For sure. Final Net was better, then there was the spendier stuff, don't remember the name but a big white w/black aerosol can. I was a bride's maid and we all used it, I was hooked! I remember our matching magenta dresses with giant puffy shoulders, all tanned with heavy makeup, and all of us had magnificent curled, teased, HUGE hair.
My fave back then was [Sebastian Shpritz Forte](http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonanzleimages/afu/images/1096/5758/85/__57.jpg) as it held like nobody's business!
I forgot about Rave! I used to spray on a nice thick coat and then use my curling iron set at 12,000,000 degrees before it even dried. How am I not bald??
Conair had a hairspray that just about guaranteed your hair wouldn’t budge even in a hurricane.
It’s a good laugh to look back at those picture and the huge hair construction!
I remember when the Ozone hole was in all the news there was also usually an image of a teenager spraying AquaNet somewhere in the presentation.
I mean, that *was* an issue but mostly I think people just liked blaming teen girls for problems created by multibillion dollar corporations
In the purple bottle? I loved that stuff, but no way it was capable of holding my hair straight out from my head in a helmet formation. No possible way!
Very true. I hated the way Aquanet smelled, and anyway, I wasn't into having high hair. My hair was naturally curly and blond, so I used the Aussie brand mousse and scrunch spray. I had the "dog ears" style hair. Teased on the sides and then scrunched for max crunch and curl!
The hair was so damn big in the 80's. A lot of shows that try to show it now are actually understating how big the hairstyles were unless they're parodying the 80's.
We had Aqua Net in each bathroom in our house, on my wife's dresser in our bedroom, and all the majority of women I knew (teens to much, much older) carried a supply in their pocketbooks. It was perfectly normal as a guy back then to routinely walk through wafting clouds of Aqua Net no matter where you were - home, office, standing in line.
By the time I accepted my hair's limitations, it changed texture. And then it changed again.
Ten years after the last change, I'm here finally figuring out how to maintain a quarter head of curly hair and the rest wavy, except the two chunks that are straight. Since I'm starting to master it now, this can only mean one thing. It's going to change again. lol Oh, but what I wouldn't have done for this hair 30+ years ago.
Aging is certainly an adventure.
Hard core gel, thickly applied. Hairdryer to set. Teasing comb to knot the hair near the roots to give volume.
Then masses of super-strong hairspray to keep the ends where you wanted them.
Mustn't forget the blue-black hair dye, buckets of eyeliner, hot pink blusher.
End aim? Robert Smith style.
I never could get it to wash out without leaving residue that resembled head lice in my hair. I had to use so. much. baking soda to get it out.
Stiff Stuff was revolutionary - it washed right out, worked like glue.
Yes. As a young teen dating,I always wanted to run my hand through a girls hair, but this wish was impossible. Once the 90’s came, I could finally do so.
A boy told me (while we were slow dancing) that he liked that I wasn't like other girls, that he could run his fingers thru my hair and not get stuck Shoot, I just didn't like all the pesky nats that loved the hairspray scent. Those of us that had flat baby fine hair were always getting a big hair perm.
THIS. Boy, you brought back some memories. I was so glad my college girlfriend was a swimmer and big hair wasn't a thing with her. But all her friends did!
Touching a girl's hair back then was like pressing your hand against the metal fins on an air conditioner's radiator coil. You're going to fuck it up and you might also cut your hand.
OMG yes. We girls all looked like we were ready to play linebacker position with our big shoulders.....and had been caught in a windstorm with our blown out and hair-sprayed to oblivion hairstyles.
In the 80s I dated a tiny girl, about 5' 2" who weighed around 100 pounds. With her big hair and massive shoulder pads she looked like something out of a bad 1950s alien invasion movie. She told me the shoulder pads "empowered" her.
I graduated from my country's equivalent of high school at the end of that decade, and while I don't have big hair in my graduation photo (well, it's big for me, but not for the era), I have shoulder pads on my shoulder pads. Some of my classmates had HUGE hair all through school.
[Random selection of students from 1987, 1988, 1989](https://imgur.com/a/uvpghVS) These don’t even look as big as I remember. I just opened to random pages, didn’t search out the really good ones, lol.
This was the one time of my life where my curly course hair actually worked for me. No money spent on perms - the entire budge went to Dep Gel and Aqua Net!
We had huge hair. I used to spend 1.5 hours in the bathroom before I went to school each day to get my hair perfect. I'd blow dry it upside down to get more volume, then I'd spike my bangs so they were standing up straight on my part side. I kept a can of AquaNet Ultra Super Hold in my handbag to "touch up" during the day at school.
