The inevitable is finally happening. After close to a decade, HBO’s Game of Thrones is finally nearing its end and we will soon know who will end up sitting on the Iron Throne.
But until then, one of the biggest joys of being a fan is dissecting every little detail in trailers and cast interviews, looking for clues as to what will happen to the characters we love—and love to hate (hi, Cersei). But there may be some surprising hidden messages we’ve missed over the years in the ever-evolving hairstyles of Daenerys, Sansa, Cersei, and, yes, even Arya.
Whether you noticed or not, the hairstyles (like everything else on this show) were meticulously planned and thought out—right down to the shades. Kevin Alexander, GoT‘s lead stylist, told Deadline in 2011 that the colors corresponded to the houses of Baratheon, Lannister, Stark and Targaryen—with the Lannisters being more blond and the Starks tending toward red, for example. And during a 2013 (circa season three) interview with Fashionista, Alexander’s attention to detail was on full display.
The fandom has certainly had many beauty-based theories over the years. Like when one Reddit user posited that Dany was styling her hair in homage to her dead husband, Khal Drogo. Or last season when people freaked out that Sansa’s hair started to resemble early-season Cersei’s—everyone started wondering if that meant she was turning toward the dark side.
And then there’s the whole discussion around why Cersei’s hair is still short (after being chopped off during her imprisonment). Could it just be a style choice or does it mean something more as we head into the final season?
Here’s everything we know about the ladies of Westeros’ hair so far, and what fans have speculated their styles might mean.
Warning: This post contains Game of Thrones spoilers.
The last time Game of Thrones fans saw Cersei Lannister, she had—finally—crowned herself Queen and came face-to-face with her rival for the Iron Throne, Daenerys Targaryen, who asked her to join forces in an upcoming war against an undead army of White Walkers.
The meeting of Westeros’ two self-anointed queens was a pivotal moment in the series, and Cersei’s costume spoke volumes about the interaction’s implications for season eight. “As she meets Dany, the costume becomes more warlike with chainmail and the silhouette changes with strong moulded shoulders, like a exoskeleton,” Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton tells Glamour. “There is also a slashed and twisted detail on the back of her coat. It feels lizard-like, cold blooded. It creates an illusion that you can see into her soul, and it’s dark.”
True to those details, audiences know that Cersei’s words belie her intentions heading into the final season. She’s pregnant with a fourth child, and she’s more inclined to ensure her future heir’s line to the throne than to honestly band together with the Starks and Targaryens in a war for the living. According to Clapton, her outfits are the first place you can look to know exactly how she’s feeling and thinking in moments like this.
HBO
“All of Cersei’s costumes tell of her story,” Clapton says. “We might hate her, but she is a product of her treatment.” If you’ve watched Thrones from the very beginning, you know that Cersei hasn’t always been decked out for battle—and that she went through a lot to reach her current situation. (To refresh your memory: She endured and escaped a forced marriage, had an ongoing affair with her twin brother, and witnessed the violent deaths of her three children, to name just a few.) Like her machinations, her wardrobe has dramatically evolved over time.
“When we first met her eight years ago, her fabrics and colors were softer. She was subdued, hunted. The imagery she embroidered onto her costumes were birds in swirls of stitches,” Clapton says. The meaning? “It was supposed to speak of her feelings of being trapped—[like a] bird in a cage—within a marriage that she was forced into, forced to be weak and manipulated only because she was a woman by a drunken boar of a man who her father chose for her. The style was a wrapped Kimono in paper silk, implying availability.”
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Of course, she didn’t stay a bystander in her own story for long. As her agency increased in the following seasons—often achieved through deception and murder—her outfits become more obvious symbols of her power grabs (and less typically feminine). “As her position changes with the murder of this husband [Robert Baratheon, who is poisoned in season one], we start to see the colors become stronger and often to be shades of red. The cloth becomes stronger and the Lannister Lion becomes prominent in the embroidery.” In other words, she’s asserting her authority, and her dedication to preserving Lannister power, through her clothing.
HBO
Side-by-side with other women at court, Cersei’s wardrobe is thrown into sharper relief. Take the arrival of Margery Tyrell to King’s Landing, who has competing ambition to take the throne for House Tyrell, for example. Margery leans in to her femininity with colorful, low-cut gowns; meanwhile, Cersei’s costumes tend toward an opposite aesthetic. “[It’s] ultimate power dressing,” Clapton explains, “with armor and heavy symbolic jewelry to insist visually of her belief in her rightful place within the family.” That view ultimately appears to win, when Margery is killed in season six’s dramatic King’s Landing explosion, clearing Cersei’s path to the throne.
Want to know how Game of Thrones ends before season eight even premieres? The answer is simple: Listen to this Spotify playlist.
