The Perms, Pixies and Bowl Cuts of ‘Stranger Things’: How Julia Roberts and Princess Diana Inspired the Iconic Hair Looks of Its Final Season

As Phoebe Waller-Bridge once oh-so-wisely said, “Hair is everything.” And that is, of course, especially true when you’re a teenager. Mia Thermopolis knew it in The Princess Diaries when she hid it below that felt bucket hat. And we all remember that infamous chop in Felicity. It turns out, hair is still almost everything when you’re battling monsters in the Upside Down. Nancy Wheeler didn’t miss a single perm appointment. Eleven felt stronger than ever once she donned her flippy blonde wig. And I can’t help but think that Steve “The Hair” Harrington would have been less effective without his iconic locks. Look, you need a good ‘do to take on a demogorgon!

Stranger Things wouldn’t be Stranger Things without those instantly recognizable 1980s hair silhouettes, from Nancy’s ever-expanding halo of curls to Joyce’s stalwart blunt bangs to Will’s persistent bowl cut. And Sarah Hindsgaul has been responsible for it all. For the past ten years, she’s been concocting these styles and transforming the cast of modern-day actors into the unlikely gang of Midwestern monster fighters we all know and love. Now, one week after the epic finale, she is taking us through the characters’ journeys and final looks.

From the beginning, Hindsgaul tried to toe the line between period accuracy and realism—which isn’t easy when you’re dealing with the era of the perm. “The ’80s are quite a complicated area to work with for hair, just because it can really easily turn into a comedy,” she says, gesturing about a foot away from her head. “Like, ’80s hair is so insane, and it’s so over the top. You know, when you Google ”80s hair’ on the internet, you get that girl with the bangs standing up like this. For me, it was important that we still kept it pretty grounded.”

Hindsgaul got her initial inspiration from the 1980s classics she grew up with. “We didn’t have a lot of movie access, but I’ve seen The Goonies and Labyrinth probably 4000 times,” she says.

She also had to create durable styles. After all, the hair in Hawkins goes through a whole lot. The perfect perm can quickly fall victim to all kinds of monster goop: think gunk from an inter-dimensional portal, ashy Upside Down spores—this season, even melting walls. Indeed, there are few shows where hair goes through quite so much. “It’s been a big learning curve,” she says. “Now, when I start the design process, I will test everything before shooting. I take it and put it into different distressed levels, and do three, four weeks of distress. We test the hair to see if it can still move and still looks the way we want it. That way I’m a little more in control, and I know that whatever script comes my way, the hair can survive it.”

Over the seasons, we’ve seen the silhouettes atop these characters’ heads grow, shrink, and puff out in all directions. After all, these are teenagers. And despite their focus on—you know—the impending end of the world, they will always find time to think about how they do their hair and what it says about them. “They’re coming of age while we’re looking at them. And it’s a fascinating age, because [it’s when we] are testing so many things, trying to find ourselves,” she says. “We’re really searching—really trying to find stuff out.”

These shifts from season to season were a huge part of defining each character’s arc. “All these kids are so cool in real life, so to kind of dial them up and down as needed has been kind of an interesting journey,” she says. “But there is not one of them that hasn’t been amazing at wanting to go into characters.”

And no one is searching more than Millie Bobby Brown’s Eleven. A girl who escapes from a lab with a buzzed head and no knowledge of the real world, she becomes a sponge, trying to soak up everything she can about the people she meets. “I think [working with Brown] has been one of the most fun things—working with a girl that’s coming of age—a girl that grew up without parents in a lab,” recalls Hindsgaul. “She’s completely moldable. We see her fit into every single environment that we put her in.”

From her iconic season 1 buzz, Brown sports a curly pixie cut—her “wild child of the forest” look, before getting to try some “fun summer ’80s hairdos” with Max, complete with a funky scrunchie. In season 4, she starts to mimic Joyce’s bangs. “There’s a search in it—more of a search. It’s a need to feel a part of something,” Hindsgaul says. In the season 5 finale, we see El setting out to search on her own—and instead of sporting a style that mimics anyone, she is finally free to truly start being herself.

Then there’s Nancy Wheeler, who goes from wide-eyed girl next door to gun-slinging badass—and her hair has become bigger and wilder to match. By season 5, she’s rocking an almost rocker chic shaggy perm look—”I was very inspired by Sigourney Weaver in Alien,” Hindsgaul says. “I was always like, ‘If there’s ever a good excuse for me to put Nancy in this haircut, I will, because the hair texture and the pattern works.'”