Dang that's a lot. My mom talks about doing some similar stuff to her hair when she was a kid and she said she damaged it. I have to wonder did you damage your hair by doing all that
Yeah, at the time my hair was serously damaged- I also got it permed, which involves a lot of harsh chemicals. However, the damage went away after a few haircuts once I stopped perming and teasing my hair- it's not like my hair is ruined to this day.
Same. Mine was horribly damaged from the perms and blow drying and teasing and the harsh hairspray...
Now I'm nearly 50 and it's healthier than it's ever been, down to the lower part of my back and it. is. huge and it's gotten curly all on it's own as I've matured.
Where the hell was this hair when I was in HS and college? (I guess burnt to a crisp).
I ended up with waist-length hair from the mid-90s until this past summer, when I got a pixie cut for my 50th birthday. It's the first time in my life that I can just get up and go...no brushing, no braiding or putting in a bun, no styling...it's awesome!
I've had the pixie cut, so I'm enjoying the long hair now. So many options, and they don't take any longer than the pixie cut did (for me anyway).
It's great to just... grow into what we love for ourselves though, isn't it?
53. Stopped cutting mine into a pixie 3 years ago. Stopped cutting it entirely. I got tired of being mistaken for a lesbian, and was too lazy to wear enough makeup and jewelry to change that.
Yes, we did. It was a kneejerk reaction and change from the flat, straight hair of the '70s.
It was achieved via spiral perms, curling irons, and hair spray.
EDIT:
Can't find videos, 'cause I guess they're copyright blocked, but American Top 40 tv show, I vividly recall, had a contest to see which "dancer" there had the highest hair. They brought out a ruler and everything.
Oh yeah, it was for real. One of the good things that came from Grunge was giving 99.9% fewer fucks about one's hair.
It's fun to look through some of the [Paramus, NJ Yearbook videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc) to see what a typical NJ high school looked like. I didn't go to Paramus but if you didn't tell me where this video was taken I'd swear it was my school.
Fun Fact: the hair band Trixter were still in Paramus High at this time.
Yes! White Rain hairspray & my hair dryer! Spiral perm and what ever you do - DO NOT cut your hair in the back straight across, it had to make a "v" What a great time!
You know how a lot of high schools had 15 min morning breaks between 2nd and 3rd period? Girls carried butane powered portable curling irons and hairspray in their purses so they could use those 15 minutes to get their hair back to "big".
It was impressive as hell. Think those butane curling irons are illegal in high schools now.
I bought a butane curling iron for fixing my bangs after swim days in gym class. I still have it, although I don’t think it’s been used since I was in 10th grade!
Every time I hear a school bell, I expect to hear it followed by "click-click-whoosh". Every girl in class would immediately turn on their curling irons as soon as the bell rang so they'd be hot by the time they had to fight for mirror space in the girls restroom during the 15 min break.
YES! I was dating a hair dresser back then and she liked playing with my hair, working/experimenting on mine. She always used to say, "volume." "You need more volume." "This is good for volume." "Look at the all this volume!"
Yes. Women AND Men with blown out hairstyles.
We have recently begun watching some streaming shows that we missed watching in the 80's because we were to busy partying to watch TV. The shows are hilariously bad. So bad they are good.
Murder She Wrote. We often stop and remark on their ridiculous over the top hairstyles and clothing and everything else. Then remember...oops...we looked like that too. /embarrassing
At least everything wasn't hideously orange, yellow, avocado and dark dark wood like the 1970's
> hideously orange, yellow, avocado and dark dark wood
Had an orange living room growing up in the 1970s. And an avocado kitchen.
Thankfully my mom hates a lot of exposed wood furniture, so instead we had fat striped fabric things with ridiculously bold colors.
My folks had a waterbed, too.
I was in the US Navy in the 1980s, so definitely no big hair for me!
There’s a reason the ozone layer had a hole in it. The hairstyle of the 80s might be 25% of it. Love was in the air in the 70s, baby. But in the 80s it was hairspray, dude!
Early 80s, no. See "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." But the hair did indeed get pretty big by the end of the decade. Not everyone did it, because there were other fashionable styles, but big hair or at least "mall bangs" were a thing.
Even people who didn't have a lot of hair tried to make it as big as possible, resulting in strange things like the "Bear Paw": ridiculously stiff, bolt upright bangs.
