girls beat you up if you were pretty too.”
In her memoir Rememberings, published in 2021, the late singer detailed that at the beginning of her career, a record executive in London wanted her to showcase her feminine charm so as to increase her chances of commercial success. Visibly annoyed with the demands, O’Connor went to the barber’s shop, where a young Greek barber scraped her hair to the scalp.
O’Connor also told Dr. Phil that she took the decision to shave because she wanted to be relevant for her music rather than her looks. “I was asked one day would I grow my hair long and wear short skirts because they wanted to sell me on my sexuality,” O’Connor said. “I didn’t want to be sold on that. If I was going to be successful, I wanted it to be because I was a good musician.”
Speaking in a 2022 interview with The Sun, O’Connor revealed that being aware of the expectations imposed upon her purely because of her gender, she was not willing to submit to anyone else’s directives for her life. “I just knew I didn’t want any man telling me who I could be or what I could be or what to sound like. I came from a patriarchal country where I’m being told everything I can and can’t do because I’m a girl,” she detailed. “I’d figure if I didn’t take it from the system, and I didn’t take it from my daddy, I wouldn’t take it from anyone else.”
She further stated that her music was motivated by her own feeling rather than what society expected from her. “I had these songs inside of me that just had to come out. I write songs about things that I feel strongly about, it’s not consciously to write a political song or consciously to make a statement about anything and I think that everyone’s duty to themselves is to act on their feelings and say when something is wrong,” O’Connor confessed. “An artist’s job is to sometimes create difficult conversations that need to be had and it’s none of my business what anyone thinks of me when I do that.”
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