The Beehive Hairdo is a woman's hairstyle in fashion in The '60s, in which long hair is piled high above the head and cemented with plenty of hairspray. A few elderly women could be seen sporting the beehive into The '90s, at which point it became more of a gag and/or trope hairstyle than anything real. They seem to have made a small comeback in the last few years, thanks to celebrities from shows like Jersey Shore making "poofy hair" trendy again. It is named as such because it resembles a Stock Beehive in shape.
Sub-Trope to '60s Hair. See also the Nefertiti Bust.
Examples:
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Advertising
- An ad for MyHabit women's designer and fashion brands features someone with this hairstyle.
- The main character in this ad
for Smirnoff flavored vodka.
- Louis Vuitton once featured an ad depicting pairs of identical twin women with their hair updone.
Anime & Manga
- During the first episode of Haganai Next, Sena tries out a Victorian-style "poof", complete with various summer-themed decorations. Her father is not thrilled about her walking around with her hair like that.
- Ruruka from Jewelpet Happiness has one, meant to be seen as a practical hairstyle befitting her tomboy personality.
- Telence D'Arby from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is one of the rare male examples of this trope, and seemingly one of the few villains in the arc without a mullet.
- Iris styles her hair this way for a glamour contest in Pokémon the Series: Black & White. Her Pokemon can even hide inside it.
- Edel from Princess Tutu.
- Astharoshe Asran sometimes sports this in Trinity Blood.
- Ryoko Sakurai in Symphogear sports this with a butterfly clip. As her true self her massive amount of locks flow freely. It's most likely this hairstyle was chosen by the designers to make a visual difference between Ryoko and Finé outside of hair and eye color being different.
Comic Books
- Night Girl of the Legion of Substitute Heroes wore a beehive hairdo for years... and has sported it in most of her modern appearances as well, as it's apparently now considered her iconic look.
- Susan Storm of the Fantastic Four has worn a beehive at various points. This was lampshaded in an issue of New Warriors where the team of teenage heroes travel through time and see past versions of various heroes with one of them remarking that Susan Storm looked silly with her beehive hair.
- Mindscan in Guardians of the Galaxy appears to have one. It's actually a wig to cover her oversized, lumpy skull.
Comic Strips
- Many panels of The Far Side featured one or more beehive-coiffed beauties. Beehive hairdos and harlequin or cat-eye glasses were Tertiary Sexual Characteristics for Gary Larson.
- Pearls Before Swine:
- Creator Stephan Pastis wrote a strip that, apparently, nobody got. Pig sees a "Beware of Dog" sign in a yard, that appears to have the "g" missing. He knocks on the door to let the owner know, only to be greeted by a woman with an atrocious beehive haircut. Beware of do. Geddit?
- Also worth noting Patty and Pigita, even though the former is, um, a reptile.
Fan Works
- Beehive Randomness
, a one-shot Lucky Star fic about six of the (long-haired) characters' hair mysteriously becoming updone. Miyuki finds it rather embarrassing, and so does Kagami once she and Konata wind up next. (Despite the title, there is not actually much random about it.)
- Starbound, another Lucky Star fic, also involves the Kagami, Konata, and Miyuki's hair becoming updone during the first half of its first chapter. They later find out from Kagami and Tsukasa's second cousin Rokuna (yes, that one, except with brown hair already also done up into a hive) that the crystals responsible for it are actually meant to enable them to use psychokinetics. (The version on Fanfiction.net is even marked with a photoshopped image of Kagami with her hair updone.)
Films — Animation
- Zootopia: There's Fru Fru, a shrew who wears her hair similarly to Amy Winehouse.
- Piella in Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death.
- Charlotte from The Princess and the Frog
- The unnamed gift shop clerk in Bébé's Kids, whose hair might count as a "triple-hive" of sorts.
- Angelica sports this for the ballroom scene in Titanic: The Legend Goes On.
- In Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Olivia Octavius styles her hair up in this fashion when assuming her Dr. Octopus identity, which makes her look like a proper octopus.
Films — Live-Action
- The girl band called the Bee Hives in Bachelor Party.
- Joy Miller, at times in The Beautician and the Beast.
