21-year-old Horatia’s father died in March 2024. “It was sudden and completely unexpected,” she recalls. “When it happened, I think my mind and body just shut down for months [...] I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience,” she says. “I had lost something foundational to who I was, especially as I was a teenager at the time.” It’s still hard, Horatia explains, to “accept that he won’t be there for the big moments” in her life: “the milestones, the things you instinctively imagine sharing with a parent.”

After her father’s death, Horatia’s sense of self was shaken to the core, and she felt in desperate need of a way to “reassert” her identity. Having grown up in a “conservative” family, where dabbling in “alternative” style felt off the table, she decided to shake up her appearance. “I had urges to just shave all my hair off,” she recalls. “But there was no way I would go through with that.”

In the end, she opted for layers and a fringe. Then, three months after her father’s passing, she got a Sacred Heart tattoo on her arm, modelled after a necklace he had given her shortly before his death. Since then she’s also gotten a small tattoo of Woodstock, the bright yellow canary from the Peanuts comics, as a tribute to her father’s love for music.

Horatia isn’t alone in changing up her appearance after experiencing grief. There’s an abundance of posts on TikTok and Reddit from people in mourning who have lopped off inches of their hair (the idea that ‘hair holds trauma’ is popular online), got inked, or else totally overhauled their style. There are myriad reasons why so many people feel compelled to make drastic changes to their looks: some no longer feel bothered to adhere to beauty standards when faced with brain-altering trauma, whereas others are keen to forge a new identity and symbolically mark a new era of their lives. Research affirms that “stressful life events” may trigger changes in appearance, and that “intentional changes to one’s physical appearance” can often act as an external expression of an internal sea change.

21-year-old Jacinta lost a family friend several weeks ago. She describes grief as a “very powerful emotion, as it makes you do things you might not conventionally consider”, adding that, like Horatia, she felt an urge to change up her looks after the loss. “Many people, when experiencing grief or extreme distress, go to change their hair,” she says. And so she dyed her hair from a soft brunette to jet black.

“There’s something so liberating about drastically changing your appearance,” she continues, explaining that she wanted to do something to signify her entering a new phase of life. “I didn’t want to look the same way I looked when I was going through so much anxiety and sadness,” she explains. “I wanted to step out of how I looked when I initially received the bad news, and almost step into a version of myself that can deal with things differently.”

This chimes with registered psychologist Dr Carolyne Keenan. “Grief can disrupt identity. When we lose someone important to us, we are not just losing the person, we are losing a version of ourselves in relation to them,” she explains. “That can feel disorientating and, at times, unbearable. Changing our appearance can become a visible marker of an internal shift – it can symbolise survival, reinvention or maybe the need to feel different in ourselves when everything already feels different around us.”

“Changing our appearance can become a visible marker of an internal shift – it can symbolise survival, reinvention or maybe the need to feel different in ourselves when everything already feels different around us”

A dramatic makeover can also be a way of reclaiming some agency in the face of grief, an experience which can floor us with a profound sense of powerlessness. “You can’t undo what has happened. You can’t negotiate with it,” Dr Keenan says. “Altering your hair, your clothes or your body can restore a small but meaningful sense of control. Even if we can't change anything about the loss we have experienced, being able to feel in control of something can feel stabilising.”

For some, an appearance change can also be a means of feeling closer to the person you’ve lost. For Horatia, getting a fringe was a way of harking back to her childhood – a period when her dad was still very much in her life. “It was the first time I’d had [a fringe] since I was five years old. I guess I was rekindling with my inner child in some way,” she says. More generally, she says, transforming her appearance was a way to prove to others – and maybe to herself – that she wasn't “lost or broken.”

Meera*, 27, lost her aunt in 2019. “The months after her passing really changed me,” she says. “Grief changes you, whether you like it or not.” A few months after her aunt’s death, she got a tattoo for the first time. “I know some people don’t think too much about tattoos, and just get stars or hearts or a smiley face or whatever, but I always thought if I got one it would have to be meaningful [...] But I could never think of something so meaningful that I’d want it on my body forever.”

She knew something in memory of her aunt would always hold meaning, and so a few months after her passing, she decided to get a small pair of angel wings on her upper back. “I know it sounds very cliché, but they’re deeply symbolic. People often get them when they have gone through grief, as a reminder that there’s a higher force or that the person you loved is still with you,” she says. She adds that the pain of getting the tattoo was therapeutic in its own way, too: “I felt alive again. It was a reminder that I was human and that it’s OK to feel pain.”

Is it possible that a big physical transformation could be a helpful way to process grief? It’s complicated, says Dr Keenan. She warns that if someone’s physical changes are “impulsive, driven by numbness, self-punishment or a desire to escape overwhelming feelings”, they may be in need of further support. But in other instances, a post-grief ‘makeover’ can be helpful. “Symbolic acts can help the brain make sense of loss, they can create a boundary between ‘before’ and ‘after’, which is an important part of integrating grief rather than being overwhelmed by it,” she says, adding that research suggests “people who find ways to construct personal meaning around their loss often adjust more adaptively over time.”

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to grief. “Some people change their appearance dramatically, others hold tightly to familiarity. Neither response is inherently healthier,” Dr Keenan says. There are as many ways of reckoning with loss as there are people on earth. For Horatia, Jacinta, and Meera, though, there was some solace to be found in changing up their appearance – and it’s a grieving ritual which has helped people for centuries. Native American Choctaw men and women traditionally shave, cut, or clip a lock of hair when a loved one passes away, for example, while wearing black to signify a period of mourning, which is a ritual that dates back to the Roman Empire. “Humans have always used physical change to mark transitions,” Dr Keenan surmises. “Modern expressions may look different – but the psychology behind it is ancient.”

*Name has been changed