Hey man, NICE BUN
The man bun is not only a bold statement of confidence, it’s a lusty embrace of the booming male grooming industry
FLASH IN THE PAN? EVERYDAY ’DO? A LOOK AT THE LOVED/HATED HAIRSTYLE MODERN MEN JUST CAN’T SEEM TO STOP SPORTING
Vanity, thy name is man. Recently it was revealed leading soccer players rely on Daniel Johnson, hairdresser to the celebrities, to style them just before a big game.
Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised: Google says 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 involved guys asking how to grow or how to tie the excrescence known as the “man bun.”
For the uninitiated, those without television or the Internet, 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, so the head resembles a jaunty number eight.
The style favoured by Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian and Rihanna has been annexed by Jared Leto, Leonardo DiCaprio, One Direction’s Harry Styles and, during his soccerplaying days, David Beckham.
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 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 capillary vanity.
And a good thing too, as most radical hairstyles, of the head and face, have been denied me.
As a toddler, I was blessed with angelic golden ringlets, which were peremptorily 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 outward from the surface of my head.
An attempted rat-tail braid (it was the ’80s!) looked like a hirsute cauliflower floret growing from the back of my neck. A later mohawk resembled a cat at bay, perched on my skull.
Worse, even though now in my late 40s, the effusive growth from my scalp is unmatched on my chin. 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.
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.