Coifs That Grow on Us
It has been said that those who cannot remember history’s bad hairstyles are condemned to repeat them. Or so claims the Internet magazine Charged.com (https://www.charged.com) in a humorous article on the top 10 hairdos of all time.
Leading the pack is “the emperor of all haircuts,” the Julius Caesar, which scores points for practicality (“Your mom can give it to you using a salad bowl and a Flowbee”) as well as versatility (“It looks just as sassy at the Roman orgy in December as it does at the execution on the Ides of March”).
But the main selling point is longevity. Current practitioner: actor George Clooney.
The rest of Charged.com’s list is heavily weighted toward the 20th century. It includes:
* The Princess Leia, featuring dueling cinnamon-roll-style buns. “Not since the beehive has hair made us feel this hungry and sticky at the same time,” says the magazine.
* Dreadlocks. Introduced by cavemen, “the world’s first hairstyle” has been making a comeback since the advent of Rastafarianism and reggae.
* The Baldy. Recent practitioners of the Zen look include Yul Brynner, Kojak, Uncle Fester and Sinead O’Connor. The anti-hair motif also raises several questions: “Does a hairstyle require hair? Does the cost of razors offset the savings on styling products?”
* The Television Celebrity. Examples include the Jennifer Aniston, the Dorothy Hamill and the Farrah Fawcett.
* The Rapunzel. “In recent times, the only famous person to dare this hard-to-maintain style is country singer Crystal Gayle,” who is forced to spend vast sums on a team of round-the-clock stylists, 50-gallon drums of shampoo and “portable generators for her arsenal of blow dryers.”
* The Mullet Head, a.k.a. Hockey Hair. Short on the top and long in the back, as pioneered by the likes of Pat Benatar, Kevin Bacon and multitudes of “hockey players [and] back-country lesbians.”
* The Mohawk. The “peacock of hairstyles” also serves a practical purpose: “Keepers of the mohawk must stand facing into the wind to avoid blow-over, which makes them the perfect weather vane.”
* The Tail, whose origins date back to the 1980s. Fortunately, “most sporters of this superfluous lock have been weeded out by natural selection.”
* The Mall Girl. Until modern times, “high hair” was limited to the noble classes, who were the only ones with enough leisure time to have their locks styled--or enough cash to buy enormous wigs. But “all of this changed with one revolutionary invention: Aqua Net hair spray, [which] turned the tide in the war against hair gravity.”
To read Charged.com’s full story, log on to https://www.charged.com/issue 2/leisure/stories/hairdos.
