Having unnatural hair in Japan: how people react

One of the things I was worried about before I came to Japan was how people would react to my bleached hair, and the blue dip dye I had at the time. I even seriously considered dying it back brown(!) In the end I decided that Japan should accept me for who I am, but I worried a lot about it, and I did my own share of frantic googling. There wasn't as much info around as I thought there'd be, so here I am with my two cents. Basically. the reaction from people has been mostly really positive, especially to the pink.

Firstly, I'm a white girl, and in a country that is 99% Japanese (and lots of that 1% is Korean or Chinese people) you're gonna get stared at if you're white. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but I don't think it's coming from a racist place and most of the time you can just ignore it. It is what it is. So even if I had my natural brown hair, I'd probably still get stared at. Honestly, I don't think there's much difference between being a blonde gaijin and a pink gaijin either. Because I'm not Japanese or Asian, it might make people more lenient towards unnatural hair - people expect foreigners to be different anyway. Sometimes, people also think that blonde/ white blonde is my natural colour anyway.

Having said that, I think having blonde hair might attract more male attention here- sometimes salarymen have come up and tried to talk to me, and I've been catcalled before (and someone called me barbie recently) I've also had a guy keep asking me to go to a bar with him... I'm definitely approached less when I have pink hair, because it's more scary >:) Saying that, it doesn't happen a lot at all. We're talking only a couple of times over a whole year. It's something I thought I'd mention but I don't want to make it a big deal because honestly, it's pretty rare.

I'm also a uni student so I don't have to worry about looking "professional". Like in any country, if you're working for a company or looking for a job then people's attitude against coloured hair might be stricter.

Overall, much like in the UK, most of the actual feedback I get is positive. I get a lot of shop staff and people commenting on it when it's pink: one of my teachers asked to touch it and was really excited when I had pink hair, and she has since said that my pink hair is her favourite. I also have had starbucks staff comment "ooh it's pink" "it's so pretty" type of comments, and I've even been asked to be a hair model a couple of times. Of course, it fit right in in Harajuku too ;)

I'm pretty shy to be honest, but I've had my hair pink, silver, blonde and even blue! If I can do it then so can you ;) In the end, if you wanna do coloured hair, and you aren't restricted by things like job hunting, parents etc. you should totally do it! Coloured hair team go <3

Check out the other posts in this mini-series: where you can buy unnatural hair dye in Japan // which Japanese hair care products I'd recommend


Edited to add: I did a part 2 of this post about how people reacted to my bleached blonde hair when I worked in Japan for a year

Thanks for reading! Do any of you guys have bleached or unnaturally coloured hair? How do the people around you react to it?

-Amy xoxo