Hashtag-manbraid is the hot new thing on Instagram. With only around 4,500 posts as of this writing, the trend cannot compare to hashtag-manbun’s over 280,000 posts. Yet.
The manbun, a men’s hair trend that originated when guys realized that they have to do something with the long tops of their undercut, is as celebrated as it is reviled. On the one hand, it looks amazing on Hollywood A-listers like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jared Leto – basically hot guys with intense jawlines and more than a bit of scruff. It’s easy, unfussy and really gives that devil-may-care sexiness that women find incredibly attractive.
On the other hand, some say it’s douchey, it makes you look like an acorn and it’s been recently accused of causing premature baldness due to too much pressure on the individual hair follicles when pulled all the way back. “Science says” so, some headlines suggest. (Counterpoint: Women have been doing this for ages and no one seemed to mind. Now that men are doing it, it’s suddenly bad for your hair? #DoubleStandards, but I digress.)
So apparently, the savior of us all is the manbraid, which is literally just a braid. It’s the “must-have guy style,” raves Today.com. But we should also note that men braiding their hair is not a new thing. Cornrows are practically the ultimate in man-braiding and they have existed for as long as all of us can remember. But their existence has been mainly confined to certain racial groups. Aside from that, cornrows have always been regarded as a unisex hairstyle but manbraids are “borrowed” from the ladies, thus the need to prefix its name with “man” to butch it up.
The “standard” manbraid, according to the Telegraph, “sees the wearer pull all his hair together, creating one neat plait down the middle of his head.” Meanwhile, the more adventurous of man-braiders go into it “with a spirit of creative endeavor, creating two or more braids.”
The current mainstreamization of the manbraid can be attributed to the usual suspects – aka hipsters. GQ.com has more on this development: “A surprising number of men have taken to Instagram to show off gently flowing French, waterfall, and otherwise fantastical braids. To clarify, we’re not talking about legitimate cornrows. These are hipster gentlemen with long top hair left over from a former bun. So instead of trimming their flaccid faux-hawks, they opted for a creative solution.”
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