I dye my hair “unnatural” colors really often, but my mom wants me to go black. She’s scared I’ll be penalized or misjudged because of my hair…
I know it’ll be difficult to find employment later in life, but I never thought colleges would really care what color my hair is. What do you think?
Colleges don’t care
Colleges won’t care. And your industry may or may not care depending on what it is. I’ve, personally, never worked for a company where it would be a problem.
By the time you are ready for a real job, you probably won’t care about your hair color.
Colleges won’t care, but some employers might. Hair color may have an impact on getting hired for internships in some industries.
Blue hair would be a problem in my job but my son took a blue-haired girl to junior prom and it was just fine. Most colleges won’t see your hair before you enroll unless you go for an interview and, in that case, it would probably not matter anyway. I do agree that it can be an issue after college, depending on the field you go into.
As long as you’re not doing an internship during college at a conservative institution, keep it and enjoy it until you graduate.
You never know the biases of the person who is recruiting.
Would you really want to go to a college where that’s an issue? If you’re the kind of person who likes to walk around with blue hair (I’ve done blue for a year and then green; so fun!) and you get DQ’ed from a college for it…good riddance.
The same, theoretically, could be said for employment.
If you interview I’d be sure your overall appearance is neat and clean and you should be fine (I’d say that for anyone regardless of hair color). If colored hair is important to you and any one school penalizes you for it (which is unlikely) then you probably don’t want to attend that school anyway.
The above posters are right: It will not even slightly matter in college. The job market, of course, is different…
This is true but… the OP should be aware that one’s appearance (unfortunately) WILL be an issue in some fields. If OP desires to eschew those, great. But if OP is interested in corporate law or finance or something like that, OP needs to weigh her decisions appropriately. But you’re already aware of this.
At this stage, your hair color won’t affect your getting into a college (unless it’s one of the Service Academies where you’d have to switch to a “natural” color).
Don’t apply to Liberty or Bob Jones, and you’ll be fine!
I think that it could negatively impact job/career applications well beyond those examples. If you have a “look at me” hair style or color, a lot of summer jobs in service and retail may pass you up, and a lot of professional positions may not put you at the top of their list. Maybe not fair, but reality. An employer may ask “Are you trying to stick out and attract attention to yourself and express yourself more than you are willing to work on our team?” I say this as someone who himself experimented with hair colors decades ago in college.
Colleges don’t care and it depends on the employer.
I highly doubt it matters in college. I know a few girls who came to college with blue/green hair, but then again I don’t know if they started doing that until after they got in. If you’re interviewing, I’d reconsider it just for that one day, but otherwise you’re fine.
To,the OP…if you are worried about this…just make your hair a regular color for college interviews…and then go back to the blue.
Another approach would be to embrace your hair color and write about it in the essay
Most colleges do not do interviews so would not know. If you are interested in colleges that require interviews, you have a decision to make. I agree that most admissions decisions are not based on hair color.
The adcoms who review your application for admission will have NO idea what color your hair is.