In the finale, we fast forward 18 months and meet a new Nancy. Having enrolled and dropped out of Emerson, she’s now out there making her own path as a journalist. To go with her new gal on the go lifestyle, she’s chopped off her iconic perm in favor of a whimsical, shaggy pixie cut.

“We wanted it shorter,” she says. “We wanted something that looks really confident, but it also has to have a relaxedness to it and not look too over-styled. It’s a very serious, personal look.”

Hindsgaul was inspired by a photo of Julia Roberts from the early ’90s—”where she kind of had the shorter hair, and she pulled out her curls just enough that it still has a very feminine touch to it, because Nancy is feminine.”

Her mother, Karen Wheeler, has gone through the wringer—both as a monster fighter and as a bleach-and-perm recipient. Karen was, Hindsgaul explains, always one of the characters who most adhered to the hair trends—each season, she sported that year’s hottest look. And like her daughter, who also has a new pixie in the finale, the wine bottle-slashing, laundry-exploding Karen has changed a lot. “They are the two people coming out stronger on the other side, and probably they have learned the most and taken the most.”

For Karen’s pixie, Hindsgaul wanted to give her “just a touch of the Princess Diana haircut.”

“Because Diana is one of the strongest females you can find in this world,” she says. “She’s filled with compassion, she’s strong, she’s all the things that I am hoping Karen Wheeler will bring into the world from now on. But we also still wanted to keep it very Karen Wheeler, so we gave it a little extra flip in the front, just to keep enough of Karen’s sassiness in there.”

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If the Wheelers are the family that always looks like they’ve come straight from the salon, the Byers are the family trimming their own hair over the kitchen sink. “It’s a completely different environment, different money, different interests,” she says. “I think Joyce got her hair cut in the ’70s and it worked for her, and she’s just chopping that bang [ever since]. She’s utilitarian in many ways, and she would never, ever pay for a haircut.”

Which brings us to poor Will and his eternal bowl cut. “Hair is just not where [Joyce’s] focus is,” she says. “I mean, she cut that poor child’s hair off in a bowl, not seeing a problem with it.”

Joyce did get one little moment of hair fun, though—a tiny, carefully selected barrette for her final date night with Hopper at Enzo’s. “That was her dressing up for the night. We just gave it a little bit of a sweet, feminine tuck because I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t care. I mean, she wants to look good on a night like that.”

But Joyce’s sweet little hair clip is a rare moment of prettiness in this world. And for Hindsgaul, that’s important. “It’s not just about making the actors look beautiful,” she says. “If you want an emotional impact, you sometimes have to go to awkward places, even if it feels like nails on a chalkboard.”

Will’s season 4 mushroom-shaped bowl cut was particularly “hard” to stomach. “Obviously, it gives him a feeling—when you look at yourself in the mirror, and you see that, your self-esteem lowers by 45%. But that’s also what we needed, and I think it helped Noah to get where he needed to be emotionally.”

While the ’80s hair in Stranger Things may look completely dated to a modern eye, Hindsgaul is predicting it will creep back into the mainstream. “What I see more than anything is that I think people are letting loose a little more. I think we have kind of been in a 10-year phase with this very clean beauty—everything has been so manicured,” she says. “Not a hair out of place. And I think people are ready for some more personality in their style. They want more uniqueness. And I hope that something like Stranger Things will teach you that also little quirks and little mistakes, a hair going the wrong way is actually quite beautiful and charming. And you should let your hair move!”

Her new hair-care line, Hindsgaul Hair, is designed to encourage just that sense of play and movement. “I made a really clean foundation, so your scalp is super clean, and your length is very moisturized. You need healthy hair for it to be able to move,” she says. “And then I made a hair mousse. I’m a big believer in mousse, and I don’t think people know how important it is. It really has nothing to do with the ’80s. No matter what hair you want, your first product should always be a hair mousse.”

Like us, Hindsgaul now has the difficult job of coming to terms with the fact that Stranger Things really is over. “It’s very hard for me to say goodbye to the actors after seeing them every day—they still come to my house!”

“I feel really honored and blessed to have been able to work with these characters for 10 years,” she adds. “We’ve been able to tell a lot of stories through these hairstyles.”