- Bride of Frankenstein has an infamous version of a beehive.
- Prof. Holt from Class of Nuke 'Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown has to lower her head whenever she passes through a door.
- Everyone sports this style in Hairspray, hence the title.
- Up to the point where Deborah Harry has a hollowed-out one with a door on the front, tall enough to keep a time bomb inside.
- Ricki Lake sports this style at the beginning, but she becomes the one major exception when she irons her hair flat in jail like she learned it from the beatniks.
- And quite a few other John Waters characters have this hairstyle.
- Hedwig and the Angry Inch: "Suddenly, she's Miss Beehive, 1963..."
- In Mars Attacks!, one of the aliens disguises itself as a woman sporting one of these, because it was the only kind of costume that would hide its huge head.
- Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany's.
- Magenta of The Rocky Horror Picture Show sports an Elsa Lanchester-style beehive near the end of the film.
- Brazilian film Super Xuxa contra Baixo Astral has Florinda Floripede, a reporter for the in-universe apocalyptic news show TV Fim, sports a variant shaped like a mushroom cloud.
- Eve Teschmacher in Superman: The Movie and Superman II.
- Johnny Cash's mother in Walk the Line acquires one of these in The '60s.
Literature
- Susan Sto Helit sported one when she was being Death's granddaughter (as opposed to Governess Susan) in the Sky One Live-Action Adaptation of Hogfather. Based on the painting by Paul Kidby which has her with more of an afro, which in turn is based on the description in Soul Music of her hair resembling a dandelion clock.
- In Relativity, the supervillain Vera Barracuda uses a beehive hairstyle as part of her disguise. In her day-to-day life, she wears her hair down. This, plus a Domino Mask, is enough to completely hide her identity.
- In Captain Underpants, George and Harold's teacher, Ms. Ribble, has a beehive hairdo.
- The lady on the cover of Rich People Problems.
- InCryptid: Many female gorgons who interact with humans wear beehive wigs, since there's more room to hide their snakes inside.
Live-Action TV
- Turned up often enough in the original Star Trek, that it's been speculated that (like many, many other parts of the show) it was a case of Author Appeal with Gene Roddenberry. The most famous example was the do worn by Yeoman Rand, made by gluing two wigs together! In later series like Deep Space Nine, Human Aliens would be given towering hairstyles to portray a different culture without bothering with extensive makeup.
- Mad Men:
- Brought back from the dead by Joan Holloway and her startlingly-red updo. The show is, after all, set in the very early 60s.
- Worn by by Betty Draper when she and Don go to Italy.
- Vlad, the Divine Executioner, from Lexx had such a hairdo... about a foot-and-a-half high.
- When beehives appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 movies, one of the gang will probably make buzzing noises at least once.
- Elvira, Mistress of the Dark sports a rather unusual beehive-mullet.
- As mentioned above, Snooki's signature "poof" from Jersey Shore.
- Joy once sported one in My Name Is Earl, when she and the rest of the cast went to see an independently produced movie.
- She also wore one in a flashback to a day when she was asked to do some trade-show modeling at "Barba-Tubba-Con," until Earl accidentally ruined it by lighting a cigarette too close to where she was applying hairspray.
- Patsy Stone's signature look in Absolutely Fabulous.
- Lois sometimes styles her hair this way in Malcolm in the Middle.
- In an episode of Malibu, CA, Tracey tries her hand in styling Stads' and Samantha's hair. Stads' is styled into an impossibly large beehive, which she initially pretends to love, before asking for Samantha's help to get rid of it once Tracey leaves.
- Bug-Eyed Bandit styles her hair like this in The Flash (2014), tying to her queen bee theme.
- The signature hairstyle of Warehouse 13's Mrs Frederic.
- Rimmer, from Red Dwarf, on one occasion rudely demanded that Holly give him a haircut. In revenge, Holly inflicted a beehive on him instead.
- Blake's 7. In "Assassin", The Reveal that a Decoy Damsel is actually the Villain of the Week is given when she somehow has time for an Evil Costume Switch into black clothes and a towering bun of hair. The latter makes her not as scary as she should be.
