Having a side parting doesn’t make you old – does it?
WHEN YOU HEAD to the hairdressers – god willing – next month, you’ll no doubt have some wildly optimistic screenshots to show the exact colour and style you’ve been dreaming about for months. One thing you probably weren’t expecting to have to factor in: what your parting says about you. For, while it’s the one aspect of our appearance we’ve actually managed to escape feeling insecure about until now, your parting is now the subject of a huge debate on social media.
It started on Tiktok, where the majority Gen Z users (aged between six and 24) have begun to point out the things they think make Millennials desperately uncool. These include: skinny jeans, obsessions with Harry Potter, jokes about wine or coffee (you know, the whole ‘But first, wine!’ or ‘Not without coffee!’ thing)… and side partings.
User @Missladygleep started the hair panic when she posted a video telling her followers, ‘Prove me wrong, but I don’t think there is a single person who looks better with a side part than they do a middle part.’ The #Middlepartchallenge followed, where users discussed the Millennial roots of a side parting and tested a middle one (including model Ashley Graham). One user wrote, ‘Now forcing a middle part every day because I don’t want Gen Z to know I’m old.’
What seemed like a firm cancellation of side partings was then thrown off course by Gen-zer Anya Taylor-joy, 24, at the Golden Globes. The Queen’s Gambit star’s hair was in a side parting, which was reported as her attempt to ‘silence the middle part debate’, though she has yet to comment.
The great hair divide is all fun and games, but Tiktok has begun to push this generation gap from a friendly social distance to a chasm which even all of our Joni skinny jeans couldn’t fill. I’ve never felt older, at 37, than I do scrolling through Tiktok – and a huge portion of the jokes seem to be on Millennials (though there are a lot of them owning that narrative too – follow @chrxstopherhall for his parody of one who’s moved home during the pandemic).
Millennial Twitter user @wittyotter_ wasn’t up for the joke, though, writing, ‘Hey Gen Z. I’ve faced infertility, PPD [post-partum depression] and suicidal thoughts, had my abdomen sliced open during childbirth & peed in a diaper.
I pay a mortgage, work and school my kid in a pandemic. It’s cute that you think I have time or f*cks to give about what you think of my hair and jeans.’ Others pointed out that Gen Z have had the luxury of Youtube and Instagram to help them perfect their hair and make-up, and mocked them for claiming to rise up against capitalism only to continue to fund Amazon the next day.
Generational divides are there to be mocked (and if Millennials and Boomers are anything to go by, Gen Z are only just getting started). I just can’t help but wonder if this could all be solved by the return of the zig-zag parting?