5 Hair Trends From the 1960s That Defined the Decade, From the Beehive to the Sassoon Cut

In the early 1960s, hair wasn’t just hair, it was a whole construction project. The bouffant and the beehive took over like they owned the decade, built with teasing, padding, and enough lacquer to make your bathroom smell like a 1950s science fair.

Picture the morning routine: backcombing the underside until it turns into a tangled, rounded puff, then smoothing the top layer like you’re sealing a masterpiece. Or go bigger, like the Chicago salon that kicked off the beehive, where the look could rise a foot above the crown, held together by aerosol spray and maintained with daily touch-ups. Even sleeping got weird, women literally wrapped their heads or slept sitting up to protect the shape.

Once Jacqueline Kennedy and the stage queens got involved, these styles stopped being “a look,” and started being a full-on deadline.

The Bouffant Defined Early 1960s Hair

The bouffant carried over from the late 1950s into the early 1960s and became the dominant look for the first half of the decade.

It's a teased, rounded, voluminous style achieved by backcombing the hair (also called ratting) to create tangled volume underneath, then smoothing the top layer over the resulting puff and locking everything in place with heavy lacquer spray. The shape sits high and full, usually rounded rather than coned. The technique took fifteen to forty minutes a morning depending on the wearer's skill.

Jacqueline Kennedy popularized the bouffant in the early 1960s after a Life magazine article promoted the "aristocratic" European look. Once the First Lady wore it, the rest of the country followed. Lady Bird Johnson kept the trend going through the mid-decade. Dusty Springfield, The Supremes, The Ronettes, The Shirelles, and Martha and the Vandellas all wore variations on stage.

The bouffant required new tools. Rollers (recently popularized) and aerosol hair spray (also new) made the look possible at scale. Without those two innovations, the entire trend wouldn't have existed.

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The Beehive Was the 1960s Hair Trend That Reached for the Ceiling

The beehive launched in 1960 from a single Chicago salon and went global within months. Hairstylist Margaret Vinci Heldt designed it after Modern Beauty Shop magazine challenged her to create a new look for the new decade, according to Click Americana.

Her inspiration was a small velvet fez hat she had been wearing. The resulting style was a tall, conical, beehive-shaped tower of teased hair that could rise a foot or more above the crown. Most women couldn't pull off a real beehive at home. The style needed:

• Hair padding or "rats" stuffed underneath for height
• A skilled hand at backcombing to create the cone
• Aerosol lacquer to hold the shape against gravity
• Touch-ups every 24 to 48 hours to maintain the structure

Many women slept sitting up or wrapped their heads in toilet paper at night to preserve the style for a few extra days. Some used frozen orange juice cans as oversized rollers. Audrey Hepburn wore a beehive in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Dusty Springfield wore one through most of the decade.

Brigitte Bardot took it French. The beehive declined in mass popularity by the mid-1960s. It never fully disappeared from the salon menu.

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The Flip Took Over Mid-1960s Hair

The flip was the friendlier, smaller, daytime alternative to the beehive. The hair was set in large rollers to create lift at the crown, then the ends were curled outward at chin or shoulder length to create the signature flick. The top retained some bouffant-style volume but at a much more wearable scale than a beehive. A simple headband often completed the look.

Marlo Thomas wore the flip as Ann Marie on That Girl from 1966 to 1971, and the show essentially turned the style into shorthand for "modern young woman." Mary Tyler Moore wore a tighter version on The Dick Van Dyke Show. By the late 1960s, the flip was reversed and curled inward at the ends to create what eventually became the modern shoulder-length bob.

The flip's lasting contribution wasn't the curl direction. It was the introduction of medium-volume daily styling that didn't require ratting the hair into a knotted mess. It bridged the gap between heavily structured early-60s hair and the looser styles that came later.

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Vidal Sassoon's Geometric Cut Broke 1960s Hair Conventions

In the mid-1960s, a single hairdresser changed what women's hair could look like. Vidal Sassoon, working in London, introduced sharp geometric cuts that relied on precision cutting rather than backcombing and lacquer.

The most famous was the Five-Point Cut, an angular asymmetric bob that emphasized the natural fall of the hair around the face and neck. There was no teasing involved. No padding. Almost no hair spray.

The look was rolled out on designers Mary Quant and Peggy Moffitt, both of whom were photographed extensively in fashion magazines wearing the style. The cut went mainstream within two years. Movie star Mia Farrow's famous 1968 pixie crop for Rosemary's Baby (cut by Sassoon for $5,000, reportedly) was part of the same revolution.

Sassoon's cuts required almost no daily maintenance. That was the radical part. Women could wash their hair, towel-dry it, and go to work. The style hung where it was supposed to hang because the cut was engineered for it.

For comparison, the daily commitment required to wear a 1980s styled hairstyle still felt extreme decades later. Sassoon set the template for low-maintenance women's cutting that the salon industry still uses.

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That’s how the bouffant went from late-50s carryover to early-60s obsession, right after Jacqueline Kennedy made the “aristocratic” vibe look effortless in print.

For a time warp that hits just as hard, check out these “80s photos” that instantly pull you into another era.

And once aerosol hair spray and rollers showed up, the whole thing stopped being a one-person stunt and became something every woman could attempt, even if it took 15 to 40 minutes.

Then the beehive burst in, inspired by a velvet fez, and suddenly hair had to be engineered, with rats underneath and a backcombing cone tall enough to challenge gravity.

By the time touch-ups every 24 to 48 hours and the toilet-paper-sleeping survival strategy became part of the routine, the decade’s hair trends were basically demanding a lifestyle.

Late 1960s Hair Trends Went Natural

By 1968, the cultural backlash against sculpted hair had become the new mainstream. Two parallel movements drove the shift. The hippie counterculture rejected formal styling completely.

Long, straight, center-parted hair (often left to air-dry) became the visual signature of the era. Cher, Joni Mitchell, Mary Travers, and millions of women who weren't famous all wore some version of it. The look pushed back against everything the bouffant had stood for.

At the same time, the Afro entered the cultural mainstream as part of the Black Pride movement. Angela Davis, Pam Grier, and members of the Black Panther Party wore Afros as a deliberate political statement against decades of hair-straightening pressure aimed at Black American women.

The style spread quickly through music, film, and activism, and stayed dominant in Black American hair through the 1970s. Both trends shared a refusal to hide the hair's natural texture under tools, products, or geometry. The hair was the statement.

By the time the 1970s started, the beehive looked dated, the bouffant looked dated, and even the Sassoon geometric cuts had started to soften into longer, looser shapes. The decade's hair had cycled from the most sculpted in living memory to the least, in under ten years.

Other decade-defining styles followed. The voluminous shapes of the 1980s brought back big hair, but the techniques changed and the maintenance was different. Looking back through centuries of styled hair photos, the 1960s still stand out as the one decade where a single tool (the aerosol can) reshaped what was physically possible on a human head.

By the end of the 1960s, nobody was just wearing hair, they were keeping a shape alive.

Want bouffant-level commitment? See 48 guys who ditched the barber for unforgettable hair.