For a moment, Katy Perry fans thought that the pop star’s long, wavy hairstyle had become the one that got away. But as it turned out, she’d been pranking them all along.
It all started when Perry posted a self-filmed video via X on Monday showing off what appeared to be a choppy new bob as her hairstylist touched up the ends with a pair of scissors. “What are you doing?” she asked the stylist, who replied matter-of-factly, “Cutting your hair.”
“thoughts, comments, concerns?” she captioned the clip.
Apparently, KatyCats had all of the above. Many of them did not hold back in the comments, expressing their dislike for the makeover and comparing it to when Perry chopped her hair into a pixie cut in 2017.
“GIRL WHAT ARE YOU DOING,” one person wrote, while another fan commented, “I THOUGHT WE LEARNED OUR LESSON.”
By the end of the day, however, Perry had returned to socials with another video message — this time, dedicated to “all you KatyRats.” “You guys had a lot of strong feelings about my haircut,” she addressed followers in a video on Instagram, sitting on a staircase while sipping Coca-Cola nonchalantly from a straw. “Let’s save that energy for KP6, because this is just a wig.”
For good measure, the “Roar” singer also trolled fans during Monday’s episode of American Idol, as captured in a fan video. “Big shoutout to all of my KatyCat fans who think I got a haircut. They’re traitors,” she said on the show, earning chuckles from co-judges Luke Bryan and Lionel Richie.
Aside from putting her fans through the ringer, Perry is currently working on finishing her final season as a judge on Idol. And, as she hinted in her Instagram video, she’s also finishing up her highly anticipated sixth studio album, which will follow 2020’s Smile.
“I just have yet to make a record from a place of feeling really happy and whole and full of love,” she said of the pending LP in a recent interview with Access Hollywood. “Sometimes artists are like, ‘Oh, that’s boring, you want to make music from kind of like a tougher place,’ but actually it’s very bright and joyful, like pure joy and fun and playful and celebratory and a party.”
See Perry’s haircut prank play out below.