‘TikTok Hairstyle’: Popular hair among young people has its origins in antiquity

The New York Times

In Los Angeles, Darrell Jones’ girlfriend, 21, often helps him curl his hair. Using a hot flat iron on areas that have been sprayed with heat protection, she creates small curls and clips them close to her head to settle them down. For a brief moment, the impression is that Jones is gearing up to be the greatest heartthrob of the 1930s. But after the curls cool, Jones fixes them with hairspray and then uses his fingers to rearrange the strands.

Across the country, in Wilmington, NC, Tristan Harrell, 17, creates a similar look using a slightly different method. He starts with wet hair and uses sea salt spray instead of heat shield spray (although his mother, who owns a beauty salon, always asks him to wear sunscreen). Depending on the day, he creates reverse curls with a brush and blow dryer, or uses a miniature flat iron. He also uses hairspray to finish the look. The entire routine takes 10 to 15 minutes.

Joshua Rich 7th, from Easton, Pa., wears the same hairstyle but has less maintenance work. He wipes his hair with a towel and leaves the rest of the job to evaporate, sometimes adding a little sea salt spray for additional lift. “It’s not a lot of work to do,” he said. “My hair is naturally messy, especially if I just towel dry it and don’t mess around anymore.”

The three young men in question wear a hairstyle that has become fashionable among Generation Z members: fluffy, soft waves of curls that reach almost to their eyebrows, combed forward towards their face and with volume at the top – or be at the same time a cousin of the tuft and its antithesis.

They each created a tutorial on TikTok on how to produce the look, and the three videos went viral with success. (The hairstyle is a big hit among TikTok’s younger users.) Jones, with 12 million views, is their biggest hit.

“I saw on TikTok that a lot of guys come to my ‘For You’ page wearing the same hairstyle,” Harrell said in an interview, referring to TikTok’s video recommendations page. When “I started changing my hairstyle, it gave me a boost of confidence, because I felt good about the way my hair was working,” he said.

It’s no surprise that the style, which many people call “TikTok hairstyle” or “TikTok male hair”, is so popular. Some of the app’s biggest stars, like Bryce Hall, Noah Beck and Josh Richards, have tens of millions of followers, and they wear this wild, textured cut. (Hall now uses a “mullet”, which is also popular.)

And while the style may seem new, we’ve been through it in many ways. Recent eras in which no man was relieved of the pressure to try on a specific hairstyle include the early 2000s, which brought a return to the topknot, a style that seemed to be the favorite hairstyle of every indie band vocalist.

We also had the iconic Justin Bieber cut (a kind of stylized bowl cut), which served as a standard for all teenagers between 2009 and 2011. Finally, and perhaps not coincidentally, Bieber’s hair shortened and the distance between his hair and her eyebrows widened, and around 2015 a new style emerged, the men’s bun — a hairstyle that a lot of people enjoyed but few people successfully adopted.

But the standards of treatment and aesthetics of male haircuts go back even further in history, and are millenary. In fact, the hairstyle now known as the TikTok hairstyle has been recycled numerous times in history, rising back into the gray every few centuries like a phoenix of hair daring.

According to Katherine Schwab, professor of art history and visual culture in the department of visual and performing arts at Fairfield University, Greeks and Romans wore hairstyles very similar to this one in antiquity. The current trend, she said, follows two cardinal rules for men’s haircuts adopted in ancient times. First, the hair is combed forward, from the top towards the forehead (following the direction in which the hair grows naturally) and, second, and perhaps most important, the strands are visibly textured.

“Alexandre Magno had thick, curly hair and slicked it from the top to the front,” said Schwab, who curated an exhibition titled “Hair in the Classic World” in 2015. She added that “in my opinion, the attention that men demonstrate to hair now –which I could classify as extreme– had parallels in antiquity. It’s nothing new.”

REJECTING THE IDEALS OF THE PREVIOUS GENERATION

In a way, Alexander the Great was the first influencer. Marice Rose, who shared the curatorship of the ancient hair exhibition with Schwab and is an associate professor of art history and visual culture at Fairfield University, said TikTok’s viral hairstyle resembles portraits of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, who became inspired by Alexandre Magno for his look; this hairstyle was later adopted by other emperors, to create an association between them and their predecessors.