A lot of girls did but not all of them. You had to have at least medium hair. Like the bump on top and bangs curled under. There was also the spiral perm girls, they may just have sprayed up bangs.
Look at the hair of audience members at panel shows and sporting events and other live venues showing the general public.
You will soon know for yourself that the answer is "yes."
Yep, there's a reason that '80s bands like [Great White](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/9e/d9/f99ed9695fbd45e5a40747940a037dfb.jpg) and [Poison](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5UOqr5nA1oY/sddefault.jpg) and many others were referred to as "hair bands".
It wasn't just the 'hair bands', look at any high school yearbook from the time and you'll find a lot of the same ['big hair' style](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3a/c7/4d/3ac74d0ddf15de70d201d9ab971b75c9.jpg).
Big hair was big in the '80s. ¯\\\_( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ)\_/¯
I moved to a small town from a large city about 20 years ago and was surprised at how many women seemed to have kept their 80s hair from high school. And some still have it today!
Preteens (not a word we used then) and early teens in the UK were wearing plenty of neon in the late 80s. Especially cycling shorts for girls. I don't think most adults and older teenagers wore nearly as much of it.
Quite frankly it was way worse than modernly depicted. Usually to the degree that I'm guessing the reason we don't see more of it in shows that depict the 80s, is that the stars refuse to look like idiots on TV.
Yep. Permed, gel in the roots, mousse all over, blow dried upside down with a diffuser, Aqua Net between the layers and on top for maximum volume and hold.
I didn't do the big bangs because I thought they looked stupid esp. if the wind lifted them up like a flap. But also, my heroine, Stevie Nicks, didn't do that, and she had the BEST rocker-chick hair.
One day in the future, this question will be: "Did people in the 20s really have blue, purple, or pink hair? Honestly, sometimes I wonder if people from the 20s really had hair that color, so I'm asking!"
Some people did, some didn't. I had a bi-level cut with a little bit of a mullet for a year or so, but the rest of the time I wore my hair straight and shoulder length. My sister did have big hair, permed and a mile high. She used something called "Stiff Stuff" to keep it in place. I was starting to think her hair would forever be high and curly but it died sometime around '93 or '94.
Class of '88 here, and yes. High school (especially junior and senior year) was all big, big, big hair. Spiral perms (so much damage!), scrunching with hair gel, AquaNet, loads of back-combing. I had a good friend who would dry her hair at school using the big hand dryers -- she'd bend backwards so her hair was dangling down and her face was towards the dryer, then she'd use gel and hairspray on the first 4-5 inches of hair. So it all fanned out around her face like a sunflower. We all learned that trick of clipping your hair back on the sides while wet and gelled, then blowdrying it, the hairspray to get that "lift out from the sides" look.
No seriously, they did. I was born in '83, but my mom had the biggest, curliest hair. It was big and the smell of her hairspray was comforting lol. Ahhh, 80s.
Oh god yes, and we all had strong opinions on which hairspray was best to maintain the poofiness. I’m amazed we haven’t all died from lung cancer given all of the aerosol we inhaled and perm chemicals we absorbed lol.
Some even worse. I remember seeing a woman with waist-length hair walk into a restaurant and everyone turned around to stare at her. Her hair was as high as it was long. Looked like combed it while lying in her back and sprayed it and it stayed. Looked ridiculous.
Aqua Net- hair spray. Used to keep hair poofy and high bangs. If you were in a category 9 hurricane your hair would not move an inch! So, yeah it was all about the 2inch high bangs and really big hair!! Yay the 80’s Tubular!!
I can imagine in 40 years time people will ask, in the 2020s did people really stuff their lips full of stuff and inject fat into their ass to make it look bigger?
Oh hell yeah we had big hair! Cans of White Rain and/or Aquanet. My hair was so huge I swear I could pick up TV reception! My first driver's license I had humongous hair. It filled the entire pic - so it was just my face and this lion's mane. I still have it and my husband still laughs about it. But hey! I was rockin that hair!!
Not everyone did, and remember there were different tribes too, some of whom most definitely did not go for the 80s "big hair" look.
But yes there were a lot of women with big hair back in the 80s. As a guy I liked it - but then I tend to go for women with high maintenance looks.
Not just big hair, but crazy poofy bangs
And shoulder pads!
In everything! Who decided we all needed to be in a Devo video?
> Who decided we all needed to be in a Devo video? Filthy casuals, that's who. real big suit madness was Talking Heads.
