Scene Hair is so Scene

Scene Hair

Scene hair is currently the hottest trend among today’s youth.  It is a category of hair style that is tricky to explain but easily identifiable.  It is straight, extremely straight in fact.  It sports bangs that are long, usually over the eye or eyes and moussed into jagged points.  Adjectives like choppy, asymmetrical, puffy, chunky, layered or textured are but a few of the descriptive phrases that come to mind.  Scene styles are often dyed black with large chunks of neon colors such as blue, red and green.  Length is not an issue.  There are long, medium as well as short scene hair styles and all are worn by both boys and girls alike.

It appears that scene hair or emo hair as it is sometimes called has a rather linear evolution beginning with the punk culture of the 1980’s.  With the punk era long, straight puffy Mohawks came into style along with the use of bright, neon colors.  You could say that scene hair for girls and for guys often utilizes a sort of Fauxhawk with some modernized variations from the punk version.  From punk to grunge, hair started to be styled choppy, jagged and straight with large globs, for lack of a better word, of teased sections.  This brings us into the beginning of the ‘90’s where grunge dumped the neons and took to bleaching and teasing.  From there it appears that Goth evolved in the late ‘90’s and the darkness it evokes was transferred to hairstyles.  Bleach was discarded and black became the color of choice.

Somewhere early in the new millennium all three of styles sort of melded and fused and scene hair was born: the neons of punk, the jagged asymmetry of grunge and the dark side of Goth.  Where the term “emo” originated is unclear, however, many believe that it is a spin off of “emotional” or “emotive.”  One thing is certain, when you hear emo hair you think scene hair and vice versa.

In fact, scene hair styles also appear to be part of a larger family of scene style.  Both scene boys and girls normally wear vivid black eyeliner and sport tight legged jeans with baggy or droopy butts.  Girls accentuate their hair style with bows, clips and bobby pins.  Face and body piercings also lend themselves well.

Proponents of scene maintain that it is NOT merely a style, scene is a way of life.  You either are or you are not scene.  Whatever the case, scene hair is unlikely to be mistaken in a crowd.  Though hard to describe it is most certainly scene.