Anderson Cooper’s New Look Will Make You Do a Double Take

Date:2025-08-08 06:34:48 Category:entertainment Views:2 Comment:0

Originally appeared on E! Online

Anderson Cooper is going full-beard ahead.

While the CNN anchor is known for his signature silver hair, he debuted a new look while on hiatus from the news network: a shock of silver beard.

“Heading back to work soon,” Anderson wrote alongside an Instagram Stories selfie Aug. 7. “Shave or keep?”

The 58-year-old gave a subtle smile for the camera in the pic, rocking a New York Yankees baseball cap, navy polo and black glasses along with his scruffy beard.

While he’s rarely sported a beard on air in the past, Anderson—who is dad to kids Wyatt Morgan, 5, and Sebastian Luke, 3—has been praised for his gray locks, with many calling him a silver fox.

“I don’t know how I got that,” he mused about the label on the Let’s Talk Off Camera with Kelly Ripa podcast in 2023. “I think somewhere it was written down, and then other people started writing it down.”

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According to Anderson, he actually started going gray while attending Yale University.

“I was on the crew team and I was starving myself to get down to race weight of 125 pounds,” he explained. “I would drop 20 pounds for races and my hair by senior year started to go gray, which I think has something to do with my poor diet and starving myself.”

Anderson Cooper, Beard, Instagram — Instagram/Anderson Cooper

Although it could just run in the family, as he noted both his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt and dad Wyatt Cooper—who died when Anderson was 10—“started going gray early.”

“I try to avoid looking in mirrors now because I look in the mirror and I’m like Casper the Friendly Ghost,” he joked. “I’m just completely white. If I took off my glasses, you couldn’t see me at all.”

And before her 2019 death, Gloria actually kept suggesting hair-thinning products to her son—although Anderson didn’t feel like he needed them.

Anderson Cooper — Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Warner Bros. Discovery

“What I realized is that with my hair really short, you can just see my pink rat-like scalp,” he said. “It’s not the hair itself is thinning, it’s just that you can see my little pink scalp.”

But, as he added, he has “these incredibly warped perceptions” from being on TV.

“We are constantly seeing ourselves on a monitor in high definition,” he continued, “which no one should see.”

For a look at more stars who have updated their locks, keep reading.

Sami Sheen