Britney Spears Finally Opens Up About Why She Shaved Her Head in 2007

Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, is officially one week away from its publication, and its contents are beginning to emerge. The book, spanning Spears’ 41 years, most of them in the limelight, includes anecdotes like one from 2007, when she infamously shaved her head during what People calls “a difficult period in her life.”

At the time, Spears was going through a painful divorce from ex Kevin Federline, and “was already a constant paparazzi target and gossip fixture,” People writes. “The head-shaving incident seemed to support a narrative that she had become erratic.”

As to what she was thinking during this moment, let’s have Spears tell you herself in an excerpt from the book: “I’d been eyeballed so much growing up,” Spears writes. “I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”

One night in 2007, Spears walked into Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, and asked to have her hair shaved off. Esther Tognozzi, who owned the salon, refused Spears’ request, so Spears did it herself, grabbing a clipper and giving herself a buzzcut while the ever-present paparazzi took pictures through the salon’s windows. Days later, Spears was photographed attacking a photographer’s car with an umbrella.

After Spears was put in a court-ordered conservatorship in 2008—which granted her father, Jamie, and a lawyer control over her financial and personal affairs—she wrote she was forbidden from keeping the new look. “Under the conservatorship I was made to understand that those days were now over,” she writes. “I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”

Her conservatorship ultimately ended up spanning nearly 14 years, during which time she was desperately unhappy. “I would do little bits of creative stuff here and there, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore,” she writes. “As far as my passion for singing and dancing, it was almost a joke at that point. Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick…Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn’t deserve what my family did to me.”

In September 2021, after Spears pleaded with a judge in open court to end the legal arrangement, Jamie was suspended as her conservator. Two months later, the conservatorship was finally terminated. It was then that Spears set out to share her journey. “Over the past 15 years or even at the start of my career, I sat back while people spoke about me and told my story for me,” she told People. “After getting out of my conservatorship, I was finally free to tell my story without consequences from the people in charge of my life.” She continued, of writing The Woman in Me, “It is finally time for me to raise my voice and speak out, and my fans deserve to hear it directly from me. No more conspiracy, no more lies—just me owning my past, present, and future.”