I watched winter 2025 anime called Honey Lemon Soda. It is a somewhat boilerplate shoujo (for girls) romance starring Uka Ishimori, a very shy high school freshman girl with severe confidence and self-image issues stemming in large part from having been bullied in middle school, and Kai Murita, her handsome classmate with yellow-blonde hair matching what seems to be his favorite drink, honey lemon soda. I first became aware of the then-upcoming show last year, learning in previews that it was based on what is apparently a well-regarded manga. I identified it as a potential future addition to my series of anime hair color studies on account of the fact that it is a romance anime aimed at girls and women (we saw in my multiple hair color analysis articles on A Sign of Affection last year that these sorts of shows can be good hair color studies) and that the very name of the series references the unusual yellow-blonde hair color of the male half of the central romance. Below, I present my study of hair color in the Honey Lemon Soda anime.
Expand to learn more about my Japanese anime/manga/novels/games hair color series…
I have written many posts examining how we should understand unusual or seemingly unnatural hair colors in anime and Japanese manga, light novels, and games. I have also written a couple of posts on hair color-dress code issues in Japanese schools. You can find all of my articles in our regularly updated Hair Color in Japanese Anime, Manga, and Games collection article.
Notes and Link to My Full Review
This review is free of plot-related spoilers and I consider it safe to read for people who have not watched or read Honey Lemon Soda but may do so in the future. With that being said, I do reference scenes from later episodes – albeit with only so much detail as neceesary to introduce the relevant hair color information – so people who have Honey Lemon Soda on their to-watch list may prefer to bookmark this analysis (I would personally recommend bookmarking in that case).
I have not read the Honey Lemon Soda manga. My hair color analysis is based solely on the anime.
If you are unsure whether you want to watch Honey Lemon Soda, I have written a full review of the anime for the indecisive: Honey Lemon Soda – Anime Review.
My Expectations
As a threshold matter, note that I had and have never read the Honey Lemon Soda manga and all of my knowledge of the series prior to watching the first episode of the anime came from anime preview articles, such as this one in Anime News Network.
From the little information I had and the fruits of my anime hair color scholarship, I strongly suspected that the yellow-haired co-protagonist, Kai Miura, was dying his hair, and that the anime would reveal his original, natural hair color through a photo and/or flashback. I covered a similar scenario last year wherein the silver-haired male love interest in A Sign of Affection, Itsuomi Nagi, was shown to have naturally black hair in a photo depicting him a few years prior to the start of the events of the anime.
While Honey Lemon Soda seemed like an obvious hair color article candidate and worthy of my attention for that reason alone, I will confess that I was not entirely enthusiastic about the prospect due to my confidence in my predicted outcome. To be sure, it did turn out early in the show that my hunch about Kai’s blonde hair and how the show would tip its hand proved to be over the target. But fortunately, we will also see that there is some interesting nuance to the handling of hair color in Honey Lemon Soda beyond the obvious Kai reveal.
Kai’s Hair Color Mystery
As a threshold matter, it is important to understand the world in which a show is taking place in order to understand its portrayal of hair color (see my explanation in my first anime hair color article). Honey Lemon Soda takes place in modern Japan (presumably around 2015, which is when the underlying manga started) and has an entirely real-world setting. With that out of the way, we can begin our analysis.
Here is Kai when we first meet him in the present in the first episode.
As you can see, Kai’s hair is a sort of yellow shade of blonde. Uka, the heroine, has the more expected for a Japanese person black/dark brown hair. We can safely forego any inquiry into Uka’s hair color and focus on Kai and the rest of the cast.
Kai is a first-year high school student just like Uka. High school is three years in Japan, so Uka and Kai are in 10th grade. The very first scene of the show is a flashback to a few months before Uka and Kai enter high school (the Japanese school year starts in April). We can see in their first meeting, before Uka and Kai knew each other’s names, that Kai already had his honey lemon soda-colored hair.
Thus, we know for certain that Kai likely already had blonde hair toward the end of his ninth-grade year, just a few months before starting high school.
Some other characters also have unusual hair colors. See a screenshot with the show’s major players and comparatively minor classmates below.
As you can see, we have a couple of blondes, one character with greenish-blue hair, and a girl with pink twin-tails. Take note of the blue-green haired boy (Satorou Seto) and the honey-blonde (Ayumi Endo) in the center of the image (between Kai and Uka) because we will return to them shortly.
As I noted, I suspected that at some point we would see a photo or flashback of Kai from when he was in middle school and that said photo or flashback would reveal his original, natural hair color. Last year, A Sign of Affection pulled this trick for Itsuomi Nagi in episode three. Honey Lemon Soda employed a similar approach, but executed it one episode later in episode four. The pink-haired girl from the previous screenshot was a classmate of Kai’s in junior high school. For the benefit of her classmates and the audience, she revealed Kai’s yearbook photo on her phone.
