"I remember asking her, 'Why did you shave your head?' And her answer was a bit weird."
It's been over a decade since Britney Spears spontaneously shaved her head, but it's not a moment those around her at the time will soon forget.
In Britney Spears: Breaking Point, a documentary that aired on the U.K.'s Channel 5, several eyewitnesses recount when the Pop Princess decided to buzz her hair off in 2007.
Hairdresser Esther Tognozzi was present at the salon just outside Los Angeles where Spears shaved her head, and recalls the droves of paparazzi that followed her to the establishment.
"I thought they were going to kill each other. They were trying to pile up on top of each other to get a picture and the one bodyguard was actually covering the front door with a cape," Tognozzi remembers. "And then the minute they heard her going out the side door, I mean, if you've seen my shop, I have gates on both sides, they were climbing the gates trying to get the first picture of her. I felt someone was going to get hurt, for sure, it was crazy."
Tognozzi says she stepped away to take a call from her brother and when she came back, Spears had "grabbed a buzzer and she was testing to see how it was going to feel or look to buzz her hair."
"So, I tried to talk her out of it and I said: 'You don’t want to do that, tomorrow is a different day, you’ll feel differently tomorrow, let’s talk about it,'" she remembers telling Spears. "My phone rang again so, as I’m answering my phone, I realize she went into that other room, sat in that chair and buzzed half her hair off."
While in the initial paparazzi photo snapped of Spears, she looks elated about her decision to shave her head, Tognozzi says the singer's mood soon changed.
"I tried to get her out of whatever mode she was in because obviously she was convinced to do this that night. I couldn’t convince her. I thought we could do a comb-over maybe to fix it," the hairstylist recalls. "What I said to her was, 'Do you realize what all the young teenagers are going to want to do tomorrow -- shave their hair off to look like you?' She didn’t care."
Tognozzi then remembers Spears saying, ''My mom’s gonna be pissed.'"
Tattoo artist Emily Wynne-Hughes saw Spears moments after the extreme haircut and got her to explain why she did it.
"I wasn’t sure what was happening, if there was a riot outside, and then the flashes came. The door opened slowly and a hooded figure walked in the door," says Wynne-Hughes, remembering Spears walking into the Sherman Oaks tattoo shop that evening. "I noticed [Britney’s] hair was gone. I remember asking her, 'Why did you shave your head?' And her answer was a bit weird."
Wynne-Hughes continues, "It was, you know, ‘I just don’t want anybody touching my head. I don’t want anyone touching my hair. I’m sick of people touching my hair.'"
Both Wynne-Hughes and Tognozzi claim in the documentary that Spears' security detail didn't appear too concerned with shielding her from photographers.
"It just didn't seem like they cared very much. I felt this insane sense of anxiety and energy that felt so negative," Wynne-Hughes says. "It just seemed like everybody was waiting for the crash to happen."
Tognozzi recalls of the night Spears shaved her head, "She had two bodyguards, supposedly keeping an eye out to make sure the paparazzi were not getting any pictures and one of them kept opening the blinds."
The year 2007 proved to be a tumultuous time for Spears, who divorced Kevin Federline, the father of her two sons, was mourning the death of her Aunt Sandra Bridges Covington and admitted herself into treatment facilities on several occasions.
In 2008, after being committed to the psychiatric ward of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and put on a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold, Spears was placed under temporary, and then later, a permanent conservatorship, which her father, James Spears, oversaw up until this year.
The 37-year-old singer has had her share of ups and downs, but is now able to take to Instagram to communicate with her fans directly, often sharing photos and videos of her workouts, vacations with her two sons, and the quality time she has with boyfriend Sam Asghari.
Here's more on how Spears is doing today, and what it means for her conservatorship now that her father has stepped down:
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