“It used to take me up to an hour to do my hair,” says Charlie Weiss, 12. “It was really straight, so I had to keep messing with it. I’d look in the mirror and be like, Is this good? No, no it’s not. Is this better? It’s still not.” Weiss, unsatisfied with his hair, ended up wearing a hat most of the time. “I would flip my hair back before I put it on, but that made it worse because I looked like a president from the 1700s when I took it off,” he says. “My friends told me I should just buzz it.”
Instead, Weiss saved up money from umpiring softball games and paid $150 for his first perm, which he got earlier this year. For his second perm, he bought a kit on Amazon and had his mom’s friend do it. “Now all I need is salt spray and I let it air-dry and it looks good,” Weiss says.
Brooks Eddy, 17, got his first perm at a salon last year (his mom paid $70 for the treatment). “I had short, straight hair my whole life, and I wanted something different,” he says. “It started getting long last year, but it was still really straight. So, I got natural curls. I didn’t want it to look super wiry or like that typical permed hair that’s short in the back, with the really big floof-y part in the front.”
Some think the Gen-Z style — a pile of fluffed curls, with stacked layers for height and a close cut on the sides and in the back — resembles broccoli. Moms on TikTok say their sons look like llamas. And then there are the alpaca memes. But most of the permed teens and tweens I talked to don’t seem to notice their resemblance to cruciferous vegetables or pack animals — or if they do, they don’t care.
“I guess some kids call it ice cream, because when you have curly, fluffy hair all around your head it looks like a scoop on a cone,” says Quinn Goncalves, a newly permed almost-12-year-old. He used to use a curling iron and styling powder to do his hair every morning, but then a kid at school mentioned he got a perm, so Goncalves asked his mom for one. They heard about a salon some kids were going to and paid $120 for his first perm, which didn’t take. Goncalves’s mom did some sleuthing and found a hairdresser who did it for $40. “This one is better and curlier,” says Goncalves. “My friends thought it was cool.”
Zane Probus, 13, and his brother, Levi, 10, got their perms at a cosmetology school, where it cost about $30. “My mom was gonna make me either get short hair or a perm, so I got the perm,” Zane says. His brother, Levi, chimes in: “She says she wants our hair out of our eyes so she can see us,” he explains. “She also helps us style it.” Zane fires back: “She helps you,” he says to his little brother. “I do my own. All I do is take a shower and let it dry, and it looks good.”
how do all these zoomers have curly hair, are they getting perms, what's going on https://t.co/wNB5UFoql7
— Matthew Zeitlin (@MattZeitlin) June 27, 2024
At first, it was a trendy look for influencers with straight hair, like Jacob Sartorius and the much-maligned Trey Lander. Then the pandemic happened, salons and barbershops shut down, and a lot of the e-boys ended up on TikTok just as their already-long-on-top hair was growing out. And as straight and wavy hair grows, its weight can drag a voluminous look down. So, what’s a TikToker to do? A perm.
“I was trying to replicate Dillon Latham,” says Weiss. Last July, Latham, posted a video of himself getting a perm that went mildly viral and now has 5.6 million views. His account remains popular by relying on a beauty trope that never gets old: the makeover. Though most teens call it a glow-up.
Globalization plays into things too. Bro perms may be newish in the States, but men in Japan and South Korea have been getting their hair permed for decades. And at least since 2020, Korean stars like Jungkook from BTS and Chen from EXO have been setting hearts aflame with their soft curls. “I’ve never seen anything like it, where so many people are hopping on an Asian trend of something. As an Asian American, it’s really cool for me to see,” says Chris Li, a colorist at Salon Benjamin, in Los Angeles, who gets his own hair permed at a salon in L.A.’s Koreatown. “But I think with K-pop being so universal and worldwide now, it’s giving a different flair to the look.”
For now, the teen boys I chatted with have no regrets. “With wavy or curly hair, there’s just more variety to the ways you can wear it,” says Eddy. “I was nervous when I first got a perm, but I was pleasantly surprised with how great it looked right away. It’s growing out, but it still has some of that texture, which I like.” But give it another decade, and things may change. “I mean, the style is probably very much a product of the time. A lot of people are exposed to it on social media so they’re like, Oh yeah, that looks good,” Eddy says. “But we’ll probably look back on this and it’ll be like soul patches of the 2000s or mullets in the ’90s.”
