So you have a humanoid being, but actual keratin hair would look weird on them, possibly because they are not mammals, such as Lizard Folk, but you still want something like a head of hair.
There are multiple subtropes because that's a common desire, but we haven't troped all the standards, like replacing hair with feathers.
Weird Beard is the beard version.
Alien Hair is likely to overlap, but that's just "space aliens have weird hair(styles)", nothing required about their actual composition. The labels of "Not-hair-at-all hair" and "Predator" Hair would count for this.
Medusa and Gorgeous Gorgon are highly likely to overlap, because the Medusa template has snakes for hair, but individual creators might not do that.
Hair Wings usually overlap with this, but not always because the wings could technically be made of "regular" hair. See also Non-Mammalian Hair.
Subtropes:
- Ears as Hair
- Elemental Hair Composition: Which has its own subtropes:
- Robot Hair: Robots aren't organic, so they can't have keratin hair, but the only sign of it being non-keratin might just be that it's on a robot.
- Tentacle Hair
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Astro Boy: Bem the bomb robot from the classic story Earth's Last Day is a reluctant humanoid control system for a planet-destroying bomb resembling a boy with bird-like wings growing out from his hair. Oddly, the alien race who created him have bat wings on their heads.
- Rosine from Berserk has luna-moth-esque wings for her "hair", which look particularly hair-like in her more humanoid form.
- Devilman, Silene/Siren has "hair" of full-feathered wings.
- Digimon Frontier: Zephyrmon, Zoe's beast spirit form, who looks like a tall beautiful harpy with head-wings that blend seamlessly with the rest of her hair.
- Fairy Tail: Kyôka's Cool Mask looks vaguely like a bird's head, with the mask's hair resembling wings.
- Howl's Moving Castle: Howl's bird transformation keeps his human face, but turns his hair into feathers.
Comic Books
- The DCU:
- Green Lantern:
- Green Lantern Feska of Zarox and her people have a crest striped with black instead of hair.
- Deeter's "hair" does not have individual strands, and despite being shaped like a human haircut is more like smooth shaped growth, plus his "mustache", and both look like they could have been popped out of a jello mold and glued to his head.
- Sinestro Corps members Kiriazis and Scivor both have needle-like spikes and horns in place of hair.
- Female Ungarans have dark thin cord-like things on their heads that look sort of like thin braids though some artists just can't seem to keep from drawing it like regular hair. Males, like Green Lantern Abin Sur, are generally completely hairless.
- Sinestro: The Yellow Lantern who gets his neck snapped by Mongul after he's freed from the Paling has a mass of cord-like things growing on his head behind his crest-adorned forehead instead of hair.
- Superboy (1994):
- One of the beautiful slave girls in Kossak's harem has long rounded feather-like "hair" which starts further back than a normal human hairline, continues onto her back and the backs of her arms, and doesn't reach the sides of her head.
- Kon-El comes across an alien girl with strange branching blue stuff that looks sort of like flat bunches of grapes that grow on her wrists and ankles in addition to on top of her head.
- Velosians have a sort of orangeish fringe skirting the back of their heads which is very visible against their turquoise skin. Or they did before they and their planet were destroyed by Yuga Khan. The only known survivor, Wonder Woman's elderly ally H'Elgn who was a slave of the Sangtee Empire when Velos was destroyed, has a white fringe instead.
- Wonder Woman (1987):
- One of Diana's space pirate revolutionaries has a large boxy lump on each side of her head which seem to be in place of ears as well as hair.
- One of the races seen most often on the Sangtee Empire's slave planets is a greenish blue-skinned people with pointed ears and symmetric coral-like growths instead of hair.
- Green Lantern:
- Marvel Universe: The humanoid Shi'ar have feathers instead of hair.
Films — Animated
- Monsters, Inc. and its sequel feature several monsters with fins, spikes, or even snakes in place of hair. One of the art directors for the movie confirmed that this was a bit of a cheat so that they didn't have to animate any more hair than absolutely necessary.
Films — Live-Action
- Avatar: The Na'vi have tendrils growing out of their head, but in a twist they have hair growing on top of all this over the neural cables.
- Predator: The Yautja have dark cords in place of hair.
