Banged Celebrities Without Bangs

How do you feel about celebrities with bangs? Do you think they’re hiding something? Maybe an extra eye or four extra inches of forehead? Celebrity haircuts are tricky, especially if you’re adding or taking away bangs. For some actors and actresses, bangs are their calling card, their hair de plume, if you will. Even if you’re not a celebrity, a person’s relationship to their hair is the most important thing that they can have; double that if you spend most of your life having people take photos of you. Like everyone else, most famous people find a style that suits them and stick with it until they’re dead just in case they’re unrecognizable without their signature look, but a few celebs are brave enough to grow out their bangs or snip off their locks whenever they feel like it. And for that, these celebrities who grew out bangs should be saluted.

There are a lot of different celebrity hairstyles with bangs. There’s the classic adorkable look patented by Zooey Deschanel; there’s the “cool” guy swoop that showed up in the early 2000s and has somehow managed to stick around for almost 20 years; and there’s the “I lost my mind, and now I accidentally have a pixie hair cut” version of the style. Whichever kind of celebrity bangs is your favorite, it’s represented in this collection of photos that capture celebrities at their most and least banged. 

Having never read 50 Shades of Grey, it's impossible to know whether or not the major Anastasia Steele character note is that she has bangs. Is that in the book? It must be because, by the time Johnson was on the How to be Single press tour, she'd gone full middle part. 

Somehow within months in 2016, Emma Stone managed to grow her (kind of weird) bangs out into a slightly longer version of those bangs. Thank goodness she's got enough gumption to pull off that kind of thing. 

After she wrapped filming on the final Harry Potter movie in 2010, Emma Watson did something drastic and snipped off all her hair. Good for her! But by the time she was named the UN Women's Goodwill Ambassador in 2016, the actress had grown her hair back out. What a difference six years can make. 

Remember Kerry Washington's Neutrogena commercial? The one where she showed off that she could pull off literally any hairstyle? Some people look weird in bangs, but not Washington. Although, when she appeared on Jimmy Kimmel in 2017, she had a more vivacious hair look to parallel her sassy leather dress. 

What was Sandra Bullock up to in 2011? Oh, just having some fierce bangs and starring in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, NBD. Compared to her 2009 Golden Globes look (on the right), she looks like a completely different actress. 

Back in 2013 at the ACM Awards, Taylor had some pretty severe bangs that give her that '60s ingénue thing; it's very Nico. Her unbanged hair gives her more of a demure Jackie-O thing, which is also kind of cool and very '60s. Is Taylor Swift a time traveler?

Woof, remember the mid 2000s? It wasn't just a rough patch for American politics; it was also a nightmare for men's hair. Whether or not it was his fault, Wentz takes on the brunt of the flack for the straightened bangs thing that still haunts the nightmares of any guy in a band. But look at him now! He's got a close crop, and he seems fine. 

Ellie Kemper seems like the living embodiment of bangs, so, on paper, her middle part shouldn't work. But in 2016 when she appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, she proved that not only is Kimmy Schmidt unbreakable, but her commitment to looking great with any hairstyle is also indestructible. 

After she finished filming Girls, Dunham cut her hair into a very nice set of bangs. It's a pretty far cry from the hair she had on the book tour for Not That Kind of Girl in 2014 when Dunham had sort of a '90s Lori Petty thing going on, and it looked very nice. Although she missed a trick by not adding some sparkly hair clips. 

Boy did people hate it when Bey cut her bangs while vacationing in Europe with Jay-Z and Blue Ivy in 2014. Now that there's been time to adjust to the cut, it looks really cute. Compare it to the Vogue cover she was on in 2015, which featured some very wet, long hair; that doesn't look nearly as fun.