What Pokemon Ultra Moon's Haircut System Actually Is
There are haircut salons scattered across the Alola region in Ultra Moon. They look like ordinary shops on the map. Walk in, talk to the clerk, select a Pokemon from your party. If that species supports custom hair, you pick a style and leave. That's the entire loop. The catch is most Pokemon don't have unlockable hair at all. The system only applies to a small, specific list, and the game doesn't tell you which ones until you try. I learned this the hard way on my first playthrough. I spent twenty minutes cycling through my entire party at the Melemele Meadow salon, hoping something interesting would happen, and got the same three styles on an Alolan Rattata and a Pikachu. Meanwhile, my Necrozma was sitting there completely ignored because it has no haircut data coded into the game. The salon will never offer you a style for a species that simply isn't built to receive one. There's no hint system, no roster screen, nothing. You just try and move on.
Unshear The Truth Everything You Need To Know About Pokmon Hairstyles In Ultra Moon
The salons are located in three cities. The first is on Melemele Island, right in the grassy area between Hau'oli City and Route 2. The second is in Vikavol Town on Akala Island, behind the grocery store near the western beach. The third is on Ula'ula Island, inside the house next to the Pokémon Center in Malie City. All three offer the same base catalog. The variation comes from which species they'll actually apply styles to, and honestly the pool is still pretty limited even if you visit every single salon. Here's the actual list of Pokemon that accept hairstyles, based on what I've seen across multiple saves: Pikachu, Alolan Rattata, Alolan Raichu, Vulpix, Alolan Vulpix, Ninetales, Alolan Ninetales, Jigglypuff, Wigglytuff, Meowth, Alolan Meowth, Persian, Alolan Persian, Primeape, Growlithe, Arcanine, Mankey, Primeape again (different style pool), Farfetch'd, Tauros, Eevee, Pichu, Clefairy, Clefable, Jolteon, Flareon, Vaporeon, Espeon, Umbreon, Glaceon, Leafeon, Sylveon.
Some of those feel obvious. Some don't. Farfetch'd getting a haircut was something I didn't expect. Neither was Primeape having more than one style available than almost anything else in the roster. The game clearly had a designer go through and pick species they thought would look silly with altered fur or ear positions, then implement exactly that many variations and no more.
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How The Styles Actually Work Under The Hood
Each hairstyle is a separate sprite overlay. The game swaps a texture layer on the 3D model when you select a cut. This means the animations stay the same. A haircut doesn't change how your Pokemon walks, attacks, or idles. It only changes the visual mesh for the head area. That's also why some species look fine with the edits while others look slightly clipped or misaligned. The overlay isn't perfect on every model, especially the ones with complex ear shapes or asymmetrical features. I noticed this clearly on my Alolan Ninetales. Three of the five styles looked clean. The other two had the fur texture slightly overlapping the tail models in a way that looked intentionally wrong, not like a bug. It was just bad hitbox alignment on the asset swap. Nothing you can fix from the outside. Just something to be aware of if you're showing these to someone who actually cares about the visual fidelity. The styling itself is persistent. Once you cut a Pokemon's hair, it stays that way across saves, trades, and resets unless you go back to any salon and change it again. There is no automatic reset mechanic. The game doesn't force a style change on evolution either, which trips a lot of people up. If you evolve your Eevee after giving it a specific cut, the evolved form inherits that same haircut type but rendered on the new species model. So a styled Eevee becomes a styled Vaporeon without any extra visits to the salon. Useful to know if you're trying to collect all variations efficiently.
Which Styles Are Worth Unlocking And Which Aren't
Most salons offer roughly four to six options per eligible species. The variety is thin. I found that five out of six styles for any given Pokemon are functionally identical with minor color or length tweaks. The one genuinely distinctive cut is usually worth locking in. The rest you can ignore unless you're doing completionist runs. For Pikachu specifically, there are about five hairstyles total across all salons. One makes it look like it has a bowl cut. One gives it longer ears with a slight fade. The rest are subtle enough that you'd need to compare side by side to notice the difference. I just kept the bowl cut one because it was the only one that looked obviously different from the default model. The rest disappeared into background noise after a few sessions. Alolan variants sometimes get exclusive styles that the regular forms don't. This wasn't consistent though. Alolan Rattata got a couple of unique cuts. Alolan Meowth got essentially the same pool as regular Meowth with a color shift. Alolan Persian was basically the same as Persian minus one or two options. The pattern here is arbitrary. Don't overthink which form to evolve for style purposes.
Practical Tips That Actually Matter
Before you start hacking through your party looking for haircut candidates, save the game at the entry point of any salon. If you accidentally commit to a style you hate and can't remember how to reverse it, you're stuck until you manually visit another salon. The interface doesn't have a clear "undo last cut" button. It just lets you pick another style, which means you're always one wrong click away from locking in a look you don't want. The most reliable method is to go to the Malie City salon first. It's the one closest to a Pokemon Center, so you can heal, save, and experiment without worrying about dying mid-session. I did all my testing there before moving on to other islands. The other two salons are in more inconvenient spots and make debugging harder if something goes sideways. Also, keep in mind that the haircut feature doesn't carry over into battle animations the way you might expect. In wild encounters and trainer battles, the style is visible but compressed to a smaller rendering. During story cutscenes and certain animated sequences, the hairstyle may not appear at all due to hardcoded sprite overrides in those scenes. This isn't a bug. It's just how the engine handles pre-rendered clips versus real-time models.
If you're doing a completionist run and want every hairstyle for every eligible Pokemon, you're looking at roughly forty-five to sixty manual selections across three salons. Each selection takes about ten seconds from entering the shop to confirming the cut. Total time investment is around fifteen to twenty minutes of actual play, spread across multiple visits because you need to rotate your party to get different species in front of the clerk each time.
Where This System Falls Apart
The haircut feature is technically functional but fundamentally incomplete. There's no gallery mode to review all unlocked styles. There's no way to tell which Pokemon still have uncut hair and which ones have already been modified. The game doesn't track this information anywhere accessible. If you close the menu and forget what you did, you're flying blind. There's also no competitive relevance. Haircut styles have zero effect on stats, moves, abilities, or anything else that matters in battle. They're purely cosmetic and the cosmetic payoff is minimal given how small the style pool actually is. For most players this is a five-minute side activity that feels more like a placeholder than a fully realized feature. That's fair. It was added late in development and shows it in the execution. If you're playing Ultra Moon purely for the story and casual completion, don't bother with the haircut salons. The experience gain from visiting them is negligible compared to the actual content you're missing elsewhere. Focus on the dex, the rival battles, and the ultra_beast encounters. The hairstyles will still be there when you decide you actually want to look at them, and by then you'll probably have bigger problems to worry about.