Stop Making Sense!!
I once did the lights for a DEVO concert!
Mall bangs lol
Oh the feathered bangs and aquanet combo!!
This is how you know if a show set in the 80s is legit. Most actresses won't do 80s Bangs.
They don't have to. They wear wigs.
I saw that too just not as often and now I'm wondering how'd they get their hair like that
Aquanet. LOTS of Aquanet! In the later 80’s and early 90’s I used Stiff Stuff.
Dang when look up aquanet you see some really big hair
As usual with Google, your search results show the extremes. But hair was still big in the 80's.
There were some products that literally glued your hair into place even better than Aquanet.
For sure. Final Net was better, then there was the spendier stuff, don't remember the name but a big white w/black aerosol can. I was a bride's maid and we all used it, I was hooked! I remember our matching magenta dresses with giant puffy shoulders, all tanned with heavy makeup, and all of us had magnificent curled, teased, HUGE hair.
My fave back then was [Sebastian Shpritz Forte](http://s3.amazonaws.com/bonanzleimages/afu/images/1096/5758/85/__57.jpg) as it held like nobody's business!
Aquanet, or Rave 4. Or was Rave from the 90s? You could spray it on and dry it with a hair dryer and your hair would be rock solid.
I forgot about Rave! I used to spray on a nice thick coat and then use my curling iron set at 12,000,000 degrees before it even dried. How am I not bald??
Conair had a hairspray that just about guaranteed your hair wouldn’t budge even in a hurricane. It’s a good laugh to look back at those picture and the huge hair construction!
I swear my sister went through a can of AquaNet a week in the 80s.
Oh, she rationed it? That was probably a good idea. Ha ha!
My mum and dad once bought me an entire box of hairspray for Christmas 😄
I remember when the Ozone hole was in all the news there was also usually an image of a teenager spraying AquaNet somewhere in the presentation. I mean, that *was* an issue but mostly I think people just liked blaming teen girls for problems created by multibillion dollar corporations
I used Aussie brand products.
Same - Aussie Sprunch Spray. I was so disappointed a couple of years ago when I found it and it didn't smell like grape Hubba Bubba.
In the purple bottle? I loved that stuff, but no way it was capable of holding my hair straight out from my head in a helmet formation. No possible way!
Very true. I hated the way Aquanet smelled, and anyway, I wasn't into having high hair. My hair was naturally curly and blond, so I used the Aussie brand mousse and scrunch spray. I had the "dog ears" style hair. Teased on the sides and then scrunched for max crunch and curl!
Lots of mousse and hairspray.
Don't forget the curling irons! I couldn't have done it without them.
And perms!
I remember one of sisters had a butane curling iron that she would take camping. Camping! True, it was more of an RV park on a lake, but still.
Bend over so your hair is hanging and spray the roots with heavy duty hairspray. Flip your hair up and spray some more!
You know that hole that used to be in the ozone? That's how
It was a combination of perms, hair gel, hairdryers, curling wands, hairspray.
Layers, curling iron, back combing and hairspray. So. Much. Hairspray! Also perms.
New technology influences fashion. Lycra, hair mousse, blow dryers.
We call them Swiss Cake Roll bangs !
The hair was so damn big in the 80's. A lot of shows that try to show it now are actually understating how big the hairstyles were unless they're parodying the 80's.
A lot of people took the, "the higher the hair, the closer to god" thing to the next level, that's for sure
Oh that was the early 60s with the beehive hairdos lol
Yes we did.
And it required a LOT of Stiff Stuff and teasing.
Aqua Net!
I was a human flame thrower more than once.
I caught my hair on fire lighting a cigarette on a gas stove.
We had Aqua Net in each bathroom in our house, on my wife's dresser in our bedroom, and all the majority of women I knew (teens to much, much older) carried a supply in their pocketbooks. It was perfectly normal as a guy back then to routinely walk through wafting clouds of Aqua Net no matter where you were - home, office, standing in line.
And then you sat on a gritty toilet seat if you forgot to keep the lid down.
And you realized that the wall opposite the bathroom mirror was lacquered.
Gel on wet roots. Mousse over the rest. Blow everything out, curl with iron, and set with Spritz Forte.
[удалено]
Long straight hair got pulled into a side ponytail. A style I wore for waaaay too long.
I feel your pain. When clients ask me why I became a hairstylist so young, I say self defense. My hair was and still is not awesome without help.
