True Colors

Lauper wrote in her memoir that she had meant to work with Chertoff again but found the experience with him problematic, and she would not work with Rob Hyman because of his ties to Chertoff. She and Petze produced it, with David Wolff as executive producer. Brian McGee engineered and mixed. She told The New York Times in 1986 that the record says to have the courage of your convictions and love yourself a little. The Guardian wrote that she was feeling burnt out by the hype and the gruelling promotional tour, and by the grief of losing close friends to the Aids epidemic.

True Colors peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 and sold about seven million copies worldwide. It was certified double platinum in the United States and topped the Australian chart for four weeks. The singles were True Colors (number one), Change of Heart (number three), What's Going On (number 12) and Boy Blue (number 71). Jimmy Guterman of Rolling Stone wrote that she "sounds more comfortable at any given moment on True Colors than she did on all of She's So Unusual", while adding that what places it "a notch below her debut is that Cyndi Lauper just isn't that unusual anymore." A 40th anniversary edition in September 2026 added two songs, The River Cried and a cover of the Beatles' Across the Universe, and an audio version of her 1987 Paris concert.