My Hair Came Out Green

""Anne Shirley, what have you done to your hair? Why, it's GREEN!""

- Marilla Cuthbert, Anne of Green Gables

Alice wants to dye her hair black. Or bleach it blonde. Whichever naturally occuring colour she wanted, it turns out a very different and thoroughly ridiculous colour—usually green, though other strange hues pop up. Sometimes, the only thing to do is to shave the head and let the hair grow back.

Not to be confused with You Gotta Have Blue Hair.

This is a Sub-Trope of Cosmetic Catastrophe specific to hair colouring. Also compare Never Trust a Hair Tonic. Kaleidoscope Hair can occur if Alice keeps re-dying her hair.

Advertising

 * There was an advertisement for Outback Steakhouse with this trope. Middle-aged woman tries to dye her hair and it turns out purple or pink. Her husband cancels their reservations at some hoity-toity restaurant and they go to Outback instead, where there are "no rules, just right" and her worries are forgotten.

Fanfic

 * In Diary of a Lovesick Mutant, Fang tries to dye his hair blond, and tomato gets into it, turning it green.

Film

 * Bride Wars: "My hair's blue! IT'S BUH-LUE!"
 * The botched Dye job look was the inspiration for approach to the Joker's hair in The Dark Knight.

Literature

 * Anne of Green Gables: Anne tries to dye her hair "a beautiful raven-black". Instead, it turns a hideous bronze-green, and Marilla is forced to cut it very short.
 * A short story that was called "In 50 years who will know?" or something like that, a woman who has said this phrase to her daughter throughout her daughter's life tries to dye her hair, and ends up with it brilliant green. The daughter even likens it to "glow in the dark green"--whereupon she tells her mother these words of dubious comfort.
 * The (mildly anti-)Soviet classic The Twelve Chairs, by Ilya Ilf and Evgeniy Petrov, has a scene where one of the protagonists tries to dye his hair and eyebrows and mustache a darker colour, but the dye is counterfeit and ends up turning him a rabid green colour. The poor sod ends up having to shave his head completely devoid of hair.
 * In the Star Wars expansion novel I, Jedi, character Corran Horn accidentally dyed his hair green in an attempt to disguise himself as Kieran Halcyon.
 * This happens to the titular character in The Story Of Tracy Beaker when The Rival dares her to steal blond hair dye from a member of the care home's staff and use it.
 * In "The Inspiration of Mr Budd" by Dorothy L. Sayers, a man walks into a hairdresser's shop just before closing time and demands to have his hair dyed. The hairdresser, who is the only person in the shop, recognizes the man as a wanted murderer with a large reward for his capture. The hairdresser knows he has no chance of physically overpowering the murderer but wants the reward money, so he deliberately arranges it so that the murderer's hair will turn bright green an hour or two after he leaves the shop.
 * Howl in Howl's Moving Castle was turned ginger when Sophie meddled with his hair products.
 * Variation: In the Kid Detective novel What's a Daring Detective Like Me Doing in the Doghouse?, Stevie and her friend Jesse find a stray dog and decide to give it a bath. While trying to find a bath product that will get the tangles out of the dog's fur, they accidentally use Stevie's mother's henna dye on it, turning the dog's fur green. They immediately nickname the dog "Swampwater".
 * The Final Destination 3 novelization mentions why Frankie had shaved his head shortly before the events of the film. His attempt at dyeing it resulted in it turning pink.
 * In Girl Talk, Sabrina tried to dye her hair blond in an attempt to improve her chances of landing the part of Sandy in Grease - it came out Bright Orange and one of her friends had to do an emergency dye job. Amusingly, she ended up with the part of Frenchie (see below).
 * In The Dog Who Wouldnt Be, Farley's father tries to get the yellow tint—caused by rolling in cow carcasses—out of Mutt's fur. He uses something called "bluing", and uses so much he does dye Mutt blue.
 * In Robert Service's poem The Baldness of Chewed-Ear, Chewed-Ear Jenkins wagers $1,000 that his wife can't cure his baldness. The wife tries every hair tonic she can find, even selling stock to Chewed-Ear's friends so they'll try their own ideas on him. When their combined ministrations start to work, Chewed-Ear tries to cheat them by shaving and applying hair-destroying drugs to his scalp when they're not looking. The unholy combination of hair restorers and hair destroyers eventually makes the hair come in - green.

