Late-night host Jimmy Fallon thinks he has cracked the mystery of President Donald Trump’s suddenly darker hair, and his answer comes in a bottle. Fallon gave a chunk of his monologue on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, to the president’s new color on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” then capped the bit with a mock commercial for a fictional dye he called “Just For Men: Touch Of Cray.”
Fallon flagged the photos as an internet sensation before putting them up on screen for the audience. Trump, 80, unveiled the browner look while stepping off Air Force One in New Jersey over the weekend, the latest turn in a summer of shifting shades that has kept the president’s hair a running subject of online commentary.
“That’s what happens when you hire the Reflecting Pool people to dye your hair,” Fallon cracked — a reference to the repainting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which turned a slimy green from an algal bloom within weeks of being refilled.
A Fake Ad for Touch Of Cray
Fallon then played the spoof spot. It began with a stand-in Trump promising that his hair would look better than it ever had, before an announcer launched into a list of made-up side effects.
The announcer said that a single week of using Touch of Cray would deliver new hair while also prompting users to start renaming states, flirt with an assistant, kidnap world leaders, invade Canada, stamp their face on every coin, stage a fistfight on the front lawn and share AI-generated clips of themselves dabbing alongside Abraham Lincoln.
“Now it makes sense,” Fallon told viewers once the spot had ended.
A Summer of Shifting Hair Colors
The images behind the segment were taken on September 4, when Trump landed at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey. Photographers caught the president waving to reporters, his hair far darker than the pale blond that has been part of his image for decades. Earlier shots of the new shade at his Bedminster golf club had already set off a rush of online reaction.
This was not the season’s only hair debate. Over the course of the summer the president’s hair ran through a range of shades, from silvery white to strawberry blond. Trump has rejected years-old wig speculation, and he has previously acknowledged a large bald spot.
Specialists have put forward more mundane theories. Dina Kales, owner of the hair restoration company The Top Shoppe, told Newsweek in August that freshly dyed hair reads darker in photographs and can look thicker than it really is, while gray regrowth later appears sparse or patchy. Eva Proudman, a consultant trichologist and founder of U.K. Hair Consultants, told Newsweek that the president’s hair is consistent with androgenetic alopecia, or male pattern hair loss, a condition she said affects 80 percent of men aged 70 to 85.
An earlier wave of chatter centered on thickness rather than color, after paired photos from New Jersey and Las Vegas spread online. Ahead of that Nevada stop, wind at the same New Jersey airport lifted the president’s hair and exposed more of his scalp in a clip that circulated quickly.
The Rest of Fallon’s Monologue
The hair joke was only one segment of a monologue that kept returning to the president. Fallon began by ridiculing Trump’s proposal, pushed over Labor Day weekend, to rename New Mexico “New America,” an idea a president has no legal authority to carry out. He then imagined a national renaming spree that produced “New Trumpshire,” “Melania-land” and “North America 2.”
A fake White House spokesman followed, insisting the president was actually a king and announcing that the midterm elections had been rebranded with a clunkier name. Fallon also jabbed at the upcoming Republican convention, joking about its reported ticket sales and the $35,000 price attached to a photo with Vice President JD Vance. Later segments took on Netflix’s “Instadocs,” Apple’s expected foldable iPhone, an artificial intelligence recreation of Walter Cronkite and Trader Joe’s court battle over the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches it calls “squircles.”
Fallon has history with the hair in question: he reached over and ruffled it on air during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The comb-over itself dates to Trump’s years as a New York real-estate developer in the 1980s and became a pop-culture fixture during NBC’s “The Apprentice,” which debuted in 2004.
Fallon was not the only late-night host to notice. ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, back on the air, wondered whether a midlife crisis was possible at 80. Trump had not publicly responded to the “Touch Of Cray” segment as of September 9. The spoof commercial is posted on the YouTube channel of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”