Seeing Bad Bunny live isn’t just a concert — it’s a cultural experience, one for which his fans are willing to pull every stop possible when it comes to their wardrobe, hair, and makeup. Many buy entirely new outfits just for the occasion, have their makeup done for them, and — in many cases – hire a very specific hairstylist to give them a very specific hairstyle. That hairstylist would be Nicole Morales.
If you search “Bad Bunny hairstyles” on TikTok, you won’t find videos of the singer’s own hairstyles — you’ll come across Morales’s account instead. Videos of fans with similar hairstyles featuring glittery mermaid waves, pastel butterfly hair clips, and bubble pigtails — the type of hairstyling responsible for her strong social media presence and virality — can be seen throughout her account. The Puerto Rico native remembers when the artist first announced his tour; she had an influx of new clients who had seen her work online requesting appointments before he even revealed the dates and locations. Immediately, she knew she needed to prepare, but what she didn’t know was just how far this tour would take her.
“This concert changed my life,” Morales recalls to Allure. She created a home-based hairstyling business in Puerto Rico during the pandemic and slowly built a small client base and social media following that way. But it was a hairstyle she did for a client going to Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour that catapulted her into virality and helped expand her client base to the United States. “I woke up to my TikTok going viral; it was my first video to go viral,” Morales recalls of the days after Bad Bunny’s first stop in Puerto Rico on July 28th, 2022. The video generated 771,000 and counting views on TikTok, and it’s not even her most popular video on the app as of today (her most popular video from September 26, taken during the tour’s Las Vegas stop, features several of her clients in her infamous bubble pigtails and mermaid waves and currently has 2.4 million views). The TikTok featured a hairstyle of a concertgoer that included those aforementioned butterfly hair clips, tinsel, mermaid waves, bubble pigtails, and glitter hairspray.
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After that, the hairstyle — now known as Morale’s signature — quickly became synonymous with Bad Bunny‘s World’s Hottest Tour. Soon enough, it would bring Morales on her own international excursion while following Bad Bunny’s US tour leg. “Girls started to reach out to me via DM on Instagram and asked me to come to their city to do their hair,” Morales recalls. Upon realizing this could become a true career opportunity for her daughter, Morales’s mother Heyde agreed to help her manage her schedule, and the duo embarked on their journey from there. They made stops in Florida, New York, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Texas, where concertgoers could get their hair done by Morales and, of course, participate in her social media content.
Morales credits her success to the community of young people in Puerto Rico. “Getting dressed up and our hair done for concerts is a ritual now. In Puerto Rico we go all out; ‘hay que darlo todo’ (you have to give it your all),” Morales explains. In fact, she says there is at least one concert a month on the island, with the mecca of all concert venues being El Choliseo located in San Juan, the island’s capital. “El Choli,” as Puerto Ricans have nicknamed the venue where Bad Bunny made his first stop, has become a hot spot for reggaeton artists and the sizzling youth culture of Puerto Rico to come together.
