He looks like a martian.
You really need to do something about his head. No sense in having a large head if the details are unclear. If that's his hair stringing out like that, why does it look like tentacles and why is it almost exactly the same color as his face?
These are important observations you will need to be able to suss out for yourself eventually. The key to being able to do that is to look at your pixel drawing objectively. Just because you want it to be hair, doesn't mean it looks enough like hair for others to tell it's hair.
I'd suggest practicing conveying different textures and forms with pixels before trying to convert a drawing into such a low-res sprite. I can't give you a one word answer for how to fix this sprite. The closest I can come to that is silhouette, color-contrast, and lighting-contrast. That is, if your "hair" *looks* like hair in the silhouette (i.e. if your sprite is colored completely black except for the transparent pixels, and the "hair" still comes across as hair), it's easier to add lighting to that to make it appear more 3 dimensional. With that said, no amount of shadow colors can make up for the lack of contrast in such a small canvas area. That means you need a few highly separate gradiations for shadowing/lighting and your colors need to be clearly different at a single super-fast glance. At the moment, none of this is true in your sprite, thus your sprite reads very poorly to others.
You should try again, but do practice the techniques mentioned above if you want to get better at pixel art -- especially concerning the rendering of materials and form.
