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Anderson Cooper is taking some time away from the cameras to experiment with a new look.
On Aug. 7, the news anchor, 58, shared a selfie to his Instagram Stories showing off his grown-out facial hair, and because fans of the CNN celebrity know Cooper for his clean-shaven appearance, his scruffy look certainly shocked a few.
In the photo, the dad of two smiled with his gray whiskers and bristles on display. For what appeared to be a day off, he also wore a laid-back outfit including a New York Yankees baseball cap and navy T-shirt.
“Heading back to work soon,” he captioned the photo alongside a follow-up question for his followers “Shave or keep?”
Anderson Cooper/Instagram
In addition to his hairless facial feature, Cooper’s other recognizable asset is his silver-white hairstyle. While that’s remained a constant throughout his career, Cooper previously confessed that he actually isn’t a fan of what, in part, has made him famous.
“I don’t really like my gray hair. I wish I still had brown hair. It’s not my thing,” Cooper shared while co-hosting Live! With Kelly in 2016. “If I could, I would probably color my hair, but I couldn’t imagine sitting in a salon with tin foil in my hair reading old issues of Rosie for hours. At this point it’s too late — the cow has left the barn.” He did recall having brunette hair at some point in his 30s, although he doubted there wasn’t at least some “pepper somewhere in there.”
Later in a 2024 episode of Ripa’s podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, Cooper recalled going gray while studying at Yale University.
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“I was on the crew team and I was starving myself to get down to race weight of 125 pounds,” he said. “I would drop 20 pounds for races and my hair by senior year started to go gray, which I think has something to do with my poor diet and starving myself.”
His lifestyle may have accelerated the process, but genetics, he explained, also played a part. “Both my parents both my mom and dad started going gray,” he said in reference to his late parents, Gloria Vanderbilt and Wyatt Cooper. He even revealed that two years before his mom’s death in 2019, she would subtly recommend hair-thinning products. “What I realize is, like, with my hair really short, you can just see my pink rat-like scalp because it comes through.”
At the end of the day, no matter what stage or color his hair is in, Cooper can at least talk about it with hilarious candor. “I try to avoid looking in mirrors now because I look in the mirror and I’m like Casper the Friendly Ghost. I’m just completely white. If I took off my glasses, you couldn’t see me at all,” he joked at the time.
