• Madonna has switched things up in the hair department, trading her signature blonde locks for a retro curly dark brunette bob.
• As the singer explained on Instagram, she wanted to channel her late mother with the look.
• Madonna’s mother, Madonna Louise Ciccone, died when Madonna was 5 years old.

Madonna is paying tribute to her late mother in the most unexpected way—with a bold hair transformation. The singer took to her Instagram Stories on May 18 with a series of selfies of the look—instead of her signature blonde hair, she rocked a retro, textured bob in a dark brown shade. “I missed my Mother so I channeled her…” Madonna wrote across the first image. She also sported layered silver necklaces and white French tip nails.

Madonna’s mother and namesake, Madonna Louise Ciccone, died from breast cancer in 1963 when Madonna was just 30—Madonna was only 5 years old at the time. Over the years, Madonna has spoken about the impact of the loss on her throughout her life. “I became very obsessed with death, and the idea that you never know when death will arrive, so one has to do as much as possible all the time to get the most out of life,” she said to Interview in 2014. “That would be a motivating force.”

In a 2023 Instagram post, Madonna reflected on her mother’s death.

“I miss my mother every day And have fantasized for decades of what it must be like to have a mother to: call on for help, guidance, care And wisdom and yet I rejected the idea of being a mother well into my 30s because I associated motherhood with sacrifice suffering and ultimately death and I wanted none of that,” she wrote.

Madonna did eventually have children—she welcomed Lourdes in 1996 with ex Carlos Leon and Rocco with ex Guy Ritchie in 2000, and later adopted David, Mercy, Stella, and Estere.

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