Hidden Hair Meanings to Look Out For on “Stranger Things”

At the end of season three, we see Eleven leave Hawkins with Joyce and Will Byers. In the latest season, the kids are in a new school in California. This major life change influences both of their looks significantly. Eleven (played by Brown) is morphing into a new version of herself, and her new caretaker is her greatest inspiration. She has a totally different look, complete with the “Joyce haircut,” featuring a shoulder-length shag with micro bangs. “Joyce is cutting everybody’s hair in that family, so they all have these pretty amazing bangs happening,” the show’s hair-department head, Sarah Hindsgaul, tells POPSUGAR.

Outside of Eleven’s shag and micro-bangs hairstyle, we see her in her signature buzz cut, which has everyone wondering: did Brown really shave her head again for the new season? Hindsgaul divulged she didn’t.

“That is a buzz-cut wig,” Hindsgaul confirms, which she adds is very difficult to pull off. “Normally, you would do that with a bald cap and then putting a wig over it, but we’re very limited on time.”

Hindsgaul had to get innovative to figure out a solution for bringing back Eleven’s infamous shaved head, and it almost didn’t happen. “But I couldn’t let it go – it’s just such an important moment for the story,” she says.

The first challenge was getting Brown’s hair flat enough to be hidden by a wig, but that wasn’t all. “If there’s too much hair anywhere, it would look like a hat – you wouldn’t be able to see that scalp through it, and that looks fake. If it was too little hair, you could just see the stitching.”

After spending a lot of time thinking on it – and “laying awake at night, studying Millie’s hairline” – Hindsgaul and her wig maker came up with a solution. “We ended having three different layers of silks inside,” she says. This helped camouflage Brown’s real hair while making the wig look real.

If we had to award one character with the title of best hair, solely based on volume alone, we’d pick Steve (Joe Keery). But unlike many of the other characters, he isn’t wearing a wig in the show – only “some extensions in the back” occasionally. So, yes, his hair is naturally just that good.

“Joe has amazing hair,” Hindsgaul says. “I would never want to try to replicate that and wig him.” The secret to his style isn’t what you’d expect. “We give him highlights,” she says. In fact, almost everybody gets highlights to make their hair visible while shooting in such a dark setting.

Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) has also undergone a bit of a transformation in season four. In the premiere episode “Chapter One: The Hellfire Club,” we learn Dustin and Mike are the proud new members of a D&D club called the Hellfire Club.

“[Mike]’s very influenced by Eddie, who’s obviously a very cool guy, and he’s a good bit older,” Hindsgaul says. “They’re all looking up to him a bit, and so, he started growing his hair out.” But it’s not so easy for Mike to shed that nerdy middle-school persona so fast. “He’s in that awkward middle phase of experimenting, but not really getting all the way there.”

Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), on the other hand, hasn’t changed much – except for one small element of his signature look. “We’re actually styling Dustin’s hair quite differently,” she says. You just can’t see it because he never takes his “thinking cap” off.

Aside from Eleven, the other biggest transformation we see in season four is in Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), who’s joined the Hawkins Tigers basketball team and, by association, earned entry to the cool-kids club at school. “With that, we wanted to make sure that he had a very distinct transformation,” Hindsgaul says. “There’s an awkwardness in that, too, when you’re trying so much. It’s such a big flat top he has going on.”

Hindsgaul and her team use a collection of hair-care products while filming, but there’s one that was relied on heavily for those big ’80s hair moments: the Kevin Murphy Body Builder Mousse ($34). “We do so many perms and we do so many curls, and I find that to be a really good curl volume booster,” she says.