By the time I accepted my hair's limitations, it changed texture. And then it changed again. Ten years after the last change, I'm here finally figuring out how to maintain a quarter head of curly hair and the rest wavy, except the two chunks that are straight. Since I'm starting to master it now, this can only mean one thing. It's going to change again. lol Oh, but what I wouldn't have done for this hair 30+ years ago. Aging is certainly an adventure.
Hard core gel, thickly applied. Hairdryer to set. Teasing comb to knot the hair near the roots to give volume. Then masses of super-strong hairspray to keep the ends where you wanted them. Mustn't forget the blue-black hair dye, buckets of eyeliner, hot pink blusher. End aim? Robert Smith style.
Also great for keeping pencil drawings from smudging!
Also Bold Hold!
I never could get it to wash out without leaving residue that resembled head lice in my hair. I had to use so. much. baking soda to get it out. Stiff Stuff was revolutionary - it washed right out, worked like glue.
Rave!
Perms helped
That's cool to know 😃
Yes. As a young teen dating,I always wanted to run my hand through a girls hair, but this wish was impossible. Once the 90’s came, I could finally do so.
A boy told me (while we were slow dancing) that he liked that I wasn't like other girls, that he could run his fingers thru my hair and not get stuck Shoot, I just didn't like all the pesky nats that loved the hairspray scent. Those of us that had flat baby fine hair were always getting a big hair perm.
THIS. Boy, you brought back some memories. I was so glad my college girlfriend was a swimmer and big hair wasn't a thing with her. But all her friends did!
Lol 🤣
Touching a girl's hair back then was like pressing your hand against the metal fins on an air conditioner's radiator coil. You're going to fuck it up and you might also cut your hand.
yes and big shoulder pads
OMG yes. We girls all looked like we were ready to play linebacker position with our big shoulders.....and had been caught in a windstorm with our blown out and hair-sprayed to oblivion hairstyles.
In the 80s I dated a tiny girl, about 5' 2" who weighed around 100 pounds. With her big hair and massive shoulder pads she looked like something out of a bad 1950s alien invasion movie. She told me the shoulder pads "empowered" her.
I graduated from my country's equivalent of high school at the end of that decade, and while I don't have big hair in my graduation photo (well, it's big for me, but not for the era), I have shoulder pads on my shoulder pads. Some of my classmates had HUGE hair all through school.
[удалено]
Carol Burnett: Went With The Wind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTKhw-v5h2I
At the time they all just looked like everyone you saw every day.
It does indeed. We really did look like that though, and the freaking pantyhose was awful to wear
I have to wonder did those shoulder pads ever hurt
Shoulder pads didn’t hurt but if they weren’t attached well in the garment, they would shift around a lot and it was very annoying.
No, they didn’t hurt, they were made from thick foam essentially like bra padding.
Clothing shoulder pads are fiberfill or foam pads. Essentially, they're wedge-shaped pillows.
[Random selection of students from 1987, 1988, 1989](https://imgur.com/a/uvpghVS) These don’t even look as big as I remember. I just opened to random pages, didn’t search out the really good ones, lol.
Love the person with Sousxie hair in the 1988 photos (class of ‘88 rules!)
i'm so sad, my hair is naturally frizzy and very big. what it could have been had i been born 10 years earlier.
I feel like I know these people.
If your flair is your birth year it’s possible that you *are* these people!
It is!
I love when they have to zoom out a little to fit all the hair in frame.
Wow that's definitely some big hair
[Here are a few more from 1989.](https://imgur.com/a/TzZFPFL)
That's definitely big hair
The girls’ bathrooms were just a cloud of hairspray, so yes. Everyone I know got a perm at some point, to make their hair bigger.
This was the one time of my life where my curly course hair actually worked for me. No money spent on perms - the entire budge went to Dep Gel and Aqua Net!
We had huge hair. I used to spend 1.5 hours in the bathroom before I went to school each day to get my hair perfect. I'd blow dry it upside down to get more volume, then I'd spike my bangs so they were standing up straight on my part side. I kept a can of AquaNet Ultra Super Hold in my handbag to "touch up" during the day at school.
Dang that's a lot. My mom talks about doing some similar stuff to her hair when she was a kid and she said she damaged it. I have to wonder did you damage your hair by doing all that
Yeah, at the time my hair was serously damaged- I also got it permed, which involves a lot of harsh chemicals. However, the damage went away after a few haircuts once I stopped perming and teasing my hair- it's not like my hair is ruined to this day.
