There’s hair, and then there’s iconic, era-defining Julia Roberts hair, a mane worthy of awards. The Oscar-winning actor’s million-dollar smile may be her aesthetic signature, but since the start of her career, Roberts’s hair has proved a close second—in all of its many iterations.
Roberts and her natural curls breezed onto the silver screen and into the Hollywood scene in the late 1980s, her Mystic Pizza character’s too-big-for-this-town sensibilities echoed by her cloud of finger-raked ringlets. True to the hairspray-happy spirit of the decade, Roberts became known for her (dyed) auburn curls, worn teased to the heavens, the style serving as a moment in ’90s Pretty Woman as Roberts’s Vivian removes her sleek and cropped platinum wig to reveal those red Pre-Raphaelite wave. Subsequent years saw Roberts lightening things up, in keeping with her natural blonde, before lopping off her chest-grazing lengths into a tousled pixie dyed in deep crimson and white-hot platinum shades.
Blame it on “The Rachel” effect, but the mid ’90s saw her beginning to embrace face-framing, shoulder-sweeping styles that ran the gamut, from a swoopy fringed lob to a sleek layered chocolate bob—yes, Roberts was team bob before much of the famed 2025 bob community even had their first haircut. Among her most iconic moments was the wispy, twisted knot (and fuzzy underarms) she wore for the premiere of Notting Hill in 1997, embodying the era’s easy, never overthought beauty attitude.
In keeping with Y2K style’s enthusiasm for the flat iron, Roberts exchanged her curl pattern for pin-straight lengths, worn parted to the side, and oscillating between vivid red, deep brunette, and golden blonde shades. It was in the mid 2000s that she began sporting the cascade of brushed-out waves that have come to be her signature. By 2009, Roberts looked every bit the sun-kissed California blonde, before returning back to more incandescent shades of red—that is, up until the 2014 Oscars, where she debuted a fresh platinum blonde dye job. It was in 2023 that Roberts embraced the auburn roots that won the fan’s hearts first. The actor recently relied on hairstylist Serge Normant for a spur-of-the-moment bang, the fringe cropped straight across, before growing out to a bohemian length worn pushed to the side. All the better to blend seamlessly into glossy waves.