Otherworldly Technicolour Hair

"Hello, Darling."

They live among us, but underneath those tufts is a facade - they're someone literally out of this world. Non-human, supernatural creatures are often coded with unusual hair colours to show their otherness, in contrast to "normal" characters that have red, blonde, brown, or black hair. While this trope often applies to purple hair, can also include green, pink, blue, white and many others.

In some cases, characters have multicoloured hair or a Mark of the Supernatural. Expect other characters to comment on it, or for it to be mentioned as a Strong Family Resemblance to specific individuals. In some cases, characters may hide their hair or dye it to appear more conforming. In rare scenarios, the hair itself might be magical.

If the setting is one where everyone, regardless if they're human or not, has unnatural hair colours, see World of Technicolor Hair. Mystical White Hair is a subtrope. This trope may or may not be related to Alien Princess, Amazing Technicolor Population, and Power Dyes Your Hair.

Overlaps with Not Quite Human.

Because the nature of this trope is that people aren't what they appear to be, beware of spoilers.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Anti Magic Academy: Lapis is a Relic Eater that takes the form of a girl with purple hair. On the other hand, the human characters have realistic hair colors.
• Bakugan Battle Brawlers: Mira, Ace, and Baron are Vestals, a race of aliens that look almost identical to humans, with their only non-human traits being their Empty Eyes and this trope.
• Captain Harlock:
  • The Arcadia Crew is made up entirely of humans, except for Miime, an alien from Planet Jura. She is a cute humanoid alien woman with long, flowing, stringy, purple hair. Though even without that, you'd be able to tell she's the token alien with her glowing yellow eyes, grey skin, and lack of mouth.
  • Seven-year-old Mayu Oyama is the daughter of Tochiro Oyama, a human, and Emeraldas, a La Metalian. She has blue-purple hair in a bob cut.
• Daimos: While most of the Baam-seijin have standard hair colours like the blonde-haired Richter and the chestnut-haired Olban, some Baam like Raiza and Gurney have green hair and others like Barandock and Himley have blue hair. Even Erika's hair (black in canon) is portrayed as green in some supplementary material◊.
• Dragon Ball has a variant with Saiyan power ups - Saiyans that surpass their Super Saiyan forms have glowing blue and crimson hair.
• Fruits Basket downplays this with the Sohma clan, as those with the curse of the Zodiac are possessed by animal spirits and turn into those animals when hugged by the opposite sex or weakened. Most of them are marked with hair colors that are unnatural to Japanese people but natural to the animals whose spirits they possess, which means they get accused of being hair-dying delinquents frequently in school. Haru is perhaps the most extreme, as his hair grows half-black, half-white (even, it's implied, in his private areas).
• Gigantor: Demon Beast Prince Gura, a Canon Foreigner introduced in The 80s series. He is Uchuumaoh's son, making him an Alien Prince, and he has cyan-shaded hair.
• Persia, the Magic Fairy is about an ordinary girl who becomes a Magical Girl thanks to a Transformation Trinket given to her by the Queen of the fairies. When she's in her transformed form, she has long hot-pink hair. An odd case of this trope because when she was human, her hair was blue.
• Raideen: Akira Hibiki's Missing Mom, Reiko, a.k.a Princess Lemuria, has blue-green hair. She's actually from the lost Mu Empire and came to Japan as a refugee after her homeworld was sunk, meaning that her son is half-Mu. She inherited her green hair from her father.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Nia Teppelin is an artificial being made by the Anti spirals, and has multicoloured, cloud-like pale blue/shiny blonde hair. She is the only non-human amongst the main cast. While Gurren Lagann is a case of World of Technicolor Hair, the human characters are restricted to a single hair colour, such as Simon's blue and Yoko's red.
• Urusei Yatsura:
  • Lum Invader not only has unusually colored hair, in the 2022 anime, her hair is actually radiant, and can change color depending on her mood, particularly if she's charging up an electrical attack.
  • Oyuki, Queen of Neptune. In the original anime, her hair was merely blue. In the 2022 series, it's actually crystalline.
• Voltes V: Kentaro Go has purple hair. He's a Boazanian himself. Even though he was born as the Crown Prince of Boazan, due to the fact that he had no horns, he was deemed a "cursed child" by his father, as only those with horns were allowed to become nobles. To prevent their name from attaining shame, his parents ordered him to wear prosthetics. However, when his jealous cousin revealed his secret, he was enslaved, but started leading rebellions with his fellow slaves. After he attempted to overthrow the Fantastic Caste System one too many times, he was forced to flee the planet. The upper-class Boazanians who benefited from slavery saw his actions as "betrayal" and Un Personed his name from all their records, hence Prince Heinel not knowing that he was his father.

