Madonna’s Beauty Evolution: Tracing 28 of Her Most Iconic Transformations

How many times can Madonna reinvent herself in one lifetime? Decades after she first disrupted the pop culture sphere with boyish brows and a peroxide blonde crop, the Material Girl, who turns 64 today, continues to be a beauty renegade.

Though she's currently synonymous with shocking shades of platinum, it's easy to forget that the music icon—born Madonna Louise Ciccone in Bay City, Michigan—arrived on the New York club scene with her natural brunette shade. Before long, she had dyed her shoulder-length mane jet black, then lobbed it off into a punkish pixie (a precursor to Kristen Stewart and Cara Delevingne's modern iterations). It wasn't until her defining Like a Virgin period, when stylist, It-girl, and confidante Maripol was recalibrating her look, that she first started bleaching it and embracing the de facto volume of the eighties—along with the mononym that would come to define her.

While maintaining her bold brows and signature swipe of deep red lipstick, she plunged headfirst into her early 90s Blond Ambition phase, teaming custom Jean Paul Gaultier costumes with high, mile-long ponytails and glossy Marilyn-Monroe-inspired pin curls. But while Madonna has never been one for minimalism, she did come around to the decade's more understated glamour with smooth, shoulder-grazing lengths, both blanched and darkened, before getting in touch with her bohemian side and adopting more lived-in textures as she embraced Kabbalah and dominated the charts with 1998's Ray of Light.

From the early 2000s through today, she's rarely paused for a beat, particularly when it comes to her shape-shifting coif. Re-imagining many of her iconic looks with new, subversive twists—think a towering gold bun adorned with a turquoise Louis Vuitton headdress or razor-sharp black bob with micro fringe at the 2009 and 2013 Met Galas, respectively—Madonna is more of a chameleon than ever before.