THE JOURNAL
From left: Mr Pete Davidson in Los Angeles, 3 June 2022. Photograph by Goff Photos. Mr Seth Rogen in Los Angeles, 12 June 2022. Photograph by Mr Leon Bennett/Getty Images. Mr Evan Mock in New York, 22 June 2022. Photograph by Shutterstock
In the 2012 film 21 Jump Street, the opening scene shows a 2005 flashback of Schmidt – played by Mr Jonah Hill – in a white T-shirt, silver chain and bootcut jeans and the yellowest bleached buzzcut reminiscent of Slim Shady. This somewhat accurate representation of the 2000s, where Mr David Beckham and Eminem’s peroxide ’dos were the peak of coolness, demonstrates the beginnings of what we now know as a particular rite of passage for a lot of men: the bleached buzzcut.
After a whole decade of longer, shaggier hair (blame Tumblr, emos and indie kids who were not fussed about having a good fade), in the mid-2010s, the Shady buzzcut had something of a revival – see Mr Zayn Malik, Mr Pharrell Williams and Mr Kanye West’s blond-turned-rainbow-coloured head, and Mr Frank Ocean, who displayed a green buzzcut on his 2016 album cover for Blonde, marking a new, more experimental era of men’s style and masculinity.
If shaving off your hair and dying it the colour of a crayon box was once considered edgy and controversial, that fringe trend has now become almost mainstream in celebrityland. With the likes of MGK’s fuschia mane, Mr Evan Mock with his staple pink buzzcut and other Gen Z It-boys – such as Mr Romeo Beckham paying a throwback homage to his trendsetter dad with a silver-blond buzz – and the hashtag #bleachbuzzcut having 15.6bn views on TikTok, the bleach now has a settled status in men’s hair.
Y2K trends have been turning up for a few years now – from baggier fits to Matrixcore and normcore, millennial fashion is very much mainstream. And we have come full circle from “teen” Jonah Hill in 21 Jump Street to now, where he’s back to his blond roots with a surfy bleached look. Mr Seth Rogen – who until recently had never really changed up his hair before – has also joined in with a silver-toned buzzcut for summer, showing it off on the red carpet in a baggy T-shirt and chinos ensemble and in his nails-matching-his-pottery gloop videos.
Another blond with a comedy background, Mr Pete Davidson has also gone under the bleach to match his girlfriend Ms Kim Kardashian’s hair, who bleached hers for the Met Gala back in May. And with snaps of Mr Ryan Gosling’s hyper-blond Ken on the set of the forthcoming Barbie movie taking over the internet, you might say that we’re about to reach peak bleach.
So, do blonds have more fun? The jury’s still out on that one, but they almost certainly have to spend more time at the hairdresser’s.