Comic Books

• Galaxy: The Prettiest Star: Taylor has green hair (and purple skin). She is the Galaxy Crowned of planet Cyandii.

Fan Works

• Charles Manson Vs The Teletubbies: When Charles Manson is transported to Teletubby Land, he notes this of the main four Teletubbies.
  He continued his search until he came across 4 color coded… things, he couldn’t actually tell what they were but he figured that they would make good little slaves if he prodded their minds the right way.
• A Certain Magical Friendship: The ponies-turned-humans due to changing worlds, keep their non-human hair colors, such as Rainbow Dash's eponymous rainbow hair, due to how the transfer works, and even though they're biologically human, it marks them as supernatural.
• The Dresden Fillies: Great Power: Chapter Four: The visiting ponies-turned-humans by magic and from another world, keep their non-human hair colors, such as multicolored hair, as a choice of the caster, instead of forcibly aligning them to natural human colors:
  ["]All of you have the same hair and eye color."
  "Not quite," Twilight replied. "I made those changes myself; the spellcaster does have some control over the transformation. The less the transformed object fights the change, the longer the spell will last.["]
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Ami's blue hair marks her as magical because she's been Trapped in Another World where only non-humans or magical accident victims have non-melanin-generated hair colors like blue, purple, or green.
• If Wishes Were Ponies (Harry Potter/My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic crossover): The Mane 6 have to use a spell to dye their naturally bright-colored hair black or brown so they won't attract attention.
• Little Hands, Big Attitude:
  • All the aliens that come from Sonic's home planet to Earth - including Sonic - have fur colours that are impossible to find on normal animals. The one exception is Rouge, who has albinism and therefore has white fur.
  • Kaia at first glance is a normal human, and Tom assumes her blue-green hair is dyed. As you'd expect from this trope, it's not dyed - it's one of the many parts of her Meaningful Appearance that hints she's a water goddess. The exact shade of her hair changes depending on her emotional state.

Films — Animation

• Harlock: Space Pirate: Miime has green hair◊ and is the only alien amongst Harlock, Logan, Kei, and Yullian. The film changes some particulars from the original anime, changing her hair colour from purple^note (It could be a reference to how in the original anime, she was an Expy of Princess Lemuria from Raideen, who also has green hair) and her species from Juran to Nibelung.

Films — Live-Action

• Barbie (2023): While the rest of the Barbies (and Kens and humans) sport pretty common hair colors like blonde, brown, red, and black, the mermaid Barbies have blue, purple, and green hair. Fitting since they are the only representations of fantastical creatures in the Barbie World; the other dolls are meant to represent young women and men.
• Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018): In the first movie, Addison Wells says her natural-born white hair cannot be dyed and nothing sticks; she also claims she wore a wig to hide it "as long as [she] can remember." In the second movie, her hair glows as a strange meteor falls out of the sky. In the miniseries she's the only one immune to Vanna's vampire hypnosis, which according to her should be impossible, causing Vanna to ask her What the Hell Are You?. The third movie reveals all this is because Addison is a quarter alien, her hair turning blue to further reflect this.