- In Shining Time Station, Didi, the drummer for the Jukebox Band has this hairstyle.
- Toast of London: Janet Plough sports a gray beehive hairdo along with her mod-print psychedelic dresses, which together give her an anachronistic 60's secretary look, consistent with most of the main cast being 60's throwbacks in the 2010's.
- The Sopranos: Livia Soprano wore her hair in a beehive during Tony's childhood in the '60s. Apparently, his father "Johnny Boy" shot a bullet through it while driving home from a double date at one point. (We only see the beehive in flashbacks; by the time of the series Livia's beehive is long gone.)
- Fawlty Towers: Sybil Fawlty sports a beehive hairdo, or "rat's maze" as Basil calls it.
- The Crystal Maze: In series 3, Auntie Sabrina has a beehive hairdo.
Music
- Ronnie Spector is the Trope Codifier who played a major role in popularizing the hairstyle.
- Ariana Grande wears a short 60s-style beehive on the cover of her album Positions and a taller, poofier one in the video for "34+35".
- Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson of The B-52s used to sport a pair of beehive wigs. It's where the band's name came from, after all (because the way they did it resembled the nose of the Boeing B-52 airplane). They stopped doing it in the '80s, but the name stuck.
- Mari Wilson of Just What I Always Wanted fame.
- Adele, of course.
- Diana Ross and The Supremes. And others of their time.
- Amy Winehouse, probably the most notable example of the last ten years. It was a Shout-Out to '60s girl group the Ronettes (themselves an example), of whom Amy was a fan.
- Dusty Springfield.
- Cyndi Lauper sported the reverse version of the Elsa Lanchester beehive hairdo around the time of her 1989 album A Night To Remember.
- A woman with one of these appears on the cover for Andre Kostalanetz's record album for Strauss Waltzes.
- Patty Smyth of Scandal briefly sported one in the video for "The Warrior".
- Mentioned in Australian rock band The Skyhooks' "Women in Uniform":
Beehive hairdo, 45 on the hipPatrolwoman Saunders don't you give her no lip
- Mentioned in "Honky Tonk Song" by Terri Clark:
It's for that good ol' boy preachin', dealin' with the DeaconsAnd the little ladies with the beehive hairdo's
Pinballs
Toys
- The black Barbie is shown with this at times.
Urban Legends
- A popular legend during the 60s, when beehive hairdos were all the rage, is one where a woman with one doesn't take it down and wash her hair for a really long time, keeping the hairdo going by continually adding more hairspray. One day she passes out unexpectedly, and when she is medically examined, it's discovered that she has a huge nest of spiders in her beehive hairdo that have bored a hole in her brain. She later dies from this.
Video Games
- Professor Juniper of Pokémon Black and White has a fairly complicated beehive.
- Meloetta's Pirouette Forme.
- Lily, the protagonist's mother in Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness.
- The titular (heh) protagonist of Bayonetta sports one in the first game, with the intention of it looking reminiscent to a witch's hat. It's Magic Hair that also forms her Spy Catsuit and is used in her most powerful attacks. She trades it out for a Boyish Short Hair in the sequel.
- Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: Puzzlette's hair looks quite like a beehive.
- Someone is shown with a beehive in an ad banner for Grand Fantasia. As it turns out, though, this is not actually a selectable hairstyle.
- An old lady in the opening cutscene to Rayman Origins is shown to have one.
- According to early concept art of Super Mario Galaxy, Rosalina was originally going to have her hair mounted atop her head.
- Shirley in MySims, who is a hairdresser. It's pink, has hearts on the sides of it, and she's pretty dang proud of it.
- There is at least one female NPC with this in We Happy Few, a game set in an alternate 1960s England.
- Purah sports this in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.
Web Comics
- Dregs: Meatball wears her hair in a large bun, outside of her protective suit.
- A spectator sitting next to Tycho in this strip
of Penny Arcade.
- Rosemary "Rosie" Willow from FAC-AgentC's
dA comic Timepeace.
