Bobble of hair on the head gets a bun rap
An assertion of masculinity and vanity, the man bun suggests a refusal to accept one might look a little ridiculous, Nick Curtis
VANITY, thy name is man. This week it was revealed that leading footballers, including Theo Walcott, Mario Balotelli and Wayne Rooney, rely on hairdresser Daniel Johnson to titivate their tresses just before a big game. I know! Rooney has a hair stylist — who’d have thought it?
But perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised: according to Google, web searches about men’s hair and styling outstripped women’s for the first time this year.
And the most popular searches of all these inquiries involved blokes asking how to grow, or how to tie, the excrescence known as the “man bun”.
For the uninitiated, or those living outside the major urban centres where such things flourish, the man bun is the same as a woman’s bun, only (wait for it) on a man.
It involves collecting long hair at the back or top of the head and tying it into some sort of bulky bobble, ranging from a loose knot to a glossy doughnut. The style favoured by JLo, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna has been annexed by Jared Leto, Leonardo DiCaprio and One Direction’s Harry Styles.
The man bun is entirely different from other male tonsorial eccentricities such as the ponytail (loose hair gathered at the back) or the topknot (short hair gathered into a tuft at the crown). But on anyone other than devout male Sikhs — who are required by their faith not to cut their hair, to comb it twice a day, and to gather it into a bunch — it makes as bold a statement as either.
It is an assertion of both masculinity and vanity, a lusty embrace of the booming male grooming industry, and a refusal to accept that one might look more than a little ridiculous.
Perversely, the rise of the man bun lifts my heart, because I am now of an age where I feel no urge to pursue such wayward spasms of vanity. And a good thing, too, as most radical hairstyles, of the head and face, have been denied me.
I was blessed with angelic golden ringlets, which were shorn off at about the age of two when my father took me for my first “proper” haircut.
Ever since, my hair has grown in a dark fuzz, directly outwards from the surface of my head, which has drawn both antiSemitic abuse and an assumption of kinship by a Trinidadian drummer at the Notting Hill Carnival.
It has a kink to it, but never goes curly in a romantically Byronic way.
Aged six, I looked like one of those old-fashioned microphones with a spherical foam cover.
Before sending me to school, my mother would try to comb a parting into it, which would gradually heal up through the day.
Later on it resisted New Romantic fringes and punk spikes. An attempted rat-tail braid (it was the ’80s) looked like a hirsute cauliflower floret growing from the nape of my neck. A later Mohican resembled a cat at bay, perched on my bonce.
Worse, even though now in my late 40s, the effusive growth from my scalp is unmatched on my chin.
While every fashionable man in the UK has spent the past year sporting a beard, I can still only manage something that looks like an Amish chinstrap. When I tried to grow a moustache for a Gomez Addams fancy-dress costume, my wife had to fill in the gaps with mascara.
So the man bun, like the lumberjack beard, is barred to me.
But I, like the truly follicly challenged, can draw comfort from the fact that the bun, like the rat tail, is surely a flash in the pan. For one thing, it is already the subject of an internet meme where a bun is photoshopped on to US heads of state, from George Washington to George W Bush.
For another, the website Wowcher is now selling clip-on man buns for $9.99 (about R142), which calls to mind the doleful lament of Danny the drug dealer from Withnail and I: “They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man!”
The surest sign that a radical trend is dead is when it is commercialised. Pretty soon, there will be a backlash against today’s furry-faced and longlocked males in favour of something cleaner and simpler and less high-maintenance: bald men, your time will come. — ©
There will be a backlash against today’s furry-faced and long-locked males in favour of something simpler