Literature

• The Stormlight Archive: The Iriali people have metallic gold hair and skin, courtesy of their ancestors having come to Roshar from another world and being Uneven Hybrids with a non-human species.
• Thanks Truck Kun For Making Me A Trader: Although Leon wouldn't know until later due to their first meeting involving hair-obscuring headgear, the first person he meets after being Trapped in Another World has a hair color that people from his original world, Earth, would need hair dye to achieve.
• Wayward Children: Cora transformed into a mermaid when she was Trapped in Another World; though she became human again upon returning to Earth, her hair remained blue-green as a sign that she "wears her scales on the inside now".
• Whateley Universe: Unnatural hair colors like true red, blue, purple, or green imply that a person is a mutant, a.k.a., superhuman.

Live-Action TV

• Kamen Rider Geats: Downplayed. The four supporters - Ziin, Kekera (in human form, anyway), Beroba, and Kyuun - all have natural hair colours. But each one has a different, unnaturally-coloured streak. Blue for Ziin, green for Kekera, pink for Beroba, and yellow for Kyuun. This denotes at a glance that they're from the far future, where they are allowed to take any form they so choose.
• Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger: Downplayed. One thing that separates the Ryusoul Tribe from ordinary humans apart from their long lifespans is that some of them can have naturally blue hair, like Melto. However, the rest of the team has otherwise naturally-colored hair.
• Power Rangers Time Force: Trip, the Time Force Green Ranger, has bright green hair, as he is a Xybrian from a future where aliens living on Earth is normal. While in the year 2001, he wears a bucket hat, but more to hide the crystal in his forehead than his green hair.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Several races/species can have their extraplanar heritage manifest in an unusual hair colour (for example, tieflings can have purple hair, with a normal human skin colour, although this is often ignored in favour of whatever the player wants).
  • The Fey Wanderer ranger subclass is a ranger who's been exposed to the Feywild and has some fae traits, which can manifest in unusual hair colour.
• Pathfinder: Gnomes are originally from the First World (Pathfinder's version of the Feywild), and can have unusual hair colours (bright green being a common one). They can also suffer from an inversion; gnomes who don't have enough whimsy and excitement in their life suffer from a terminal condition called The Bleaching, where they lose all their colour.

Theatre

• Nerdy Prudes Must Die: In a play where all the human characters have natural hair colors, the Lovecraftian Lords in Black distinguish themselves with brightly-colored hair in their signature colors.

Video Games

• Chantelise: Humans that have been transformed into a fairy and reverted keep the fairy form's new hair color, which are different from human hair colors. For example, green, or silver.
• Inverted in Digital Devil Saga, where the black-haired waif Sera is considered to have an abnormal hair color by Junkyard standards; the party alone has red, green, lilac, pink, and silver. The sequel then plays it straight; revealing that Sera is from Earth, and everyone in the Junkyard except for her is a ghost or a sentient AI.
• Fire Emblem Engage: Lord Sombron is from another dimension, so his humanoid form has all sorts of unnatural features to emphasize this, such as his Third Eye, Glowing Red Eyes, Gray Skin, etc. His hair is also a very unusual shade of purple-ish red, a hair color that no almost no other character in the franchise has, even in Worlds of Technicolor Hair.
• Neopets: Some faeries have purple hair to signify that they're magical. Among them are Queen Fyora and Jhudora.
• Hallelujah in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse has silver hair that turns hot pink when in demon form.
• Shin Megami Tensei V: Aogami has bright blue hair; when he fuses with the protagonist, their Nahobino form has ankle-length blue hair. Fitting, for a god of the ocean.
• Tales of Xillia: The humans in the setting largely have normal hair colours of blond, brown, black, and grey from aging, with all odder colours associated with the supernatural spirits, like the Great Spirit Muzét, who has teal hair. Milla Maxwell, the Lord of Spirits temporarily taking human form, is otherwise blonde with an errant strand of hair styled green by the Great Spirit of Wind, Sylph. It's later revealed that Milla was Human All Along, and when she dies and reincarnates into a spirit herself, her blonde hair turns entirely green.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Voluntary Shapeshifter enemies, in their natural form, have snakes for hair.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: Despite literally taking place on another planet, and the character creator allowing for the usual outlandish anime hair colors, the citizens of New Los Angeles are all humans who came from Earth, and as such exhibit usually normal physical qualities. This trope applies to Elma, who is actually an alien who came to Earth to give them the technology to escape from the planet before it was destroyed in the crossfire of two warring factions. Her human form has dark skin and white hair, but her true form has pale skin and blue hair that may very well be made of crystals.

