Cindy Brady’s Hair Started Falling Out, Thanks to This ‘Brady Bunch’ Requirement

Were the sitcom gods picking on Susan Olsen, or did the actress who played Cindy simply have worse luck than a Brady kid carrying the tiki idol during the Hawaiian vacation episodes? 

She recently complained on The Real Brady Bros podcast that she was nearly killed on the first day of filming, thanks to falling production equipment bonking her on the skull. And at last week’s Chocolate Expo, per People, Olsen revealed more physical maladies suffered on The Brady Bunch set. 

Olsen told the story during a question-and-answer session when one fan asked if she was required to dye her hair to play the part of Cindy. “You bet,” she said. “Every three weeks they had to dye my hair. If you look at the third season, my hair is kind of a different shade of blonde every episode.”

Pouring a bunch of bleach in a kid’s hair has an unintended effect after a while. “My hair had started to fall out,” Olsen complained. “With that, I went back to letting my mom do my hair, every Friday night.”

It’s not easy being “the youngest one in curls” — especially if your hair isn’t naturally curly. In addition to her hair getting constant lightening treatment, “I had to keep it in rollers because my hair was straight. It couldn’t hold a curl unless I slept in them,” she explained. “But my mother was responsible for those ringlets.”

Unlike other Bradys, who went through a variety of ‘70s-era hair styles over the course of the show’s five seasons (every male cast member had a perm at one point), Cindy’s hair was written right into the theme song. Unless producer Sherwood Schwartz was going to hire someone to rewrite it midway through The Brady Bunch’s run, “in curls” was part of the job description.

But Olsen wasn’t the only one who had to alter their natural appearance. Mike Lookinland, who played youngest brother Bobby, had light brown hair that was a poor genetic match for his TV father and older brothers. “In 1970, trying different things meant a whole cocktail of weird chemicals, right?” he said. “All I had was Miss Clairol, Jet Black number 23. I the little bottle, and it said, ‘Jet Black.’”

Olsen ed that her bottle said, “Classic Blonde.”

Besides a fractured skull and thinning hair, Olsen also complained recently about one other Cindy Brady affliction: a startlingly low IQ. “She’s nine years old, and she doesn’t know how to spell her sister’s name,” Olsen complained. “I would get teased for everything stupid that Cindy did.”

The character’s habit of misunderstanding even the simplest of life’s realities led Olsen to believe that Cindy “doesn’t have a functioning brain.” 

Maybe it was due to that cocktail of weird chemicals seeping in through her scalp.