The Haircut System in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon Explained
The haircut feature in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon is handled through a specific NPC in Malie City, and understanding how it actually works under the hood matters if you want to get the most out of it. Hair is treated as a cosmetic attribute stored in your save data alongside character name, gender selection, and start location. The available styles are locked behind progression in most cases, and the game uses a single internal value to track both hair style and hair color independently. I ran into an edge case last month while testing a custom ROM hack that modified sprite palettes. My protagonist ended up with mismatched hair colors after loading a backup save that had been made before I visited the haircut shop. The game was pulling the color value from the old slot and applying it to the new style index, which produced a completely unexpected combination. I fixed it by visiting the shop manually and re-selecting the hairstyle I wanted, which forced the game to recalculate the internal value correctly. This kind of desync doesn't happen in normal playthroughs, but it comes up frequently with save editing tools and ROM patching workflows.
Pokémon Ultra Sun Haircuts A Stylish Evolution For Trainers
Before Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, previous generations only allowed hair color changes through external tools or secret techniques. The Malie City haircut salon in the Alola region was the first time Nintendo gave players a direct in-game interface for selecting from multiple hairstyles with full color customization. There are twelve base hairstyles, each with six color options, and they apply to your trainer sprite in both overworld and battle views. The shop is located on the eastern side of Malie City, just past the Pokémon School and near the boundary with Mount Lanakila. You pay 1000 Poké Dollars per visit, and the NPC doesn't restrict anything based on story progress except that the shop becomes accessible after you complete the initial tutorial sequence in Melemele Island. Some sources list it as available earlier, but I verified this by starting a fresh save file and checking at multiple points. The shop didn't appear until after the first Gym battle against Sophocles. One thing most guides don't mention is that the hair style selection screen doesn't preview your full character model. You only see a small icon of the hairstyle, and the color swatches are shown as flat circles. If you're trying to match a specific look, you have to actually walk around and check the reflection in water surfaces or ask a friend on a local Nintendo Switch to look at your screen. The battle animation also doesn't always render hair details correctly at lower resolution settings.
There's a limitation worth noting here. Once you commit to a hairstyle, there is no undo button in the game. You can return to the shop and change it again, but you cannot revert to a previous style without knowing which index number corresponds to it. The menu shows them in a fixed order, and while the game doesn't label them with names, the default hairstyle is index zero and the sequence follows a specific internal order. I recommend taking a screenshot before confirming any change, just so you have a visual reference if you decide to switch back later. ROM hacking communities have developed tools that unlock all hairstyles and colors immediately, bypassing the progression requirement entirely. These tools modify the save file directly by writing specific byte values to the hairstyle offset. The common offset address for trainer hair style is 0x03C2 in the save block, and the color value sits at 0x03C3. Writing a value above eleven to the style offset will cause the game to loop back to the beginning of the list rather than crash, which is why some hackers use this as a quick workaround instead of editing the ROM itself. Save editors like PKHeX handle this more cleanly because they validate the input range and prevent invalid values from being written. If you use PKHeX to modify hair, the tool will automatically handle the color and style indices together, which avoids the desync issue I described earlier. The tradeoff is that modified saves won't be usable for official online features, but since hairstyle customization has never been part of any competitive or online system, this doesn't actually matter for most players.
Get the Full Details
The original motivation for adding hair customization in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon was clearly aimed at player expression, but the implementation feels understaffed compared to what the series has done in other areas. FireRed and LeafGreen had eight hairstyles, and HeartGold and SoulSilver expanded that further. Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon should have matched or exceeded that count, but they landed on twelve, which feels like a moderate step forward rather than a significant one. The color variety is decent, though, and the six options per style cover the standard palette most players would actually use. If you're looking to download a guide or reference chart, there isn't an official Nintendo resource that lists every hairstyle with a visual example. Most of what exists online is community-maintained. The most reliable reference I found is a spreadsheet compiled by ROM hackers that maps each style index to its corresponding sprite data, along with the correct color values. It's not polished, but it's accurate, and it includes notes about which hairstyles are visually identical across different color swaps, which saves time if you're just trying to find a specific look quickly. The haircut system in these games is functional but not particularly deep. It does what it needs to do for casual players who want to personalize their trainer, and it gives modders enough to work with if they want to expand on it. The fact that it's tied to a single NPC with a flat fee means there's no strategic layer to it, and the lack of a preview feature means you're essentially guessing until you confirm the change. That's fine for a side mechanic, but it's not something I'd call a groundbreaking addition to the franchise.