“There are many historical, sociological and anthropological studies that show that hairstyles and hair styling have been – and continue to be – used to communicate information about a person’s social and individual identity throughout history,” Rose said in an email .

“I don’t think the TikTok people have the same propaganda goals as the Roman Emperors,” she clarified. But “our culture has gained an increasingly strong visual orientation; smartphones have put cameras and ways of viewing images in everyone’s pockets, and people today record and record each of their experiences for the visual consumption of others. Now it’s not just the rich. and powerful ones that can create portraits.

Ancient Greeks and Romans tried to convey a sense of power with their brushed-forward curls and wavy hair (which Rose said were created by TikTok’s predecessors in ancient times with heated metal blades, olive oil, animal fat and even butter.) In 2021, there may be different considerations at work.

Hairstyle historian Rachael Gibson believes it’s a matter of visibility and a sense of rebellion. She likens the trend to men’s styles that were popular in the 18th century.

In that era, there was the Bedford cut, a short, curly hairstyle that came about due to a shortage of flour and in protest against the high taxes levied by wig-whitener powders. There was also the longer Brutus style, inspired by the ancient world. This style was a favorite of Beau Brummel, a high-society hotshot at the time, and his followers.

And finally, Regency-era men in England (late 18th and early 19th century) also wore a style known as the “frightened owl”, perhaps the most rebellious of the three, a feather of curls obtained through washing. infrequent and profuse use of hair wax (it’s Colin Firth’s hair in the role of Mr. Darcy in “Pride and Prejudice”.)

These hairstyles were intended to be romantic and poetic, the opposite of their purpose in ancient Rome and Greece. Most importantly, however, they were all meant to be seen.

“I think all the menswear from the Regency era was pretty far-fetched,” Gibson said. “People dressed well, devoted a lot of time and care to their appearance. And it was a time when it was OK and normal for men to behave like peacocks, sporting extravagant looks.”

Gibson says he sees a return to that mindset, in the sense that perhaps there is a sense of acceptance in taking time to look after one’s appearance among boys and men today.

The styles were also intended to serve as signs, added Gibson, that the man who wore them rejected the ideals of the previous generation – “the exaggeration and excess of the powdered wigs, and also what they represented: old-fashioned ideas and policies. a demonstration, visual and immediate, that the subject wanted to be different”.

Have you ever seen something like that?

THE SIMPLE DESIRE TO BE SEEN

As Generation Z navigates the post-pandemic mute, having a pile of curls sliding down their foreheads is certainly a way to stand out, or perhaps to signal to past generations that the opinions and ideals of those emerging are different from their own. predecessors.

“With the world slowly returning to a sense of reality, albeit an altered one, and people stunned out of the isolation of the pandemic,” said Gibson, “what most people simply want is to be seen.”

But it’s also important to recognize that this is just a hairstyle, and a dominant hairstyle among white men in today’s culture. Yes, it’s popular, but the disproportionate attention it gets on TikTok is part of a pattern we’ve seen before.

“Men of all backgrounds and backgrounds put a lot of time and effort into hairstyles. Many black men have complicated hair care routines, and they always have been,” Gibson said. “And the white guys now say they use hair care products too.” It’s not an idea “that you made up; you just discovered it,” Gibson said.

Perhaps it’s not so different from the hairstyles of young men who refused military service in the 1960s, immortalized in the musical “Hair”, or from the Mohawk and other punk styles that signaled non-conformity and rebellion, in the 1970s. All have become better known. by its use among white men.

But hair, or its absence, has long served as a vehicle of expression and resistance in historically marginalized communities. From the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s — which called for black men and women to adopt more natural hairstyles — to braids, cornrows, “Bantu knots” and other styles that continue to be policed ​​in public spaces still today, for women who continue to wear their hijabs even though the highest court in the European Union has ruled that they are grounds for dismissal for cause, what a person has on their minds can serve as a public display of who they are and, perhaps more important, than she claims. “It’s a way of expressing what you aspire to be,” Schwab said.

But sometimes a hairstyle is just a hairstyle. As Rich said about your hair, some people like it, some people don’t. “I’ve been told I look like an electrocuted sheepdog,” he said. But as the style’s popularity grows, “this is something I hear less and less.”