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court: Some of the former Forest denizens who became human have unusual hair colours like blue, green, and pink. The colours are muted in their physical bodies but vivid in the Spirit World.
• My Impossible Soulmate: Inverted in this isekai webcomic. Protagonist Chiaki Koizumi has regular black hair, but the world she gets sent to is one where hair colours like green and purple are quite common.
• Sluggy Freelance has an alternate dimension where all the counterparts of the regular (human) cast have purple hair, and speak Portuguese for some reason.
• Unsounded: The waterwomen have hair in shades of blue and green and despite being relatively humanoid are impossibly ancient beings much older than humanity that survived the destruction of the deathless "first word" into the "second word". Waterwomen do not operate on the same basic biologic rules as normal animals; their "blood" is the water in which they live and they cannot reproduce, instead regrowing from their "pearl" when their bodies are ruined.

Web Animation

• hololive: The first wave of hololive English, HoloMyth, consists of four Cute Monster Girls and one Token Human girl. They are:
  • Gura Gawr, a shark girl from Atlantis who has white hair with blue highlights at the tips and fringe.
  • Calliope Mori, a shinigami Grim-Reaper-in-training with long pink hair.
  • Ina'nis Ninomae, a tentacled Angelic Abomination with purple hair. It has orange tips when it's parted around her face.
  • Kiara Takanashi, a phoenix who's died and reincarnated many times. Her hair is bright orange on the top and bright green at the bottom. When she's mad, it literally turns into fire.
  • Amelia Watson, a human detective who solves mysteries for a living. Her hair is blonde, making her the only one in the group with a natural hair colour.

Web Videos

• Critical Role: Campaign Three: Imogen and her mother are humans who both have naturally purple hair, implied to be because they are Exaltant Ruidusborn, gifted with abilities by the red moon Ruidus which is actually a prison for a god eater.

Western Animation

• Barbie:
  • Barbie in a Mermaid Tale: Merliah Summers, despite being a natural blonde, suddenly sprouts pink hair out of nowhere after a surfing competition. She then realizes that she can speak to aquatic animals and breathe underwater. She then learns that while her father is a human, her mother, Queen Calissa, is a mermaid, and she needs to be saved from her cruel sister Eris.
  • Barbie Fairytopia: The residents of Fairytopia have hair that's blue (such as Nori, Lumina, Rayla and Willa) and purple (such as Glee, Henna and Shimmer). Rayna and Talayla have pink hair.
• Futurama: Leela's hair is purple, and she was initially thought to be an alien from an unknown planet, but eventually, she's revealed to be a mutant human. Her parents were mutants relegated to living in a sewer, who tricked the surface-dwellers into thinking she was an alien so she would be allowed to live on the surface and have better opportunities in life.
• The Owl House: Witches and demons have a far greater variety of hair shades than humans, with colors like magenta, mint, and navy being treated as completely normal. While a few (Amity's green and Lilith's blue for example) are canonically the result of hair dye, most of them are 100% natural.
• Teen Titans: Raven has purple hair. She is a Human-Demon Hybrid as her father is Trigon the Terrible and her mother is a human woman. Trigon created her with the intention of bringing ruin to the world, but she defies him every time. This stands out in comparison with the normal human characters —Robin, Aqualad, and Bumblebee are black-haired; Speedy and Kid Flash have auburn; etc. The only exception is Beast Boy, who got dyed green as a side effect of taking the cure for a mysterious disease.
• Winx Club: All the human characters have brown, black, or blonde as their hair color. Now, of course, there are magical beings sporting those shades too but blue, purple, pink, and green are perfectly common as well —or they have non-dyed strikes of a different color. Furthermore, this trope is used to indicate that Roxy is the last Earth fairy the Winx are seeking in the fourth season. Her bright, pink with yellow tips hair stands out like a sore thumb any time she's in a human crowd.

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