You Gotta Have Blue Hair/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


A list of literature with characters who have unusually colored hair.


  • In the fantasy novel Drink Down the Moon by Charles de Lint, one of the faerie women living among humans who is posing as a young punk musician has natural pink hair. Anyone who sees her (anyone who sees her and due to her glamour is led to think she is human, that is) assumes it's dyed.
  • In Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart, Alcuin's hair is white even as a young child. This is implied to make him unearthly beautiful.
  • Members of House Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire have platinum-colored hair. Aegon Targaryen invokes this trope and dyes his hair blue to avoid being recognized.
    • Tyroshi people tend to dye their hair to various unusual colors, most notably blue.
  • The novel Super Folks, one of the earliest deconstructions of the super hero genre, has a Superman Expy named Indigo as its main character. Since comic books always shaded Superman's black hair with blue highlights, Indigo actually does have blue hair. Thankfully, none of his Secret Identity's friends ever seem to notice.
  • The Twelve Kingdoms novels. The starting setting is a plausible, normal Japan, where people have the Japanese hair colors and such. Then, the main character, Youko Nakajima, has almost red hair and it's completely natural (although people accuse her of dying it red to bring attention to herself). Then, a platinum blond (almost white-haired) Japanese looking guy appears from nowhere and wants to take Youko to his world (making people assume he's a gangster and she's secretly his girlfriend). When she finally goes to this world, between all the suffering, she sees Japanese-looking people of all skintones and hair colors. All the colors in a rainbow. The anime shows it with beautiful detail, but not as impressively as it is the novel description. But taking in consideration that they are sorta like aliens...
  • In "God Bless The Rockstars", the main character, Zack, eventually comes to believe his wife Georgia's hair is actually pink, as he's never seen it any other colour. It turns out that her hair is naturally a reddy brown colour, like her true father's.
  • An actual, legally enforced law in Crest of the Stars. The Abh were created by genetic engineering and were all given blue hair as part of the process and they kept that when they became independent. The anime shows it as a fairly uniform colour with only a handful of exceptions, but the novels describe it as running gamut from very pale blues and blue-greens to dark blues and purples.
  • The people living in the Capitol in The Hunger Games are described as having not just weird-colored hair, but also dyed skin.
  • Subverted in Isaac Asimov's story My son, the physicist, where an elderly woman has hair dyed apple green, which is extremely old fashioned -- modern girls, apparently, have rainbows on their heads.
  • In the Harry Potter series, Nymphadora Tonks uses her Metamorphmagus abilities so that her hair is normally pink, except for the period in book 6 when she was too depressed for her ability to work.
    • Her son, Teddy, also uses Metamorphmagus abilities to change his hair color. As a baby, his hair is said to be turquoise.
  • In The Hobbit, Dwalin is introduced to Bilbo as having a blue beard.
  • Nihal and the others half-elves have blue hair.
  • Many versions of the "Bluebeard" story take the notorious lady-killer's name literally.
  • Lampshaded in Zenna Henderson's science fiction short story Crowning Glory, in which everyone except the heroine, Anna Mary, has extremely short hair dyed bright colors such as pink or blue. It turns out that untreated hair, such as Anna Mary has, is something aliens require, and, in return, they're willing to give the Earth medicine that eliminates many degenerative diseases.
  • In Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, Malcolm Hulke's novelisation of the Doctor Who serial "Colony in Space", it's mentioned in passing that a young woman had dyed her hair "dull blue, as was the fashion that month".
  • In The Dresden Files, Maeve, Lady of the Winter Court, has hair that is styled into dreadlocks, and each lock is dyed a different shade of cold green, purple, or blue.
  • The main characters in Caitlin R. Kiernan's novel Silk have unusual hair. Robin has green hair. Spyder has white dreads, and the other main character has cherry-red hair.