No, I’m not kidding. A Spotify playlist really has all the answers to your burning GoT questions. Who ends up on the Iron Throne? Who dies? Who lives? How are Dany and Jon actually related? This is all answered in the playlist, which was crafted by Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
Granted, you’ll have to do some digging. The answers aren’t obvious, but more so embedded in the specific songs Weiss and Benioff selected. Each track is deliberate and, in some way, unlocks information about what’s to come on Game of Thrones‘ final season.
“The answer to the ending is one hundred percent hidden in the playlist choices,” Benioff and Weiss told Spotify’s blog For the Record in an email. “No one will believe us, but it’s true.”
They added, “We were looking for songs that made us feel the way the show made us feel. There’s variety in there—Rage is not Johnny Cash. But they both have a deep inherent power.”
While Weiss and Benioff didn’t intend for fans to go on a scavenger hunt with this playlist, that’s absolutely what’s going to happen. This fandom is strong and dedicated, and they can find Easter eggs anywhere.
Take a look at the songs, below, and see if anything sticks out.
The playlist is a mix of metal and rock music with themes that include war, fire, cold, and wolves—all staples in the Game of Thrones universe. “Born for Greatness” by Papa Roach has me particularly worried for Arya. Just look at these lyrics: “We’re not nameless, we’re not faceless/We were born for greatness.” Oof.
It’s only a matter of time before the fan theories start rolling in. Game of Thrones season eight premieres Sunday, April 14 on HBO.
If you’ve ever worn hair extensions, you don’t need us to tell you how inconvenient and high-maintenance they can be. If it’s not clip-ins, which take forever to do yourself (and leave room for human error), then it’s sew-ins or bonded extensions, which require an afternoon in the salon.
So it’s no surprise that when Hidden Crown‘s hair extensions hit the scene, they blew up on Instagram for the sheer ease and accessibility of wearing extensions like a headband.
Instead of the tedious process of applying multiple clips, these hair extensions are shaped like an elastic headband with hair attached around the back. It takes the effort out of extensions; all you have to do is slip it over your head until it sits around the crown of your head (hence the name), layer your own hair around it, and proceed as usual. It’s so genius that these halo-shaped extensions are now favorites of Ashley Graham, Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, Olivia Culpo, and too many Real Housewives to count (among them Melissa Gorga, Erika Jayne, and Stephanie Hollman, to name a few).
Founder Shelley Goodstein had a pretty impressive resume before she added “founder and CEO” to the list. The Tucson, Arizona-based mom of three balanced her career as a pharmaceutical rep, modeling gigs with Ford Models, a blog called A Model’s Secrets, and a self-published book, a prescient, pre-social media guide to taking flattering photos.
Once she hit her 40s, she says her hairstylists started to put clip-in extensions on while she was modeling: “My hair would be fuller, and it’s the one thing you can’t Photoshop—fuller hair.” She loved the effect of the extensions so much that she once asked if she could keep them in for dinner with her husband afterwards. It was easier than doing it herself. “There had to be 25 clips—there was no way I could do that confidently,” she says.
When Goodstein began to search for other options (and thus found the fishing-line design), she also entered the Beauty Search contest for the since-folded More magazine, which celebrated women over 40. “I got to come to New York to do a photoshoot and won $10,000,” says Goodstein, who was 45 at the time. Her idea: Invest the winnings in a prototype of the halo-style hair extensions. “Once I had the extensions and perfected the design, I decided to test the market,” she says. Her best group of testers? Her blog readers.
Goodstein wrote a blog post in which she explained her new hair extensions, shared photos, and compared them to clip-ins. Readers sent in orders—and she sold out her first batch. “I doubled my money on day one, and then I never put another penny into my business,” she says. “I did all the shipping, I did all the service. I tried to figure out all the advertising.”
And while they’re an Instagram darling, Goodstein never sent them to influencers or celebrity reps to get coverage. The purpose of these halo-type hair extensions—which is to make extensions seem less overwhelming and easier to handle—is what made them stand out. That’s how celebrity hairstylist Justine Marjan discovered them.
“I’d seen Hidden Crown Hair Extensions all over Instagram for years and love how the headband-style makes extensions non-intimidating,” she says. “The clear string adjusts to your head shape and sits comfortably on your head, so you don’t have to worry about tracks showing or a clip coming undone.”
Bailey Marshall, a lifestyle blogger, learned about the extensions when a friend recommended them. “I didn’t even realize that Hidden Crown was even a thing until two months ago,” she tells Glamour. “You know the feeling when you leave your hair in a pony too long? That’s what I would get with clip-ins. Now that I have a Hidden Crown, I don’t know know why clip-ins are even a thing.”
