From her sleek pixie cut to her increasingly serious relationship with Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry’s life looks nothing like it did a few years back. But as she reveals in Paper’s latest cover story, she’s been going through plenty of substantive changes at the same time — and they may have had something to do with her urge to lop off her dark locks. “Changing my hair definitely was the biggest physical transformation I have experienced as a woman,” she tells Paper. “When you don’t have long hair, you really can’t hide behind it. Everything is exposed.” The singer’s openness is a case in point. She jokes about having ditched Orlando’s decade-old toiletry bag while he was out of town recently (“he wanted to keep it in a drawer,” she recalls, adding that she told him, “the moment you leave is the moment this thing is going in the trash”). But she also admits she battles the urge to keep things around that she doesn’t need — a habit she says she developed while growing up without much money. “You get something and you’re like, ‘I’m never going to get it again’ or ‘I’ll never have the means to get it again.’ It’s this psychology behind it, when all of a sudden you can just purchase something — it’s very wild for your brain,” she explains. “I’m very OCD and I don’t say that lightly…it was just a product of me trying to control my environment.” All in all, though, the 34-year-old is happy she’s grown up as much as she has in recent years. “I’m just such a different person than I was [in my 20s],” she says. “Not such a different person — the foundation was always there. I’ve always been hella sarcastic, always the black sheep, always thought outside the box…[but] whereas I used to think things were too scary or not for me, now I’ve pushed my limits in all of that. I’m really more tolerant and accepting. It’s really just your 30s. I love them so much.”
