bad hair day
11
4.6
- noun
- Informal
:
mal día con el pelo
- After struggling with her curls all morning, she finally admitted, "Today is definitely a bad hair day."
It's going to be a very bad hair day, but it's unavoidable.
- It's going to be a very bad hair day, but it's unavoidable.
- So may all your good hair days outweigh all your bad hair days.
- I said maybe I should cancel this arrangement because I have a bad hair day.
- And the first thing they say is fuck you and I go, are you having a bad hair day?
Examples
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Social media does not help with this—who wants to share with the world about their breakdown because their clothes didn't fit properly and they were having a bad hair day?
Blog text (26) -
Looks like Jennifer Lopez had a bad hair day.
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Looks to me like a bad hair day.
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Do you want to have your picture taken on a bad hair day?
Blog text (26) -
Having a bad hair day?
Fiction book (2002) -
Did you have a bad hair day or something?
Blog text (18) -
Thank you, but I'm having a bad hair day.
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I'm having a bad hair day.
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But once my face was clean, I couldn't help but notice that I was having an exceptionally bad hair day.
Fiction book (1997) -
Hope you're not having a bad hair day, 'cause I'll have that thing airborne in no time.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase's meaning — a day when one’s hair looks untidy or is difficult to manage — is directly built from the constituents 'bad' + 'hair' + 'day' and requires no idiomatic inference beyond the literal senses. This compositional pattern is common cross-linguistically, so an average B1 learner who knows the words would readily understand the expression.
Etymology
Bad hair day paints a simple picture: your hair is messy or will not behave, and that small problem can make you feel embarrassed or annoyed all day. So, the phrase now means 'a day when your hair looks untidy and this affects how you feel'.