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Britney Spears has now disclosed the reason for her notorious hair cut 16 years ago.
The singer shaved her head in 2007, much to the amazement of her fans, who were left wondering if she was okay.
Between recovery stays, the Grammy winner came into Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, one night in 2007 and requested that her then-brunette hair be shaved.
Esther Tognozzi, the salon’s owner, refused, so Britney took matters into her own hands by grabbing a clipper and buzzcutting herself while paparazzi snapped images through the windows.
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back,” the pop star writes in her forthcoming memoir, “The Woman in Me,” according to an excerpt published by People magazine on Tuesday, October 17.
Britney, 41, notes that once her father, Jamie Spears, took control of her personal, medical and financial affairs in 2008, she no longer had a say in her day-to-day life.
“I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she shares. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”
The “Toxic” singer was spotted hitting a photographer’s car with an umbrella just days after chopping her hair.
Britney became a tabloid fixture when two events occurred while she was going through a divorce and custody fight with Kevin Federline.
However, after she was hospitalized on two involuntary psychiatric holds the following year, Jamie went to court and appointed himself as his daughter’s legal guardian.
“The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child,” Britney writes in her book, which hits stores on Oct. 24. “I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time,” she writes. “They wanted me to be wild onstage … and to be a robot the rest of the time.”
After Britney testified against her “abusive” conservatorship in open court in 2021, a Los Angeles judge suspended Jamie, now 71, before terminating the arrangement altogether.