- Star Wars: There's Tentacle Hair known, usually two tentacles growing out of the back of heads, called "lekku". But that's a subtrope. The Togruta (such as Shaak Ti and Ahsoka Tano), who have hollow horn-like "montrals" at the top of their heads and three lekku extending downward from them. Rare individuals will have four lekku instead of three.
Literature
- Cities Of The Weft: The Mistress of Malarkoi and her daughter Dashini have long spines and feathers in place of hair, respectively. It's most likely an affectation, since the Mistress was human before she became a demigod-tier Reality Warper.
- Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Rei, a Siren, has feathers in place of hair on top of her head.
- The Spiderwick Chronicles: Merfolk and Nixies are fishlike and amphibian-like species, respectively, with "external gill filaments" of various kinds that resemble hair but aren’t. In the published version of the field guide, the Caribbean Mermaid has what looks like anemone tendrils on her head, while the lionfish-like Atlantic Sea King has lionfish fins there. The Nixie also has skin markings over her eyes that look like eyebrows.
- Wayfarers: The reptilian Aandrisk have very long feathers where a human would hair.
Live-Action TV
- Aliens in the Family: Spit has spikes growing out of his head instead of hair.
Mythology and Religion
- Classical Mythology: Medusa has snakes instead of hair.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Wind and Stormsoul Genasi have crystals in place of hair.
- Warhammer 40,000: Orks are naturally bald, and instead use a type of squig (vicious creatures that are half fungus, half teeth, and half mad) that's quite small but covered in hair (appropriately known as a hair-squig
) that bites down on their scalp and doesn't let go. They come in many lengths and colors, and so orks don't understand why humans never seem to want to trade for them.
Video Games
- Cuphead: Cala Maria is a mermaid with an octopus for hair, with the octopus's head vaguely resembling a bun. When she enters her gorgon phase, the octopus's tentacles become living snake heads.
- The Elder Scrolls: Argonians have just about everything but hair treated like hair. Horns, spikes (both flexible and rigid), scales, fins, feathers (particularly females), etc.
- Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: Intelligent murlocs are shown wearing their distinctive crest of spikes like hair. One female murloc even has hers done up in a ponytail. This is averted in World of Warcraft proper, where murlocs always keep their spikes straight up even while wearing a hat (although, this is more likely due to model limitations, and the fact that non-hostile clothes-wearing murlocs are exceptionally rare in the canon game).
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Queen Rutela has "hair" made of tubules, like coral.
- Mass Effect:
- The asari and their "hair-tentacles", or so Joker describes them, but they're not actually Tentacle Hair. They're are basically cartilaginous crests that grow in a vaguely curvy conic direction towards the back of the asari's head.
- Quarian evo-suits designed for men also have a bundle of cables connected to the top of their helmets to evoke a long braid.
- Mass Effect: Andromeda: The angara have a cobra-like hood in place of hair.
- Palworld: Lunarises have a pair of tendrils on their heads resembling long pigtails.
- Starcraft:
- The Protoss naturally have a long bundle of cable-like nerve cords growing out of their head like a ponytail that serves to connect them through the Khala; Dark Templars crop theirs to sever their connection to their race. This becomes a plot point in Legacy of the Void, where the heroic Protoss cut them off as the Khala is being used to enslave them.
- Post-infection Kerrigan has Alien Hair made of God-knows-what, which she retains and regains after [[being de-zerged and re-zerged]]. It stands out even more due to the Zerg being insectoid or reptilian and so having little to no hair.
- A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: Shapeshifters have snakes for hair, they also use the art called Lamia and have a humanoid top and snake-lower-body to match.
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary: A Fobott'r has a crest of similar shape and consistency to a human mohawk, but it's really a collection of symbiotes that help regulate temperature and the chemical balance of the blood and nervous system.
Web Videos
- Multiverse Tales: Fear Herself/Araava, one of the main villains, differs from other Overseers by having bubbling, shifting purple slime instead of hair on top of her head. This, combined with her unnaturally blackish-grey skin, Supernatural Gold Eyes, and Creepy Monotone, helps establish her as an unsettling Humanoid Abomination, perfectly fitting for a woman who created the hordes of demons that populate her world.
Western Animation
- Lilo & Stitch franchise: Angel (Experiment 624) has two long antennae that resemble human hair.
- The Owl House: Kikimora has a hand grabbing her head instead of actual hair.
