Popular hair trends tend to revolve around using two chunks of hair to accessorize the head, and there’s a hot new hair-chunk duo in town just in time for horny summer: hair horns.
Hair horns are exactly what they sound like: two little slanted nuggets of hair sitting on either side of your head that are styled upward with hair spray and heat to look like pointy horns growing out of your skull. Hair horns aren’t superthick like, say, a ram’s horns, or the ones Lil Nas X stole from the Devil, nor are they very obstructive, like Daniel Radcliffe’s horns in that movie Horns. Hair horns are relatively tiny and super-manageable, like the ones on those headbands you buy only at the end of October and the ones on the little goats that do yoga and love smiles.
Now, goats are beauty influencers in their own right. And their pasture-based peers, the highland cows, have been pairing choppy layers and heavy bangs with horns since before the internet was a thing. But lately, hair horns have been gaining popularity where most beauty trends tend to incubate these days: TikTok. That’s where e-girls and shag owners like Allison Ponthier have been documenting and sharing the creation of their little hair horns for the non-horned and curious.
Ponthier’s horns were cut by a pro — Mischa G., mullet and “shullet” whisperer and the owner of New York’s Treehouse Social Club — but a number of e-girls have taken scissors to the tops of their own heads to DIY antennae, and compared to most viral trends that require removing sections of hair unsupervised, it seems pretty chill.
Hair horns are basically just two super-short layers that sit slightly beneath the topmost layer of the hair, so if you completely mess it up, it’ll be really hard for anyone to tell, especially since we’re currently living in an extremely layered world in which intentionally “bad haircuts” and choppy Instagram shags and wolf cuts dominate social-media feeds and celebrity heads.
Two quick snips, two hair-spray spritzes, two flat-iron flicks, and voilà, you look as horny on the outside as you are on the inside. Not feeling particularly horny anymore? Simply let your horns lie down naturally, and no one will ever know what’s hanging out behind your curtain bangs or atop your Rihanna mullet.
While these two extra-credit layers are easy to camouflage and will provide you with a built-in emergency Halloween costume for fall, it must be noted that getting a pair may require a bit of risk-taking for some: Like most hairstyles favored by e-girls, hair horns require wearing an unapologetic middle part, so you might want to take that into consideration if this year’s contentious part debate made you feel some type of way.
