bad hair day

bad hair day noun: a day when one's hair seems unmanageable.

Image: Colin McLaughlin, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

bad hair day (plural bad hair days)

(literally) A day when one's hair seems unmanageable.
- Okay, girls, here's the plan. I'll call Jerry and tell him we need to get to Tahiti A.S.A.P. Clover, you free the Bees and restore their memories. Alex, you figure out how to put an end to this very, very, very bad hair day.2002 March 23, Michelle and Robert Lamoreaux, “The Black Widows”, in Totally Spies!, season 1, episode 16, spoken by Samantha “Sam” (Jennifer Hale), Marathon Media, via Teletoon
Synonyms:

hairmageddon
(broadly, idiomatic) A day when things seem to be unmanageable or go wrong.
- What's the matter with Fred? Oh, he's just having a bad hair day.
- Okay, girls, here’s the plan. I’ll call Jerry and tell him we need to get to Tahiti A.S.A.P. Clover, you free the Bees and restore their memories. Alex, you figure out how to end this very, very, very bad hair day.2002 March 23, Michelle and Robert Lamoreaux, “The Black Widows”, in Totally Spies!, season 1, episode 16, spoken by Samantha “Sam” (Jennifer Hale), Marathon Media, via Teletoon

plural	bad hair days

Said to have been coined by British trichologist Philip Kingsley (1930–2016).

What does bad hair day mean?: Bad hair day means a day when one's hair seems unmanageable.
What part of speech is bad hair day?: Bad hair day is a noun.
What is the plural of bad hair day?: The plural of bad hair day is bad hair days.

Adapted from Wiktionary: bad hair day (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-bad hair day.ogg.

Cite this entry: “bad hair day.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bad_hair_day. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.