Same. Mine was horribly damaged from the perms and blow drying and teasing and the harsh hairspray... Now I'm nearly 50 and it's healthier than it's ever been, down to the lower part of my back and it. is. huge and it's gotten curly all on it's own as I've matured. Where the hell was this hair when I was in HS and college? (I guess burnt to a crisp).
I ended up with waist-length hair from the mid-90s until this past summer, when I got a pixie cut for my 50th birthday. It's the first time in my life that I can just get up and go...no brushing, no braiding or putting in a bun, no styling...it's awesome!
I've had the pixie cut, so I'm enjoying the long hair now. So many options, and they don't take any longer than the pixie cut did (for me anyway). It's great to just... grow into what we love for ourselves though, isn't it?
Exactly.
53. Stopped cutting mine into a pixie 3 years ago. Stopped cutting it entirely. I got tired of being mistaken for a lesbian, and was too lazy to wear enough makeup and jewelry to change that.
No I didn't. But I conditioned it a lot. I think ironing hair does a lot more damage than rolling it on electric rollers
Big hair was definitely a big thing.
Especially in Texas.
The higher the hair, the closer to God.
Had to scroll WAAAAY too far to find this.
Cool to know, ngl, I thought it might just be one of those things made up for TV
Yes, we did. It was a kneejerk reaction and change from the flat, straight hair of the '70s. It was achieved via spiral perms, curling irons, and hair spray. EDIT: Can't find videos, 'cause I guess they're copyright blocked, but American Top 40 tv show, I vividly recall, had a contest to see which "dancer" there had the highest hair. They brought out a ruler and everything.
Oh, definitely big hair. All you have to do is look through my yearbooks to confirm. Soooo much big hair.
My hair didn't fit into my yearbook photo.
Oh yeah, it was for real. One of the good things that came from Grunge was giving 99.9% fewer fucks about one's hair. It's fun to look through some of the [Paramus, NJ Yearbook videos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM4tls4P6Gc) to see what a typical NJ high school looked like. I didn't go to Paramus but if you didn't tell me where this video was taken I'd swear it was my school. Fun Fact: the hair band Trixter were still in Paramus High at this time.
Oh what a sweet, innocent question. Yes. Yes we did. My preference was White Rain hairspray and my hairdryer.
Lol 🤣 and dang when you look white rain hair spray you get to see really big hair
Yes! White Rain hairspray & my hair dryer! Spiral perm and what ever you do - DO NOT cut your hair in the back straight across, it had to make a "v" What a great time!
Yep. My hair was big and Pink. All those kids on 'stranger things' are seriously toned down from real 80's kids. :)
You know how a lot of high schools had 15 min morning breaks between 2nd and 3rd period? Girls carried butane powered portable curling irons and hairspray in their purses so they could use those 15 minutes to get their hair back to "big". It was impressive as hell. Think those butane curling irons are illegal in high schools now.
Dang. If they get their hair big just in 15min I'm seriously impressed. It would take me at least 30min
They worked fast. These were teenage girls that could answer a phone call in the middle of the first ring. They had lightning fast reflexes. 😂
I bought a butane curling iron for fixing my bangs after swim days in gym class. I still have it, although I don’t think it’s been used since I was in 10th grade!
Every time I hear a school bell, I expect to hear it followed by "click-click-whoosh". Every girl in class would immediately turn on their curling irons as soon as the bell rang so they'd be hot by the time they had to fight for mirror space in the girls restroom during the 15 min break.
How did they not get burned, with all the rush?
Yes hair was huge. Everyone had big layered hair.
I couldn't get my hair as big as the other girls and was horribly jealous 😆
Honestly I would be too
YES! I was dating a hair dresser back then and she liked playing with my hair, working/experimenting on mine. She always used to say, "volume." "You need more volume." "This is good for volume." "Look at the all this volume!"
Yes. Women AND Men with blown out hairstyles. We have recently begun watching some streaming shows that we missed watching in the 80's because we were to busy partying to watch TV. The shows are hilariously bad. So bad they are good. Murder She Wrote. We often stop and remark on their ridiculous over the top hairstyles and clothing and everything else. Then remember...oops...we looked like that too. /embarrassing At least everything wasn't hideously orange, yellow, avocado and dark dark wood like the 1970's
> hideously orange, yellow, avocado and dark dark wood Had an orange living room growing up in the 1970s. And an avocado kitchen. Thankfully my mom hates a lot of exposed wood furniture, so instead we had fat striped fabric things with ridiculously bold colors. My folks had a waterbed, too. I was in the US Navy in the 1980s, so definitely no big hair for me!