Web Original
- This DeviantArt group called "The Beehive"
is all about this trope. In case anyone's curious about the icon, though, the girls depicted are: Konata Izumi, Kagami Hiiragi, and Miyuki Takara; Guuko; Makoto Minagawa (from Getter Love!!); Pepper; Rebecca "Becky" Miyamoto; Mai Tsurugino (from Makeruna! Makendou Z); and Kiyomi "Yomi" Mizuhara. None of the girls ever actually sport a hive canonically; these were modified versions of pre-existing images. Why them? Ask the group owner.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons:
- Marge Simpson here is the modern queen of the beehive. She's never seen anyone with taller hair outside of Graceland.
- Her mother's beehive is pretty impressive as well.
- Sideshow Mel also counts, as a rare male example.
- Agnes, Principal Skinner's mother, also has one, but not nearly as large (and it's a wig; she's actually bald).
- This hairstyle was spoofed in one episode of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. In the episode, Robotnik's Mother adopts Sonic. A social worker comes to inspect the fortress and not only does she have a beehive hairdo, but real bees buzzing around it, and a hole for them to fly into.
- Lady Nickelbottoms from The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. According to one episode, it's actually a wig that she wears to cover up her "beauty mark".
- Gerald from Hey Arnold!, though his is an exaggerated hi-top fade.
- Sheila Broflovski on South Park.
- A villain from Totally Spies! sported one of these to hide the top half of her head, which had grown huge after stealing the intelligence of several geniuses.
- The Magic Schoolbus: Miss Frizzle sports one in the episode where they go see the inside of a beehive.
- Cordoth's Daughter from The Life and Times of Juniper Lee
- The Oblongs: Pickles Oblong wears a beehive hairdo wig, as the pollution of the Valley caused her hair to fall out.
- In an episode of Daria, Brittney sports a hive at a dance. Someone on the sidelines can also be seen with one.
- In the episode "Pierce Me", Helen wears one for a Mother-Daughter fashion show with Quinn.
- Betty Jo Flynn from Phineas and Ferb.
- The unnamed gift shop clerk in Bébé's Kids, whose hair might count as a "triple-hive" of sorts.
- Rugrats: Didi Pickles has one that points in three directions.
- Mrs. Brinks in Angela Anaconda wears a beehive wig, which periodically falls off.
- Miss Sculptham in Moral Orel has this. Another hint (see page description) that this show might be set in The '50s.
- In The Flintstones episode "Fred's New Boss", Wilma Flintstone and Betty Rubble get their hair done in gigantic, elaborate beehives at a salon, and the pair drive their car very slowly to protect their hairdos. Unfortunately, their 'dos are destroyed after a fast-moving dinosaur vehicle passes by and blows them down.
- Avatar: The Last Airbender: Toph regularly wears her hair in a large, flat bun atop her head.
- Buttercup Raiko has a similar hairdo in The Legend of Korra.
- Eustace's mother in Courage the Cowardly Dog.
- Marguerite Grey in the Over the Garden Wall episode Mad Love.
- Olga in The Mouse And The Monster.
- Some episodes of Kaeloo have either Kaeloo or Quack Quack wear a wig that looks like a beehive hairdo.
- In the As Told by Ginger episode No Hope for Courtney, popular girl Courtney Gripling has her hair done in a beehive.
- The female lead in the 1931 Fleischer Animation short In My Merry Oldsmobile
.
- Ms. McBrisk in The Crumpets.
- In My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Starlight Glimmer has this manestyle as the Arc Villain of Season 5. In Season 6 onwards (post-Heel–Face Turn), she swept her cut bangs out of the way and curled it to her side, but otherwise kept her original style.
- Little Charmers: In "Hairy Ways", Posie sports a beehive as tall as her body, though she's constantly struggling to keep her balance throughout the episode while trying not to fall over.
- Li'l Gideon from Gravity Falls is a rare male example with a massive white beehive. It emphasizes his extravagant and vain personality, and adds a few feet to his short stature.
- Cheryl and Meryl Farrell of The Loud House sport beehive hairdos. In "Double Trouble", Cheryl lampshades this as she's getting chased by bees.
Cheryl: THEY THINK MY BEEHIVE IS THEIR BEEHIVE!
Real Life
- There are images of Kimberlé Crenshaw
with her hair done up this way.