Frosted Tips Are Back. What Took Us So Long?

Lance Bass, who currently serves as the literal Wikipedia photo for frosted tips, posted a TikTok last December claiming he was returning to his “Frosted Tip roots.” The former *NSYNC member isn’t the only one: Mark McGrath, David Beckham, Jared Leto, and other early adopters of the look have all sported the style over the years.

Frosted tips’ inherent tackiness is culturally specific; the style has long been treated as an embarrassing relic of boy bands, reality television, mall culture, and turn-of-the-millennium masculinity. (In 2018, GQ called frosted tips a trend Timberlake “survived.”)

But as the Y2K revival exhausts the era’s most cherished references — tiny sunglasses, low-rise jeans, velour sweats, zig-zag headbands, claw and butterfly clips, side parts — it’s finally reaching the beauty choices we’ve spent decades disavowing. We’ve reached late-stage Y2K nostalgia, and frosted tips are finally boomeranging back full force.

So how exactly did frosted tips escape the spiky-haired boy-bander and migrate into 2026? It’s an aesthetic rejection of severe, self-serious masculinity in favor of a more playful, less polished, but still visibly constructed approach to grooming — and the intentionally tacky “crunch” is finally worth embracing.

From *NSYNC To Guy Fieri: A Brief History

In the mid-‘90s, frosted tips rose to prominence as both a grittier foil to the ‘80s surfer aesthetic and a tamed-down response to the disheveled, Nirvana-inspired grunge movement of the early ‘90s. Timberlake and the rest of *NSYNC were poster children for the hairstyle in its heyday. As the trend faded, the exemplar quickly shifted from JT to Guy Fieri.

So frosted tips never really got the chance to become culturally neutral. That may be why it's so jarring to see the style IRL. And celebs are still the go-to inspo: “They want to look like Brad Pitt,” says Ian Whitman, a stylist at New York City’s Mott Salon. Whitman has been seeing an increase in clients asking for all-over bleaching, and most recently gave Benito Skinner his bleached do. “There's one photo of [Pitt] in the ‘90s where he's really blonde. That's what Benny showed me.”

Full Bleach To Frosted Tips

A new wave of frosted tips has been emerging almost by accident as a byproduct of the buzz-and-bleach craze of the late-2010s-early-2020s: someone gets a buzzcut, bleaches it, and then, as it grows out, it becomes frosted tips. I’ve been watching my SoulCycle instructor repeat the process all year.

Pete Davidson, Dominic Fike, and Troye Sivan have all sported the look. After debuting his all-over bleach in July, Skinner showed off his frosted tips at Calvin Klein’s S27 NYFW show and the U.S. Open Semifinals.

Sometimes, when clients are looking for frosted tips, Whitman suggests an all-over bleach, which lets them lean into the natural grow-out as the weeks go by. “I'm like, ‘Why don't we just do the full thing, to get two looks out of this?’ And a lot of them just let it grow to the frosted tips look,” Whitman says. “[I tell them] ‘We can either keep touching it up or let it kind of grow into something that's an evolution.’”

So some of frosted tips’ “return” could be, in part, transitional, a result of a bleached hair maintenance cycle rather than one specifically going for the Lance Bass look, frosting cap and all. The options are boundless, not restricted to just one look. “When you get a lot of root, you can kind of take it anywhere you want,” says Lauren Naomi, color director at Mott Salon and in-house wig colorist at Shani Wigs. “You can bleach again, you can let it all grow out, you can add another color on top.”

Malleable Masculinity Embraces The Crunch

Even those who opt for a full bleach first are still adopting frosted tips in their starkest form. This is most often seen in sports, where the examples are more varied and overt: Joe Burrow, Odell Beckham Jr., Lionel Messi, and Cristiano Ronaldo have all donned the look on the field.

Since the Beckham days, soccer seems to have been an unofficial breeding ground for frosted tips, and the 2026 World Cup was no exception. The interpretations were more creative, less cut-and-paste: Spain’s Nico Williams had frosted tips on his locs while Curaçao’s Tahith Chong’s tips cast a halo around the edges of his curls.

Frosted tips have thus escaped boy band purgatory, leaving room for people with any hairstyle, texture, or cut to offer their own interpretations. It’s especially popular with Gen Z. “Younger generations love the color blocking and making things their own,” Naomi says. “Bleaching is another way to do that, because of all the different things you can do with it, like Alysa Liu’s stripes.”

The Appeal Of Looking A Little Ridiculous

The style’s appeal is in the wearer’s willingness to look a little silly, conspicuous, and groomed-but-not-too-groomed at a moment when male beauty often falls to one extreme or the other (i.e., 3-in-1 hair-and-body wash versus looksmaxxing).

“A lot of men are afraid to have a routine, or [to] care about their look, or experiment,” Whitman explains. “But I've noticed that a lot of them are excited and willing to learn how to style it, take care of it.”

Whitman sees that willingness to experiment as a shift in how bleaching is perceived. “I think [people] kind of shame guys when it comes to, ‘Oh, he's having a mental breakdown, he's bleaching his hair,’” Whitman says. “But I grew up bleaching my hair and coloring it as a way to express myself. Now, everyone's like, ‘Actually, that's punk and cool looking and fun and cute, and we should bring it back.’”

On the surface, the frosted tips of today don’t look much different from those of decades past. No matter how you get to them, they’re still bleached ends and dark roots. What’s changed is our willingness to take them seriously — or, more accurately, not take them seriously at all.