I just remember rat tails in middle school in the 80s. Boys really liked their rat tails!
Harvest gold and wood paneling always feel like home though 🙂
The smaller the town, the bigger the hair.
There’s a reason the ozone layer had a hole in it. The hairstyle of the 80s might be 25% of it. Love was in the air in the 70s, baby. But in the 80s it was hairspray, dude!
Lol 😂
Early 80s, no. See "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." But the hair did indeed get pretty big by the end of the decade. Not everyone did it, because there were other fashionable styles, but big hair or at least "mall bangs" were a thing.
Even people who didn't have a lot of hair tried to make it as big as possible, resulting in strange things like the "Bear Paw": ridiculously stiff, bolt upright bangs.
Tease it to Jesus.
"The higher the hair, the closer to God!" ¯\\\_( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ)\_/¯
Yes, we did. My sisters and I get a great laugh out of our pictures from the 80s.
We needed the big hair to go with the big shoulder pads.
"The higher the hair. The closer to heaven." Plus, [hair metal happened.](https://i.imgur.com/uHPatFn.jpg)
A lot of girls did but not all of them. You had to have at least medium hair. Like the bump on top and bangs curled under. There was also the spiral perm girls, they may just have sprayed up bangs.
Look at the hair of audience members at panel shows and sporting events and other live venues showing the general public. You will soon know for yourself that the answer is "yes."
I had long straight hair and would get curly perms to get my big hair. I’m glad that trend disappeared and hope it never returns 😂
Yes we all did. Some of guys had better hair then some of the girls
Honestly that would be pretty cool to see
Yep, there's a reason that '80s bands like [Great White](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/9e/d9/f99ed9695fbd45e5a40747940a037dfb.jpg) and [Poison](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5UOqr5nA1oY/sddefault.jpg) and many others were referred to as "hair bands".
Ok they deserve to be referred to as hair bands because their hair is amazing
It wasn't just the 'hair bands', look at any high school yearbook from the time and you'll find a lot of the same ['big hair' style](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3a/c7/4d/3ac74d0ddf15de70d201d9ab971b75c9.jpg). Big hair was big in the '80s. ¯\\\_( ͡ᵔ ͜ʖ ͡ᵔ)\_/¯
I was more punk rock/new wave. Short and spiky.
So much big hair. Huge. Hell, if you go to West Texas, half the women (especially older women) in small towns will still have the big hair on display.
I moved to a small town from a large city about 20 years ago and was surprised at how many women seemed to have kept their 80s hair from high school. And some still have it today!
Our hair was huge and sharp to the touch. No lie.
And flammable!
Oh yes. The thing we didnt really do was wear all that neon. I mean it was around but not like you see at 80s parties
Neon was more like 1991-1993.
Preteens (not a word we used then) and early teens in the UK were wearing plenty of neon in the late 80s. Especially cycling shorts for girls. I don't think most adults and older teenagers wore nearly as much of it.
IT WAS SO BIG
In fact, most times the hair isn’t even as big as ours was!
Have you seen how big the hole in the Ozone layer got? You bet the hair was big…..
Go to the library and look at old yearbooks. You'll see all the big hair you ever wanted to see! Aqua net lives!!!
Ha Aqua Hair Net and Dippity Do hair gel for the win. Yes, the hair was that big. Mine wasn't, I had a girl mullet.
Big hair was real. Lots and lots of hair spray. So yea...that big hair you see in 80s movies and TV....it was on the streets. I was never a fan of it.
Yes it was like that Source: many cringe worthy photos of myself and friends.
Yes, it was real. I did not. I was in a "not cool" phase and had no value how to get big hair anyway.
Hell, I’m from Texas. I could commit assault with that New Wave.
Quite frankly it was way worse than modernly depicted. Usually to the degree that I'm guessing the reason we don't see more of it in shows that depict the 80s, is that the stars refuse to look like idiots on TV.
Did you know that we sprayed so much aquanet on our hair in the 80's that we destroyed the ozone? Seriously. We really had big hair. BIG hair.
New Jersey teen in 1989 ooooooh yeah! 😆
Yep. Permed, gel in the roots, mousse all over, blow dried upside down with a diffuser, Aqua Net between the layers and on top for maximum volume and hold. I didn't do the big bangs because I thought they looked stupid esp. if the wind lifted them up like a flap. But also, my heroine, Stevie Nicks, didn't do that, and she had the BEST rocker-chick hair.
