Erika Titus couldn’t sleep one night. It was around midnight, and she had been watching Stranger Things when a shame spiral found her.
“I was literally sitting right here, in this very bed that I’m sitting on right now,” Titus told BuzzFeed, gesturing to her bed, beside dark brown curtains. “I was feeling kind of sad that night, really in like, that self-loathing space, which I think we all get in our early 20s, as we’re kind of navigating everything.”
The 23-year-old content creator has been making TikTok videos for her four million followers since she was a teenager. In that time, she’s been open about feelings of insecurity and anxiety, which she said a presence on social media has exacerbated.
Titus told BuzzFeed it’s not rare for her to sit on her bed and enter what she calls a negative thought cycle. But something different happened when it found her that night. A thought randomly popped into her head — one she couldn’t ignore.
“I had the thought of shaving my head,” she told BuzzFeed.
Sporadically, this idea had entered her brain over the years, but never in a serious way.
“You know how everybody says, like, ‘Oh my god, I’m going crazy! I’m gonna shave my head,’” Titus explained to BuzzFeed.
But that night, instead of waving off the thought like she usually would, Titus started doing research. She wanted to know why women did this, and fell down a rabbit hole, spending hours watching videos about other women who had taken the plunge and shaved their heads.
“It made me really emotional,” she said, tearing up in a TikTok video posted on Dec. 16, 2025. “For me, it was like, that’s so scary, and I would hate it…And that’s exactly why I should do it.”
In that video, Titus outlined a couple of reasons why shaving her head would be a good idea. One was to transform her thoughts on feminism and beauty, which she admittedly has a strained relationship with, partially due to growing up Mormon, she said.
Another reason was to face the anxiety, guilt, and shame that cause Titus to be a “chronic people pleaser.” Because of those people-pleasing tendencies, Titus said she doesn’t know what she herself finds to be beautiful, and she wanted to explore that.
“My want to be beautiful has never really been, like for me,” she said in her TikTok. “I’ve never wanted to achieve beauty for me. It’s always been out of fear. Like, everything I do has always been in the hopes that other people will like it.”
Initially, Titus told her followers that she would start slow with a “bixie” cut—a mix between a bob and a pixie, like first lady of New York City Rama Duwaji. She also said she needed time to think about this big decision.
Anytime she thought about shaving her head, her mind was invaded by negative self-talk.
“It’s like, ‘Well, you don’t even deserve to do new things.’ Or, ‘You’re not good enough to try these things.’ And, ‘it’s embarrassing that you want to try these things,’ and it’s just all these horrible thoughts,” Titus told BuzzFeed. “When I want to try new things, I’m always like, ‘Ok, yeah, you can try that, but you know yourself already, and you know that you’re going to give up.’ Like, it’s me competing against myself.”
Titus said she wanted to stop feeling this way and felt like cutting her hair could be the fresh, clean slate she was craving.
So, she bought a buzzer — no more time to stew on it, no baby-steps bixie. Just a buzzer, some hairties, her two siblings, Jacob and Kirsten, and her vlog camera.
Then, on the first day of 2026, she shaved her head.
Immediately, her comments became flooded with people sharing their opinions. Some were…interesting.
But, mostly, her comments were full of support. Much of which came from women who had done the same thing.
“To have that space, and have that discourse with other women was really nice,” Titus told BuzzFeed. “Loved the girls that were like ‘this is the best thing that I did for myself to grow,’ and even the women that were like, ‘girl, this is the worst thing I ever did.’ But, the main thing is that nobody ever regretted it.”
Francesa Ridella always wanted to shave her head. In fact, she took a baby step years before and got an undercut, but she could never fully commit to shaving her entire head. “I was really scared I wouldn’t be beautiful,” Ridella told BuzzFeed.
“It felt like she was putting my own thoughts into words,” Benisch told BuzzFeed. “She spoke about her emotional connection to her hair, the fear, the hesitation, and the courage it took to finally take that step. Seeing someone go through that same internal battle and come out the other side feeling empowered and free made it all feel possible for me. Her bravery was what finally pushed me from thinking about it to actually doing it.”
In the comments of videos like Trinity’s, Ridella’s, and Benisch’s, similar hoards of supportive women were sounding off.
Titus described seeing women cite her as their inspiration for shaving their heads as “amazing.”
“Girl, I just don’t want anybody to feel like they have to be doing anything other than being themselves,” Titus told BuzzFeed. “My main motivation behind shaving my head was obviously focused on my appearance and everything, but as I got more into it I was like…man, it’s just so crazy how society has nailed all of these beauty standards into us from such a young age. So, it makes me feel great that some women are just like, ‘No, I’m not gonna do this anymore. I’m not gonna let society control me.’”
In the month since Titus shaved her head, she’s already begun to experiment with length and color. She bleached her hair, hated it, then dyed it again, this time a “milk tea” color. She’s also experimented with wigs, and said that the growth journey that comes next won’t be linear. But, no matter what, she’s committed to seeing through every emotion that comes with this chapter of her life, positive or negative.
“The biggest lesson I want to be learned is that it’s never too late to stop hating yourself,” Titus told BuzzFeed. “It gets really exhausting to hate yourself all of the time, and whether it’s shaving your head, or not, [people] should just find things to work on, and do that inner work. It’s never too late to try new things, never too late to let yourself become the person that you’ve wanted to be.”
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