By Cara Schacter

Copyright gq

Last week, Carlos Alcaraz celebrated his Grand Slam win by bleaching his buzz cut.
Tuesday afternoon, forty-something hours after showing up to the U.S. Open freshly shorn (he said his brother “misunderstood with the machine”), Alcaraz appeared on Instagram in a makeshift aluminum beanie with white cream poking out around his temple.
His pivot to peroxide came at the end of an eighteen-slide carousel captioned, “Blessed hands,” with a couplet of emojis distilling the key takeaway: “🏆💈.” After recapping off-court moments like eating ramen and clubbing with Adrien Brody, the photo dump ended with his trophy poised on the edge of a roof, and then some foreshadowing: a shirtless selfie of Alcaraz on a sunny balcony with foil presciently clutching his scalp.
Seventeen hours later, he added to his Story: “✌️ ⚪” over a shot of his hair bleached beyond blond.
What do we call this spectral shade? Colorists use the term “level ten,” the point where pigment is fully stripped. It’s somewhere between gray, violet, and invisible. Imagine a Scandi-blond standing under the surgical cast of a Greyhound bus stop bathroom light, say. It’s cool and clinical but also campy and space-age in a retro-futurist Jetsons silver kind of way but with a bit of a powdery Versailles vibe. Think: the synthetic glare of a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser but with a celestial edge.
Online, people compared it to a snow cone and mold spore (I think they mean the hyphal growth around sporangium). Others invoked Eminem, tennis ball fuzz, Draco Malfoy, and other pure-blood wizards. An X user mentioned “big anime villain energy.” In a thread titled, “Alcaraz’s new haircut. No, it’s not AI,” someone said it was proof that Alcaraz is lab-grown, “I see no other explanation.”
Alcaraz’s barber might have one. Victor Martinez (@victorbarbers5) shared the bleach job on TikTok with the message: Nos volvimos locos pero tenemos palabra (roughly translated to “we went crazy but we keep our word”), suggesting, perhaps, some kind of pre-game platinum promise.
Over on r/tennis, a warning from u/random-user772: “Carlitos, you should take full advantage of your hair…after all there’s an epidemic of androgenetic alopecia on the Iberian peninsula.”
Which raises the larger question: is this the type of thing normal people can pull off?
It might depend on your bone structure. Before erasing your hair, consider your cheekbones. It’s kind of like removing the ceiling of a cathedral. Without frescoes, the stonework has to carry the story. Can your facial architecture handle it?
Erase the hairline and eyebrows rise to power. Alcaraz’s brows, already thick, seem even thicker in contrast to the blankness above. This isn’t “good” or “bad,” just something to keep in mind as the margin for expression shrinks; a slight furrow and people might think you’re mad.
Teeth, too, are affected. Bleaching shifts the visual balance of the face. Pale hair means enamel gets more attention. “His smile shines even brighter,” one fan said on Instagram.
Aesthetics aside, there’s the matter of practicality. A snow cone cut isn’t icy for long. Hair averages half an inch a month, and since Alcaraz is twenty-two with a high-calorie intake and good blood flow, it’s a recipe for robust follicular activity. That said, I don’t think he cares. As Alcaraz told the press: “I’m the guy who thinks, like, the hair grows. In a few days it’s going to be already okay I guess, so…it just happened and that’s it.”