The Royal Family's Most Embarrassing Hair Mistakes

Being a member of Britain's royal family comes with a lot of privileges, but it also comes with a lot of rules and restrictions, especially around maintaining an appropriate image. As you might expect, modest guidelines for skirt length and cleavage control are included, but the monarchy's other sartorial rules can seem strange, if not outright arbitrary. For example, royal ladies must only carry purses in their left hand, are strongly encouraged to wear sheer pantyhose, and should never don colorful nail polish.

And the particulars don't stop there. Members of Britain's royal institution must also pay keen attention to their hair, which could make or break an otherwise elegant look. Their coifs are meant to be perfect in all circumstances, with no pesky flyaways or slapdash styles allowed. Unfortunately, though, even experienced aristocrats don't always get it right. From Kate Middleton to Queen Camilla, several royal ladies have made embarrassingly public hair mistakes.

Catherine, Princess of Wales — still known more informally by her maiden name — has been hailed as a paragon of upper-crust refinement. Apart from a few of Kate Middleton's more inappropriate outfits, she seems to have mastered the royal look, from tasteful pantyhose and skirt weights to her sleek curls. However, Kate's hair was unusually frizzy and unmanageable during a 2012 visit to Singapore. The island nation's humid weather seemingly got the better of her typically silky tresses, creating an aesthetic that was more evocative of a frazzled Hermione Granger than of calm and collected royalty.

It was a danger Kate had apparently seen coming: As the trip got underway, a young fan asked the Princess of Wales for hairstyling tips. "I asked her how she kept her hair so perfect in this weather, because it's so humid. Mine always poofs up," Ella Major told the Daily Mail. "She was afraid that her hair might be the same way in a few minutes. She said that her hair would poof up soon enough." Still, Princess Kate didn't let her styling woes slow her down — she was gracious as ever throughout the Singapore trip, which was just the first stop on her and William, Prince of Wales' goodwill tour honoring Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.

Since marrying into Britain's royal family, former "Suits" actor and now Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle has never seemed like much of a fan of their styling conventions, whether she's flaunting progressive wardrobe choices or ignoring the tradition of tidy hairnets to keep her updos in place. But certain mistakes can't be written off as a disagreement with the monarchial norm — sometimes, a bad hair day is just a bad hair day.  For instance, there was definitely something strange going on with Meghan's hairstyle at the 2017 Invictus Games in Toronto. 

From the front, Meghan's hair looked relatively normal, seeming to aim for a classic middle part. But things got wonky at the crown of her head, where the part abruptly zagged sideways. Maybe it was windy in the stands, because her hairdresser surely didn't create that sloppy, disjointed part on purpose — and Meghan's rearmost tresses also looked a little scraggly, like they'd perhaps been wafted into tangles.

A few eagle-eyed Reddit users have also suggested that this jarring hairdo might be the result of poorly applied extensions. "Real hair (and part) in the front, extension tacked onto the back," guessed one. Another chimed in, "The photo clearly shows the weaves in her hair. Normal hair doesn't sit like that." Meghan Markle has certainly undergone a stunning hair transformation over the years, and it wouldn't be a surprise if hair pieces played a role — they're common enough in Hollywood, after all. Under the watchful eye of the media, it's just a matter of keeping those extensions corralled.

Meghan Markle's flub at the Invictus Games sadly wasn't the only time she's had trouble wrangling her chaotic hair. Things got even worse during her first solo trip with Queen Elizabeth II in 2018 — an all-important gesture from the sitting monarch. While the duo were attending a ceremony to open the new Mersey Gateway Bridge, they had to endure strong gusts from Storm Hector. Having unwisely chosen to wear her hair down for the occasion, Meghan once again saw her loose locks fly every which way, utterly destroying her tidy part. The resulting look was sadly jumbled, rather than regal.

Unsurprisingly, this incident elicited more harsh observations from Meghan's critics on Reddit. "If you know you're going to be outside, and wind is expected, you don't wear your hair down loose in your face," wrote one, while many others questioned her lack of a hat. Not only would a fascinator have helped keep her hairstyle contained in the blustery weather, but it apparently would have been more polite, as well. "As the highest ranking lady in the UK, other ranked ladies should know that if the Queen is wearing a hat, so should they," wrote one user. As another Redditor remarked, "Her hair probably looks almost as good as Catherine's indoors but a bit of a breeze is going to make it wild."

Diana, Princess of Wales, was one of the U.K.'s most beloved and celebrated royals, from her warm demeanor to her classy aesthetic — but even style icons make missteps. In Diana's case, the 1980s came for her hairstyle, and the product-heavy trends of the time left their mark on her precisely coiffed 'do. "Terrible hair," photographer David Bailey told The Telegraph, recalling a 1988 photoshoot with the princess. "You know, from the hairspray — solid as a plastic dummy."

In Diana's defense, maximum-hold hair products were a staple of the era. Moreover, Diana had good reason to be extra stringent with her bulletproof hair: As an oft-photographed representative of the monarchy, it was critical that she looked tidy and put-together at all times. Layers upon layers of hairspray were surely one way of preventing any style malfunctions. However, the '90s were kinder, and Princess Diana's style changed further after she left the royal family in 1996. While she kept her hair short during this period, it had a softer look with tousled layers and was often paired with ensembles that felt much more modern and casual than her stiff '80s wardrobe. 

Princess Diana may have been dinged for her rigid hairstyle, but then-Prince Charles' second wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, encountered the opposite problem. At the couple's first outing as spouses — opening a pavilion in London's Regent's Park in 2005 — the brand-new Duchess of Cornwall endured lashing wind and rain that thoroughly (and repeatedly) disrupted her bob. Credit to Camilla, she weathered the squall with good humor, joking to the press, "I'm going to go off like Mary Poppins" (via the Daily Mail).

Despite the occasional weather-beaten moment, Camilla has stuck close to her preferred hairstyle. In fact, she's had the same stylist, Jo Hansford, for over 35 years. And even at the 2023 coronation ceremony, where she officially became Queen Camilla, she kept things simple and regal with a short halo of swept-back tresses — topped, of course, with a crown. Namely, Camilla wore the royal heirloom Queen Mary's Crown, which is set with 2,200 diamonds and dates back to 1911. "I think the difficulty will be putting the crown on without changing the style," Hansford told BBC's Women's Hour shortly before the coronation. Otherwise, the stylist predicted, "I think she'll look gorgeous. ... I'm sure her hair will look the same as it always looks, and it does look good now. Yes, in photos, it looks so much better, the color, because it's softer and warmer."

And thank goodness, Hansford was right. Putting any previous hair mistakes behind her, the queen consort shone like the jewels on her crown for Coronation Day. Even her makeup was flawless, which was another sigh of relief — Camilla's occasionally had flubs in that department, too, such as her 2018 self-tan debacle, which counts among the royal family's biggest makeup mistakes.