You know witchy makeup when you see it: dark smoky eyes, sharp defined brows, and deep wine red or pitch black lips. And forget glowy skin: Instead of a shimmery highlighter or lively blush, it’s all undead pallor, all the time. It’s a look that’s equal parts sinister and chic, that’s marked an entire era of badass witches from The Craft to American Horror Story: Coven.
In Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, now streaming on Netflix, that same look is apparent on the witches of Greendale—except for its titular witch. Sabrina Spellman, played by Kiernan Shipka, begins her story facing a supernatural choice—whether she will pronounce her loyalty to Satan and become a full-witch in the Church of Night at her “Dark Baptism,” or remain a mortal—in noticeably natural makeup. She wears a creamy lip gloss and a rosy blush. Her eyes are unlined and shadow-free; her brows are combed with clear styling gel. That’s it.
PHOTO: Diyah Pera/Netflix
Of course, that’s no accident. According to Candice Stafford-Bridge, the makeup department head for the show, Sabrina’s natural beauty look sets the stage for her transformation over the first season. Over the course of the show, her makeup—whether light and feathery or, eventually, vamped up with the other witches—is a barometer for her allegiance to the witch’s coven.
So that bare-faced look at the show’s beginning? It’s symbolic of her innocent state: She’s uncertain about leaving her high school life behind for full-time duty in the witching world and dubious of the Satanic goings-on in the Church of Night. “We keep her young and clean-looking,” Stafford-Bridge says. “And that was really, really important: There had to be room for the character to progress, because things happen.” And, oh, do they.
PHOTO: Diyah Pera/Netflix
“I think the thing with making Kiernan less made-up is that before the Dark Baptism, she’s pure and she hasn’t chosen the so-called Dark Side,” she continues.
Then, there’s the lip, a rosy peach balm by Dior. “In the early episodes, her lips are the Dior Lip Glow in 004,” says Stafford-Bridge. “It gives her a really natural glow.”
PHOTO: Courtesy of Netflix
When Sabrina finally swipes on some dark lipstick, though, pay attention: It’s a sign that she’s considering going all-in with the coven. Take a scene in the second episode, for example, where Sabrina calls on the Weird Sisters—a trio of dark witches decked out in Bite lipstick, Anastasia Beverly Hills Eye Palettes, and stacks of false eyelashes—to assist her in pranking a group of boys who bullied her mortal friend at school.
PHOTO: Diyah Pera/Netflix
The witches lead the group of boys down into a mine that almost scares them to death. (We won’t spoil exactly what happens here, but that’s not an exaggeration.) Sabrina says she called on the Weird sisters seeking justice for a friend who was hurt, but her makeup says there’s more to the story. She arrives to hex the bullies in classically witchy makeup, courtesy of Tom Ford’s Bruised Plum purple lipstick and a black powder along her lashline. It’s dramatic, it’s dark, and it matches the Weird Sisters to a T. Her lipstick sends a message: She’s testing her powers and how much bad she’s willing to do.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Netflix
Then, there’s Sabrina’s Dark Baptism (also in episode two), which falls on Halloween and Sabrina’s sixteenth birthday. She arrives at the ceremony in a white dress and a matte red Christian Louboutin Lipstick that Stafford-Bridge calls “sixties inspired.” It’s timeless, but more dressed-up than her everyday look. Here, her lipstick is both a nod to her signature color—red plays heavily in Sabrina’s wardrobe—and a signal that Sabrina may be more converted over to the church than we think. (We won’t give away too much here, but this episode…omg.)
PHOTO: Diyah Pera/Netflix
Sabrina’s interactions with the coven increase over the season, but she’s still a student at Baxter High School by day, and her dark makeup is missing from many of her school-day scenes. “Even when we think that she’s maybe going dark, she still looks like the innocent 16-year-old with her friends in regular high school,” Stafford-Bridges adds.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Netflix
So can we expect to see Sabrina in full-blown witch makeup by the season’s end? “She’s still battling it, so she’ll never look like the Weird Sisters,” Stafford-Bridge hints. “But if that does happen, you will see a change in her makeup.”
The main draw of Netflix‘s new show Maniac are the amazing dreamscapes, the bizarre and intricate worlds that Annie (Emma Stone) and Owen (Jonah Hill) experience after taking pills given to them during a pharmaceutical trial. The mind-bending adventures are sometimes based in real memories, other times pure fantasy—but each one takes the viewer into the deep recesses of Annie and Owen’s minds.
In other words, these dreamscapes are a visual feast chock full of easter eggs, surreal gags, and cool hair. No, really: Emma Stone’s hair journey is a fun trip in and of itself. So much so that I called the show’s hair department head Fríða Aradóttir to walk me through each look. “It felt like we were doing something different; that possibly wasn’t done in this format before,” she says of filming Maniac. “And that’s really, really exciting.” See her take on the hairstyles, below.
