Meaning
Literally, a day when one's hair will not behave or look right; far more often, a day when everything seems to go wrong and one feels generally frazzled or out of sorts. Predominantly American and most at home in informal US English, though now widely understood elsewhere. Informal and self-deprecating; keeps difficulties light rather than serious. Regional use: American English (clothing origin).
Origin
The Phrase Finder's earliest documented citation is from the Lansing State Journal of Michigan in February 1970, which treats 'a bad hair day' as an established barbershop complaint about hair that 'gets too expressive'; the OED's earliest evidence is likewise the 1970 Lansing paper. The literal sense came first, and the generalized 'day when nothing goes right' developed as the phrase spread through American media in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Various people, including talk-show figures and comedians, have been credited with coining it, but researchers report no hard evidence for any of those attributions. A line in the 1992 film Buffy the Vampire Slayer gave it a further push, and William Safire examined its history in his New York Times language column in 1993 by which time it was a national catchphrase.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- bad hair days (plural)
- bad-hair-day (attributive)
- having a bad hair day
Usage Examples
- Sorry I snapped earlier; I've been having a bad hair day since the alarm failed to go off.
- The interview happened to fall on the one morning she woke up to a genuinely bad hair day.
- A delayed flight and a lost bag combined into the travel version of a bad hair day.