The '90s style that everyone's obsessed with at the moment wasn't the reality for many, including me. My life didn't look like a coolly androgynous cKone ad, nor did it resemble an episode of My So Called Life. I had unfortunate 'curtains' hair, spermy over-plucked eyebrows and clogs. Yes, clogs. But at least there was one girl who walked that awkward path with me while still remaining the most iconic heroine of her time: Buffy Summers.

For most, even the pretty, even the superhuman, the ‘90s wasn't a great decade for hair. Over seven glorious seasons we saw Sarah Michelle Gellar’s vampire-slaying teen evolve from happy-go-lucky high school girl into world-saving woman, with hairstyles to match her emotional states.

These ran the gamut from a choppy long bob to tumbling curls in every shade on the blonde spectrum from peroxide to dark honey. She wore her hair down, up, in a ponytail, a chignon, scraped back, with strands framing her face, centre-parted, side-parted, with a whispy fringe, tight curls, soft waves and poker straight.

I'm pretty sure she wore a scrunchie and at one point she even had a quintessentially '90s Ginger Spice-style peroxide front section and copper back - a look I tried to achieve in 1997 with a bottle of Sun-In with unfortunate results.

Creator Joss Whedon developed the character of Buffy as an inversion of "the little blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed in every horror movie" and this for me is why she is such a compelling character. Buffy is a typical teenager - she experiments with her style, has plenty of boy (vampire) trouble, she's confused, complicated and is always getting into scrapes, both of the regular and the supernatural variety. But she's also loyal, funny, brave, ambitious and empowered.

Just because she cares about her hair, that doesn't mean she's not completely kickass. A lesson to all those who say you can't love fashion and beauty and call yourself a feminist.

Click through the gallery to return to Sunnydale and revisit the highs and lows of Buffy's hair...