Sometimes the first thing we have a chance to judge about a person is their hair. It’s visible from far-away, it frames their face, and it’s more often than not consciously used to let others know what we’re all about.
With Fallout 4’s sophisticated engine, we can easily spend hours tweaking every angle of our character’s cheekbones to create an exact representation of who we want to play as.
Still, our minds are simple, and the hair on our Sole Survivor’s head will say much more than a subtle 2-degree inclination of the outer brow ever could.
Despite Bethesda being fully aware of the vital importance of customization, the speed at which they create new hairstyles for their character creation engines will never be enough to satisfy the gluttonous masses.
That’s where mods come in.
To help those of you desperately in need of a haircut, I’ve put together a list with the 15 best hairstyle mods for Fallout 4. Get ready to slay.
We start our ranking with a very simple yet very useful mod.
Thanks to modder Ayvis, it’s now possible to choose whichever hairstyle best fits your Sole Survivor from the get-go, with access to 14 male and 8 female options you would normally have to unlock by progressing through the game.
Did I mention it also unlocks opposite-sex hairstyles to be used by any Sole Survivor?
The gender roles made sense in the early 70s, but this is 2287, and things have changed.
Once you’ve done that, I’d suggest widening your hair dye repertoire to match your newly unlocked hairstyles.
Creator Derpsdale seeks to make that a simple process by simply enabling you to choose between a whopping 512 different hair colors.
This truly massive amount is achieved by combinations of highlights, textures and different hues of the same colors to increase variety and fulfill very specific desires.
If sheer variety is what you’re looking for, it doesn’t get any better than this.
That said, endless variety often leads to being paralyzed by the inability to choose just one.
A smart alternative would be going for something more curated, such as Zella’s Hair Dye Collection, uploaded by Jtesmer.
This mod adds numerous dyed hair texture replacers to give you an expansive color palette that really sets itself apart from the vanilla options.
Some even include natural eyebrow colors, which really puts emphasis on these being dyes rather than an unnatural hair color – making it extra lore-friendly.
But perhaps it’s not the hairdos or the limited color palette that really grinds your gears, but rather, the glossy texture that can make it look as if these guys haven’t washed their hair in months.
Granted, most of them probably haven’t.
This mod by creator Shred666 seeks to solve this and make hair look much more natural by upgrading the textures to either 2K or 4K, depending on your preferences and how much V-Ram you can spare.
Thanks to a couple tweaks and the simple increase in pixel density, you’ll notice the improvement right away. If you didn’t feel as if the vanilla hair had a problem before, I’m pretty sure you do now.
Sometimes, instead of working out a detailed solution, you just throw resources and manpower at your problems and hope they go away.
In this case, that takes the form of over a hundred new female hairstyles, as well as the addition of all the male ones, and a bunch of hybrids made with different parts ripped from the vanilla options.
Much like the extra 512 hair colors from a few mods back, this add-on by NexusMods user Rbddc12 seeks to solve the issue of insufficient hairstyles by completely flipping the pancake and giving you way too many to choose from.
Even more meaningful than adding over a hundred female hairstyles is doing the same for male ones.
The modding community rarely gives our boys the attention their hairstyles deserve, preferring to pray at the altar of over the top, hyper-animated female hairdos.
Thanks to this mod, which includes around 150 new hairstyles including hybrids, we’ll finally get the variety we have always wanted.
As if taking it upon themselves to address every one of the player population’s needs, modder Rbdcc12 also offers an expansion to facial hair options.
The vanilla game has little variety in the way of beards and mustaches, and a lot of what it has is occupied by styles nobody would wear if their lives depended on it.
With this mod adding over 100 new options, it’ll be hard for you not to put some volume on that five o’clock shadow.
If 512 different hair colors were a little bit too much for you, consider the more distilled appeal of these 82 new hues for your character’s mane.
Other than choosing the most appealing hair colors possible and maintaining a wide variety, modder Eraston also put in the time looking for interesting combinations of tones and textures.
And yet, somehow, they all manage to look natural and lifelike. This is hair you could see out on the streets – granted you met somebody with perfect styling skills.
When what you’re going for isn’t exactly variety, but rather elegance and volume, then Aniceoaktree’s Hairstyles is the first place to look.
This mod includes ten custom hairstyles, going from a very natural-looking combed hairstyle for men to a ponytail with a sort of spiral faux-hawk worthy of a scheming lady in a Victorian-era show.
It even includes what can only be described as a “Braveheart” hairdo for men, and if that doesn’t justify its place on the ranking, I don’t know what would.
People in the Wasteland have gone without shampoo and hair conditioner for far too long, and you can easily see that on their hair.
Thanks to NexusMods user Limo, you don’t have to put up with it anymore.
Bring the inhabitants of the Commonwealth the gift of good hair with Wasteland Salon, a mod that gives the hair textures a bit more contrast and variation.
With it, vanilla hairstyles and any others using the default textures will look a bit less bright and flat. It breaks the uniformity and gives their hair a more lifelike appearance.
Ponytail hairstyles used to be severely limited due to the way they to behave in the real world. Ponytails move, they sway, and that used to be hard to reproduce in-game.
Luckily for us modern humans, the times have changed, and now modders like Azarikowa can offer us the wonders of animated ponytails with realistic physics – 32 of them, to be exact.
Although it’s among the least mobile of the bunch, my favorite hairstyle in this mod is the Ponytail Dreads, which look quite natural.
Sometimes, what you need to achieve greatness isn’t creativity or inspiration, but the smarts to apply the available technology the best way possible.
Creator ClearanceClarence took pictures of actual hair, put them in Photoshop, and found the average shade by merging the colors. Then they used these to create the color gradient that this mod implements.
The result is natural-looking, vibrant appearances that can elevate almost any hairdo to greatness.
Choosing quality and detail over quantity, modder Vermillion brings us six new short-haired styles originally introduced in an older Skyrim mod.
Given how long the Skyrim modding community has been working on improving the game’s look, it’s no wonder some of the best aesthetic mods in Fallout 4 are ported directly from The Elder Scrolls V.
These are perfect for the cyberpunk head-hunter Sole Survivor, as well as anyone trying to turn their Fallout 4 into the most stylized game possible.
Combining intricate overly-stylized design with the wonders of hair physics comes KS Hairdos, another hairstyle pack ported straight from Skyrim.
Granted, you have to be willing to throw all realism out of the window, but this mod uploaded by Oeliza will grant you access to almost 725 elaborate hairstyles that make just a little more sense in the post-apocalyptic Commonwealth than they did in northern Tamriel.
Whether it’s variety or sheer quality, no other mod in the Nexus comes close.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