Just as I expected – Kai’s natural hair color is black. But while Kai had a dark past, we learn that some of the other main secondary characters already had unnatural hair colors in middle school.
First see the light-brown haired Ayumi Endo, who is Uka’s closest female friend.
Then see the always blue-haired Satorou Seto, who is a close friend of Ayumi.
Their middle school hair colors are just about the same as their high school hair colors. I will add for additional context that Satorou and Ayumi attended the same junior high school as Kai.
Additional Hair Color Context for Kai
One point that is left unclear in the first four episodes is when or why Kai changed his hair color. Episode seven features a prolonged flashback sequence which shows Kai in junior high school with his natural black hair.
Note in this image you can see Serina Kano (not pictured in previous screenshots) who has reddish hair in junior high school. Like Ayumi and Satorou, she sports the same hair color in high school.
To my surprise, episode 10 added an additional touch to Kai’s hair color journey. While I will refrain from going into detail to avoid spoilers (not that Honey Lemon Soda is an unpredictable show, mind you), Ayumi narrates a flashback to the day Kai surprised everyone in junior high school by showing up for the first time with dyed hair.
Ayumi specifically noted that Kai showed up with blonde hair in third year, which in Japanese junior high school terms would be ninth grade. That is consistent with information from other parts of the show about Kai’s middle school days.
Finally, I noted at the top that Honey Lemon Soda is a romance starring Uka and Kai. In one of the later episodes, Uka’s classmates indirectly probe her about her potential romantic interest in a certain blonde classmate. How do they indirectly probe Uka?
They ask whether she prefers black or blonde hair.
A Broader Hair Color Picture
Granting that some of the important characters have unusual hair color consistency, one may wonder how I can be completely sure that they are dyeing their hair. For example, in my recent hair color study of I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class, I concluded that one blonde-haired girl was dying her hair based on evidence in the show, but that the show did not make a similar hair-dyeing statement about a silver-haired girl in the same class. It is not necessarily the case that we can infer from Kai’s hair dyeing that every character with an unusual or obviously unnatural hair color is dyeing his or her hair, especially having just noted that both Ayumi and Satorou have no comment about their own unusual hair colors.
My hunch regarding Honey Lemon Soda was that every single character with an obviously implausible hair color is dyeing his or her hair. I consider that hunch more or less confirmed by an event in the ninth episode. Here, I will refrain from saying more than absolutely necessary for spoiler avoidance purposes, although those of you who are definitely watching the show may nevertheless exercise your discretion to bookmark this article for reading after the fact. I will introduce the decisive scene with just a little bit of context.
While Uka has some understandable interpersonal short-comings, she is portrayed as being a good student. We learn early in the show that she had sat for an admissions test to what is portrayed as being a high-level academic all-girl’s high school, but she froze while taking the test and failed. As a result, she ends up attending Hachimitsu High School, which is comparatively lax – evinced by how most of the non-Uka characters interpret the school dress code.
In episode nine, we see a few adults conversing as they see some of Uka’s classmates from Hachimitsu High School. They opine that the school is lax and does not have a good reputation. Uka is part of the group, which includes Kai, Ayumi, Satorou, and other classmates. One key character sees Uka with her friends. After the fact this character expresses his or her surprise to a surprised Uka:
The character describes Uka’s friends as having flashy accessories (Ayumi’s cherry earrings were a small topic early in the show) and outrageous hair.
The reference to outrageous hair confirmed my assumptions. An impartial adult character recognized that high school students in a group including Kai, Ayumi, and Satorou had outrageous hair. Their hair styles are not too outrageous, but their hair colors are certainly unusual. This scene made me confident in concluding that the characters with definite or likely unnatural hair colors are viewed in the show’s world as dyeing their hair.
Wrapping Up
I had assumed for several months that I would be writing a hair color article about Honey Lemon Soda, and my assumption proved to be correct. But I had not originally planned on publishing my review after the season’s run had ended. In theory, I could have written an analysis after the fourth episode’s reveal that Kai’s natural hair is black, but that would not have made for an interesting article. I will admit that I began drafting this article after the additional developments in episode seven (I believe I started writing between episodes 8 and 9), but I decided to shelf it again after more hair color points emerged in episode nine. At that point, I decided to hold out until the end of the show to make sure I covered everything (that turned out to be the correct choice). Then I figured I may as well take advantage of the screenshots I collected to also write a review of Honey Lemon Soda, so why not publish the articles together?
Honey Lemon Soda looked like a strong potential hair color analysis prospect and it ultimately delivered on its promise and added a few highlights (pun intended) for the hair-conscious anime viewer.
