At the top of the do nots

Man buns are an issue for natural selection, not legislation

We get it: You hate man buns.

I hate them too. But it’s not so much just the hairstyle I dislike — and I do dislike it very much — but the endless discussion surrounding it. Man buns are slovenly, some say. Or they’re simply not fashionable (any longer). If you were to believe a survey of “most women” conducted earlier this year by Details magazine, you might find them “feminine.”

They’re also making you go bald. New research suggest that wearers of the style may be tying their buns too tightly, resulting in something called traction alopecia. Well, actually, they’ve been making wearers go bald since around this time last year: that’s when writer Nick Eagland, in a story published by this paper, quoted Essential Hair and Care founder Ray Cox as saying the tightness with which men are pulling their hair back may be literally pulling it out.

And now, Brigham Young University-Idaho has banned the man bun, saying it is not in adherence with school dress code.

To which I say: Brigham Young University, you have no chill.

The man bun — what is now a somewhat objectionable, questionably stylish, kind of ostentatious looking hairstyle — will almost certainly, in hindsight, be one of those generation-specific coifs about which we all cringe. But at the same time, history will not be kind to those who are making the eradication of the man bun an actual cause.

Remember: in the 1960s, people objected to The Beatles because the fab four wore their hair long, which seems ridiculous now. It only got worse a decade later, when there was an entire musical that used long hair as an extended metaphor for political freedom. And not to put too fine a point on things, but there are only 28 state-approved haircuts in North Korea. The man bun is not one of them.

And anyway, it’s not a man bun. It’s just a bun. Yes, the hairstyle is more commonly worn by women because women more commonly grow their hair out long enough to put it in a bun, but it’s certainly not some new and novel thing for men to do the same.

It is tradition for orthodox Hindu men, for instance, to shave all their hair, leaving a long patch at the back, which is often styled into a knot; sumo wrestlers have long pulled their hair into topknots. The style is only something we’re talking about now that all these young white dudes are wearing it — and wearing it so poorly, they’re ruining their scalps.

And really, so be it. Men going bald because of their buns are doing so because they’re pulling them way too tight, as they transition from short hair to long. It is, put more simply, because these guys don’t understand how to do their own hair. So let the bun-wearing men pull out their man buns. Call it survival of the follicularly fittest.

This way — if it’s really such a big deal — we’ll end up with fewer men wearing topknots through natural selection, rather than legislation. And in 20 years, everyone can still laugh at the whole debacle.

Well, everyone except the guys who man-bunned themselves bald.