Live Action TV

 * In the last episode of The Brady Bunch, Greg buys some hair tonic from Bobby out of pity, and it turns his hair orange. Greg wasn't trying to colour his hair; it just worked that way.
 * In The Suite Life of Zack and Cody/Hannah Montana/Wizards of Waverly Place, Miley tries to dye her hair blond and it ends up green.
 * Cody also tries to dye his hair and it ends up bright red.
 * Emma of H₂O: Just Add Water decided to colour her hair and Cleo used a dye called "Scarlet Fever". Luckily for Emma it only showed up in her mermaid form.
 * This got blended with a Green Aesop, of all things, in an episode of Different Strokes. Kimberly tried washing/rinsing her hair with rainwater caught in a copper bowl. However, it was acid rain, which reacted with the metal and left a layer of green (corroded) copper on her hair...
 * An episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show was describing how she was involved in harmless pranks. One of the pranks had clients of a hair salon watch a teaser showing people using a shampoo/conditioner caused people's hair to turn out green. It was the same shampoo used in the hair salon.

Newspaper Comics

 * Liz from For Better or For Worse goes for a dye job, and apparently ends up with her hair bright purple.

Theatre

 * Frenchie in Grease accidentally dyeing her hair bubblegum pink is what leads into the song Beauty School Dropout.

Web Comics

 * Referenced at one point in Questionable Content. Raven tries to bleach her hair blond to appeal to Sven, but instead it comes out "all orangey and gross", so she has to settle for dyeing it neon-pink.

Western Animation

 * Doubly subverted in Pepper Ann. Her hair turned out green when she tried dyeing it blue.
 * Actually she mixed blonde hair dye with blue to purposefully make it green and be known as the green haired girl.
 * One House of Mouse short was actually about Minnie Mouse accidentally dyeing Pluto's fur purple after mistaking a bottle of purple dye for shampoo. She then tries to find ways to get the purple dye off, including painting the dog with a can of "Pluto-colored Paint" (which is the same shade of orange as Pluto's fur).
 * Happened to Lou in Rugrats. The main plot dealt with Chuckie getting tired of getting attention from his red hair, so he used Lou's black hair dye. By the end of the episode, exposure to the sun turns both their hair orange. While Chuckie is thrilled to be a redhead again, Grandpa is less than happy. Didi chalks it up to buying hair dye off of an informational.
 * On Daria, Jane wants to dye her black hair with orange tiger stripes and essentially forces Daria into helping. It comes out looking terrible, and Jane blames Daria, only to later realize that this wasn't really fair and she was sublimating her anger about something else.

Real Life

 * In a show of Truth in Television, this also happened to actress Emma Roberts when her hair was supposed to be dyed blonde for her role in It's Kind of a Funny Story.
 * Chilean writer Isabel Allende told in one of her memoirs that when she was young she tried to bleach her hair blond, but for some reason she ended with green hair. Rosa, one of the characters in The House of the Spirits, was inspired by that experience.
 * Sometimes, recently dyed hair has an... interesting reaction to the chemicals in swimming pools causing discoloration.
 * Cheaper men's hair regeneration topics used to do this.
 * This is the origin of the Elderly Blue Haired Lady. You see, some people's hair turns an ugly yellow color instead of white or gray when they age. In the 70s, salons would typically treat this with a little bit of blue dye to counteract the yellow, but since different people's hair absorbs pigment at different rates, some people wind up with bright blue hair.