Britney Spears Reveals Why She Shaved Her Head in 2007

More than a decade after she made headlines in 2007 when she shaved her head, Britney Spears is opening up about the infamous moment. In an excerpt from her upcoming tell-all memoir, The Woman In Me, the singer revealed that she shaved her head as an act of rebellion before she was placed under a conservatorship in 2008.

"I'd been eyeballed so much growing up. I'd been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager." Spears writes in the memoir, per PEOPLE. "Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back."

At the time of that headline-making moment, Spears's divorce from her ex-husband had only recently been finalized and the singer was a constant paparazzi target and gossip fixture. Amid the turmoil, one night in 2007, the singer walked into Esther's Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California and asked for her head to be shaved. When the salon's owner, Esther Tognozzi, refused, Spears gave herself a buzzcut as paparazzi photographed the moment through the salon's windows.

Shortly after, Spears was placed under a conservatorship, with her father, Jamie Spears, taking over control of her personal, medical, and financial affairs. Spears writes in her memoir that under the conservatorship, she "was made to understand that those days were now over. I had to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I had to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take." Although Spears continued to work and produce music under her conservatorship, she revealed her "heart wasn't in it" and that her passion for dancing and music was "a joke."

"I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I had been so infantilized that I was losing pieces of what made me feel like myself," the pop star writes in her memoir. "The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me."

Spears' conservatorship would last until November 2021, when a judge officially terminated it after Spears gave explosive testimony. Looking back on that period of her life, Spears writes, "I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick. Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money. I didn't deserve what my family did to me." The Woman in Me is available for pre-order ahead of its release on Oct. 24.