Scene/Emo Hair

I was doing an image search for "short hair" and "medium hair" on Google the other day. A search that broad does tend to bring up a variety of pictures. One theme I kept noticing was pictures tagged with titles like "scene hair/emo hair". Not knowing that meant, exactly, I felt old and out of touch. So, I went to YouTube and did a search for scene/emo hair.

I came up with a ton of different videos! Most of them were girls showing how they styled their hair. Like this girl who reminds me of Isla Fisher. Here she is again. And this girl is really skilled at teasing.

This style seems to involve a lot of flat ironing, teasing, and aerosol hairspray. I didn't recognize any of the music in the videos except for one video that I found featuring a girl teasing her bangs with a song by MGMT playing all garbled in the background.

There were a few professional videos, like this British one showing a girl getting her hair cut in a scene hairstyle at a salon.

It all got me thinking about what it would have been like to be in middle school or high school with webcams and cameras that shoot video. Would you have posted videos of yourself styling your hair (or doing anything else) on YouTube when you were in high school? I don't think I would have - I mean, I haven't put any videos up on YouTube in the present, anyway.

More importantly, though, have you heard of this genre? I've heard of emo music, but never heard it related to hair. It kind of reminds me of goth and makes me think of when I tried to make my hair all big like Robert Smith's when I went to see the Cure in 8th grade. I didn't look nearly as cool as I thought I did - that's for sure. We didn't have flat irons, but that wasn't the style anyway. I remember my friends hairspraying my hair and trying to make it stand up, but having it droop down and look kind of ratty. I can't even find a picture, which is probably a good thing. Good, too, that I don't have any kids, because I would sound like an ancient person to a kid. "What are you doing to your hair? You look like Siouxsie Sioux! Do you know who that is? What is this emo music you kids are listening to? What? You know, Robert Smith played guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees for a while. Yep. It's true.

Can you turn that noise down? That's not music! THIS is music!" As the imaginary kids cover their ears and wince, like I used to when my mom played Bob Dylan before I realized it was good music.