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Punk Rock Hairstyles

April 20, 2012 by · Comments Off on Punk Rock Hairstyles 

Punk Rock Hairstyles, This is “bad hair time” in religious Jewry land. Men may not shave nor have a haircut till the 33rd day (Lag) of the Omer, if you are Sephardi, or three days before Shavuot if Ashkenazi (no, harmonization is not one of our strengths).

Hair, whether facial or on one’s head, makes a lot of statements about who a person is. In my youth, almost every male in England would go into a barbershop and ask for a “short back and sides”. It was not until the era of the Beatles that anyone, apart from a few eccentrics, considered letting his hair grow into a floppy imitation of a juvenile sheepdog. Looking back at it now, one is amazed that anyone could have thought it to have been a protest against authority. But that was also the era when most middle class males went to work in London with a bowler hat and a furled umbrella.

Since then, hairstyles have proliferated. A baldpate no longer automatically suggests one might be ill or even an employee of the Israeli Secret Service! A Mohawk cut is no longer the preserve of the Mohawks. Punk rockers gave us every color and shape option, and hair gel has allowed every strand to go in a different direction. One’s hairstyle tells us a great deal about the person.

The messages that hair sends is an ancient human tradition (let alone amongst animals). Anthropologists have written about the way hair delineates different levels in what we like to call more primitive societies. In ancient Egypt priests shaved their heads. In many other societies, only the wealthy had the leisure and assistance to cut or shave their hair, so beards became associated with the poor and barbarians. Beards were forbidden in the British armed forces, except the navy (it was too difficult to shave on a rolling ship). Look at photos of, say, George Orwell, and you will see how upper class Englishmen actually did shave their sideburns almost all the way up to mid-skull (or, if you are a soccer fan, look at Meireles of Chelsea). Whenever I was sent to have my hair cut I had to tell them to leave my sideburns in place and not to use a razor.

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