Starting with Laguna Beach in 2004 and moving on to The Hills, Lauren Conrad, known affectionately as L.C., has had the last five years of her life documented on national television. Since she only turned 23 in February, this means that nearly 22 percent of L.C.’s time on earth has been transmitted to homes around the world. And that’s not including the countless tabloid articles chronicling her anxieties about her work (at Teen Vogue and fashion-public-relations firm People’s Revolution), her friends (Whitney Port, Audrina Patridge, and Lo Bosworth among them), her frenemies (Heidi Pratt), and, of course, her love life. (She’s dated Laguna costars Stephen Colletti and Jason Wahler; Brody Jenner; baseball player Doug Reinhardt; and currently actor Kyle Howard, though, despite rumors, she insists they are not engaged.)

When Conrad decided to leave The Hills, she considered dyeing her hair brunette so her producers couldn’t coerce her back in front of the camera. “I went into a wig store and tried on a brown wig, and they all laughed at me,” Conrad recalls. “All these women [who worked there] were like, ‘You look like Hannah Montana.’” So today, in a quest for a little peace and quiet, if not complete anonymity, she agreed to don a brown wig as a social experiment for Bazaar. Off she trotted to paparazzi haunts in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills to see if she would still be mobbed by fans and cameramen from TMZ. (“The last three concerts I went to, I was removed by security because I was a fire hazard,” Conrad says drily. “People crowd around you and you lose that whole personal-space concept.”)

In front of the Marc Jacobs store on Melrose Place, tourists gawked while 15 paparazzi came out of the woodwork and frantically snapped away. It may not have needed local-police intervention, but “it was a bit of a scene,” Conrad explains later. It wasn’t just the wig that had onlookers confused and excited, it was L.C.’s transformation from typical California girl to glamazon. “Normally, if I was walking down Melrose,” she says, “I would be in sandals and skinny jeans. This was a whole look.”

She adds, “I think initially the wig threw people off, but they figured it out. I felt like it only disguised me for a moment, and then it made me feel like I was hiding, which made me feel silly.”

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