Sarah Joy Brown Shows How Her Hair Fell Out After Leaving GH

Actors are always transforming themselves for roles and unfortunately, sometimes those changes have some bad side effects! Sarah Joy Brown admitted that playing Claudia Zacchara on GENERAL HOSPITAL led to her hair practically falling out — not from the stress of playing the villainess or being killed off the soap, but from changing her hair color so drastically!

“The aftermath of Claudia Z.,” the actress captioned an old photo of herself with her hair looking a little rough. “My hair mostly broke off shortly before this pic. Transforming from that very dark hair to very blonde is a perilous endeavor, not to be entertained by the faint of heart. Had to have extensions sewn in for about a year. All glamour, all the time.”

When Brown originally played Carly Benson on GH from 1996-2001, she was a blonde, but when she returned to the soap to play the brand-new role of Claudia Zacchara in 2008, her hair was jet black, the perfect shade for such a dark villain. In between, from 2004-05, Brown played Julia Larabee on CBS sudser AS THE WORLD TURNS, where her hair was more of a chocolate brown. During her other daytime roles — THE BOLD & THE BEAUTIFUL’s Agnes Jones (2009-11) and DAYS OF OUR LIVES’ Madison James (2011-12), the actress returned to her blonde locks.

The damage the dying did to her hair after she left GH in 2009 couldn’t have come at a worse, time, too! “Unfortunate timing,” Brown admitted, “as it happened the weekend before I started shooting CASTLE, with my awesome high school voice and speech teacher from Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Penny Jerald.”

Thankfully, extensions helped Brown look camera-ready for her 2010 appearance on CASTLE and kept her looking great until they were no longer needed. “Five years to get it all back to where it had been,” she revealed. Although honestly — long, short, light, dark, extensions or not… we can’t think of a single hairstyle that Brown couldn’t totally rock!