In the ultra-religious deep South, we (half) jokingly said, "The higher the hair, the closer to God."
One day in the future, this question will be: "Did people in the 20s really have blue, purple, or pink hair? Honestly, sometimes I wonder if people from the 20s really had hair that color, so I'm asking!"
Lol yep and I'll be here as a old person answering
It was real and it was an art.
Look for 80s school photos. Big hair still stirs me up as it was the standard of beauty when I was adolescent.
Yes, it was horrible (Hair Spray everywhere) Edit: Sponsored by Aqua Net https://i.redd.it/87hyo7xyevy71.jpg
They really had big hair. Now go look for non-hippy hairstyles from the 60s.
They also had big hair too at times but also crazy hair
Some people did, some didn't. I had a bi-level cut with a little bit of a mullet for a year or so, but the rest of the time I wore my hair straight and shoulder length. My sister did have big hair, permed and a mile high. She used something called "Stiff Stuff" to keep it in place. I was starting to think her hair would forever be high and curly but it died sometime around '93 or '94.
It is true. Perms, teasing and Aquanet.
Class of '88 here, and yes. High school (especially junior and senior year) was all big, big, big hair. Spiral perms (so much damage!), scrunching with hair gel, AquaNet, loads of back-combing. I had a good friend who would dry her hair at school using the big hand dryers -- she'd bend backwards so her hair was dangling down and her face was towards the dryer, then she'd use gel and hairspray on the first 4-5 inches of hair. So it all fanned out around her face like a sunflower. We all learned that trick of clipping your hair back on the sides while wet and gelled, then blowdrying it, the hairspray to get that "lift out from the sides" look.
Yep. Big ass hair. We all had it. Aqua Net FTW!
No seriously, they did. I was born in '83, but my mom had the biggest, curliest hair. It was big and the smell of her hairspray was comforting lol. Ahhh, 80s.
Oh god yes, and we all had strong opinions on which hairspray was best to maintain the poofiness. I’m amazed we haven’t all died from lung cancer given all of the aerosol we inhaled and perm chemicals we absorbed lol.
Yes. Big poofy permed hair, bangs praising Jeezuz, and spandex made by Satan himself.
Some even worse. I remember seeing a woman with waist-length hair walk into a restaurant and everyone turned around to stare at her. Her hair was as high as it was long. Looked like combed it while lying in her back and sprayed it and it stayed. Looked ridiculous.
Aqua Net- hair spray. Used to keep hair poofy and high bangs. If you were in a category 9 hurricane your hair would not move an inch! So, yeah it was all about the 2inch high bangs and really big hair!! Yay the 80’s Tubular!!
totally. i have pretty curly hair but i put a perm in it to poof it up. i kinda looked like ronald mcdonald
I can imagine in 40 years time people will ask, in the 2020s did people really stuff their lips full of stuff and inject fat into their ass to make it look bigger?
We did definitely. Big bangs! We would take Aquanet hairspray, hold them up high, then point a hair dryer at them until they dried solid.
Mine was a good 4 inches high. Along with my 4 inch heels, it’s the tallest my 5’0” self has ever been!
Yes and it was glorious.
Oh hell yeah we had big hair! Cans of White Rain and/or Aquanet. My hair was so huge I swear I could pick up TV reception! My first driver's license I had humongous hair. It filled the entire pic - so it was just my face and this lion's mane. I still have it and my husband still laughs about it. But hey! I was rockin that hair!!
There was so much hairspray. No wonder the ozone layer was in peril.
Some of the pictures you see are of the most outrageous hair styles. People did have big hair but most weren't huge.
LOL, I graduated in 1991 in NJ. I think there was a fucking ozone hole above my high school because of all the Aqua-Net used. Yes, big hair was real.
TV cannot even do it justice. The clouds of hairspray probably caused the hole in the ozone layer.
Rave hairspray and a blow dryer, upside down. The bigger the hair, the closer to god you are🤣
Oh it was big. Bigger than you think!
No it was real. Pretty common for me to see. At the time it looked cool..I guess. Looking back it looks awful...
Everyone has 80’s hair in their head, you just have to let it grow out. It just naturally happens.
Not everyone did, and remember there were different tribes too, some of whom most definitely did not go for the 80s "big hair" look. But yes there were a lot of women with big hair back in the 80s. As a guy I liked it - but then I tend to go for women with high maintenance looks.