Taylor Swift’s New Curly Hairstyle Is Her Hair’s ‘Factory Settings’

• Taylor Swift, 36, debuted her new lob in curls, with full bangs, in a photo Official Charts shared on Friday, Oct. 2, to mark her latest U.K. chart double.
• The curls are her own. She called them her hair’s “factory settings” on the Eras Tour in Singapore in 2024, and wore ringlets through her first three albums.
• She joins Nicole Kidman, who told fans to “embrace the curl,” and Andie MacDowell, whose curls came back silver, among stars who stopped fighting their texture.

Factory settings, restored. Taylor Swift, 36, is wearing her new lob curly. In a photo Official Charts shared on Instagram on Friday, Oct. 2, the singer holds two chart trophies, her hair falling to her collarbone in loose curls under a full fringe.

The photo marked her fifth Official Chart Double in the U.K., with “Patient Zero” at No. 1 on the singles chart and The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore at No. 1 on the albums chart in the same week. The picture is credited to TAS Rights Management, her own company.

What does Taylor Swift’s new curly hairstyle look like?

It is a lob, short for long bob. A classic bob ends between the jaw and just above the shoulders; a lob lands between the shoulders and the collarbone. Swift’s sits right on that line, with blunt ends, light layering and a dense fringe that stops at her brows.

In the Oct. 2 photo, the ends turn into loose spirals and the bangs keep a slight bend. To ask for it at a salon, the description that matches is a long bob grazing the collarbone, with full bangs cut to the brow.

When did Taylor Swift cut her hair?

In August. The chop surfaced at a dinner in London, her first outing after she married Travis Kelce on July 3, and again at the countryside wedding of her longtime collaborators Oli Jacobs and Laura Sisk, at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios near Bath.

She has styled it three ways since. It was straight, with bangs, in her pre-taped SVU cameo at the Emmys, in loose waves at a Kansas City Chiefs game in September, and sleek again on Sept. 27 at the MTV VMAs.

That night she accepted the VMAs’ first Artist-Director honor and became the most-awarded artist in the show’s history, with 33 wins. Five days later came the curls.

Is Taylor Swift’s hair naturally curly?

Yes, and she has said so on stage. On March 3, 2024, during an Eras Tour show at Singapore’s National Stadium, the humidity turned her smooth hair back into curls mid-concert. A fan filmed what she told the crowd.

As you can see, my hair has returned to its factory settings, thanks to the humidity here. I’m not complaining, I like it.

Taylor Swift, Eras Tour, Singapore, March 3, 2024

Longtime fans knew the texture. Swift wore ringlets through her first three albums: the 2006 video for “Tim McGraw,” the fairy-tale curls of “Love Story” in 2008 and the spirals of “Mine” in 2010. She switched to straight hair and blunt bangs for Red in 2012 and cut a short bob for 1989 in 2014.

The curls kept resurfacing after that: the loose texture on the 2020 folklore album art, the faux curly bob she wore to the Los Angeles premiere of her Eras Tour concert film in October 2023, and Singapore.

Why does humidity bring the curls back?

Chemistry. Hair is mostly keratin, held together by two kinds of bonds. Disulfide bonds are permanent and give hair its strength. Hydrogen bonds are weak: they break when hair gets wet and re-form as it dries, which is why hair keeps the shape it dried in.

A flat iron or blowout sets those hydrogen bonds straight. Humid air is full of water molecules, and on a muggy night they get pulled into new hydrogen bonds, coiling naturally curly hair back toward its original shape, as Smithsonian magazine has explained. That is what happened in Singapore.

Which other stars went back to their natural curls?

Nicole Kidman, 59, tells the closest story. Looking at photos from Days of Thunder (1990) in a May 2025 interview for Allure, she asked, “Why did I straighten my hair?” She told “little girls out there” to “embrace the curl. Do not follow in my steps and straighten your hair.”

Her fine print matched Swift’s. She said she can still get the curl back, but “it needs to be kind of humid and I need to use the right product.” In 2026 she has been wearing it again, including on a February outing in Sydney.

Andie MacDowell, 68, let her curls go silver. She stopped coloring during the 2020 lockdown and told Drew Barrymore in February 2021 that her daughters “kept telling me that I looked bad-ass.” She wore the silver curls to the Cannes Film Festival that July as a L’Oréal Paris ambassador.

For Swift, the new cut lands mid-rollout: The Encore arrived in September, and The Life of a Showgirl turns one on Oct. 3.

More Taylor Swift: what “Cleveland!” and the other new songs on The Encore are about. And from Style: Hailey Bieber in Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s rehearsal dinner dress.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: Official Charts (@officialcharts), Instagram, Oct. 2, 2026 (photo: TAS Rights Management); E! News (Sabba Rahbar), Oct. 2, 2026; Yahoo (Madison Emily Whisenand), Sept. 26, 2026; Grazia USA, 2026; Marie Claire (Iris Goldsztajn), March 6, 2024; The Zoe Report, 2023 (Eras Tour film premiere); Smithsonian (Joseph Stromberg), April 12, 2013; Allure (YouTube), May 22, 2025; InStyle (Emma Banks), May 23, 2025; WWD (Kaleigh Werner), Feb. 11, 2026; The Drew Barrymore Show (YouTube), Feb. 1, 2021; MTV (YouTube), Sept. 28, 2026. Photos and video: Official Charts / TAS Rights Management; Taylor Swift (YouTube); MTV; Allure; The Drew Barrymore Show.