Sarah Michelle Gellar has cut her hair. This is, in most circumstances, the sort of information that registers somewhere in the mid-range of celebrity news: notable, briefly discussed, then filed and forgotten. In Gellar’s case it lands with slightly more weight, because she wore the same long, honey-blonde hair for so much of her public life that a change to it registers as something.
The new cut is a blunt, chin-grazing bob. It is, by any objective assessment, excellent. The bluntness of it suits her. She has worn her hair long — across seven seasons of Buffy, through numerous press cycles, across decades of magazine covers — and the effect of seeing it cropped and precise is the visual equivalent of a sentence that ends exactly where it ought to.
Gellar posted photographs on Instagram, as one does. The response was predictably enthusiastic, because the internet has a specific affection for the blunt bob — it has been the statement haircut of several successive cultural moments — and because Gellar has spent long enough as a public figure that any meaningful change in her appearance becomes, briefly, something people feel entitled to have opinions about.
The timing is interesting, for what it is worth. Gellar is in a moment of general reappearance: Wolf Pack on Paramount+ brought her back to genre television for the first time in years; she has been giving interviews with more frequency than she has for some time; the Instagram posting has become more active. The hair feels continuous with that — not a departure so much as an extension of the same energy.
Buffy Summers, for the record, never cut her hair. The show kept it long throughout its run, varying the style slightly season to season but never breaking from the fundamental look. There is something quietly pleasing about Gellar, twenty years on from the show’s end, doing what Buffy never did. She is no longer Buffy. She has not been for some time. The bob is a small, clear statement of that fact.
It suits her very much.
Leave a Reply