Jennifer Aniston’s singular, signature hair has, for decades, propeled women to the hair salon chair. The “Rachel”—a layered, dark blonde, shoulder-length ’do with face-framing pieces—sits pride of place in pop culture’s hair hall of fame. But Jen An is reminding us that her iconic hairstyle is far from natural.
In a video shared to her own personal Instagram and her haircare brand LolaVie, the actor responds to a question coming from off-camera about her color: “Would I ever go brunette? I am brunette.”
Friends co-star and longtime friend Courteney Cox then emerges into the frame: “Here, this is what she looks like brunette,” she says, spreading her own dark hair over Aniston’s head, framing her face.
“That’s black!” says Aniston.
“It’s not black,” Cox hits back playfully.
“It’s dark,” Aniston continues.
“It’s dark brown,” Cox retorts.
“Oh, this is like the Horrible Bosses character I played,” she says, in reference to the 2011 movie in which she sports a dark brown wig to play a sex-obsessed, unhinged dentist—a huge departure from her previous, mostly girls-next-doorsy roles. A hair transformation, then, made sense—but she had to fight for it (as she said in a previous interview) and it “was not an easy battle.”
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Last year, the actor and haircare mogul talked about how she “fought for” the hair switch-up, when speaking to Vanity Fair in a video looking back at some of her most titular roles.
“I wanted [my character] to look different,” she says. “The argument from the studio—and I am sorry to call you out—was that ‘we are afraid it won’t look like you.’ That’s kind of the point! I still think it might look like a little bit like me. But I’m glad I fought for it and stuck to my guns.”
“I was always seen as a girl next door or the ingenue. It was so fun to play something like this because it’s so far away from anything that I am,” she added. “That’s what the director liked. It’s so much not what you would expect. That was the fun of it. That’s what made it more creatively exciting for me, obviously.”
"Would I ever go brunette?" Aniston repeats once more after her brief hair experiment with Cox. “Yes! Well, that was, you saw that answer right? Did that work?” She runs her hands over her head, playfully calling her blonde hair “fake.”
The caption was equally fun: “Do blondes *reeeaaalllyyy* have more fun??”
Through the ’90s—pre Friends—Aniston kept her dark brunette hair in a quintessentially ’90s side part and soft for roles in movies like Molloy, Ferris Bueller, and Leprechaun, slowly adding in blonde highlights over the years to establish that iconic blonde ’do.
It’s not the first time Cox has had a cameo on the LolaVie account, which Aniston founded back in 2021. To celebrate her haircare brand’s fourth anniversary, Aniston gave her fellow Friends alum a bouncy, Rachel-esque, frizz-fighting blowout. Aniston’s boyfriend Jim Curtis has also made an appearance (only his second time appearing on her grid) to smooth out his curly mop.
Whatever shade, Jennifer Aniston’s hair style is a lifestyle.
