UrbanUpdate

We often count on our friends to artfully perform that delicate balancing act between unwavering support and brutal honesty. It was with that sense of security in mind that I headed to Tyler and Mieke’s apartment—for dinner, and to test out my new look.

Mieke, as always, greeted me effusively. “Hi, how are you?!” she asked. A thick, palpable pause hung between us. A more pressing question: “What are you doing with your hair?!” Her voice was incredulous now, almost as if she smelled something rank in the air.

Uh oh, I thought: So long, unwavering support. Hello, brutal honesty.

“You know, just trying something new,” I said. “You don’t like?” No, she shook her head. She did not like.

Tyler’s assessment was short and sweet, reiterating his wife’s sentiment—and perhaps even my own: “I have to admit,” he said, patting me on the back. “I’m not a big fan of the man bun.”

And with that, I reached up behind my head and pulled out the hairband. My man bun was retiring, at least for the evening. Maybe forever.

Years ago I had a girlfriend who referred to me as Bartleby, Melville’s famous scrivener whose reply to any and all requests was, simply, “I’d prefer not to.” He declined extra work and mealtimes, all the way to the grave. He was not a real trend follower.

Frustrated that her outsized passions were often met with passivity, my girlfriend accused me of sitting on the sidelines of my own life.

She was right: I have been known to approach life’s twists, turns, and especially its high-drama moments with, if not outright indifference, certainly a lack of action.

And it was inaction that led to my current flowing locks. Last year, after years of working 60-plus-hour weeks, I quit my job. As my focus shifted from management meetings to travel arrangements, I let responsibilities and expectations go. My hair, which was often fairly shaggy, grew longer and longer. It became a literal extension of my new self, and I liked it.

Me being me, though, I didn’t seize all my possibilities with the gusto of Hollywood’s elite males—or even Groupon.

But with 2015 drawing to a close, and high-profile man-bunners like Jared Leto and Bradley Cooper having snipped their top knots, the man bun trend was clearly coming undone. And then Groupon rolled out a $10 clip-in bun. The jig was up. I figured it was time to get off the sidelines and into the game, even just for a couple plays. I was going to be—Bartleby be damned!—a guy with a man bun.

Up until this point, I’d never worn a man bun. It seemed like one of those things between red-carpet casual and trying-too-hard douche, outside the gray area in which I live most of my life. It was on the list of things I’d never considered — a leather jacket, a motorcycle. Maybe a toe ring. It was an effortless look that belonged to the chiseled and famous, not an average guy who looked, with his long hair, like a member of the Scotland national rugby union.

As I was contemplating my makeunder, I met a few friends for drinks. The bartender, an affable guy the size of an NFL lineman, was wearing a man bun. I asked him — this is one of the things that genuinely eluded me — how he actually does it.

“Hold on a sec, I’ll show you,” he said. “I can’t do it behind the bar. It’d be a health violation.”

He came out front and walked me through a man-bun how-to. I tried to take note: make a high ponytail, part that in two, twist those two parts, add second hair band, and do some sort of… tuck?

I was going to need professional help.

So the next day, I went to see Melissa Soon, who has been making some sort of sense of my head and hair for over a decade. “I have a kind of silly question to ask,” I said, “but…can you show me how to do a man bun?”

She laughed and sat me down in a salon chair, and immediately pulled my hair into a high ponytail. But from here, her approach was different than the bartender’s: wrap the ponytail around twice, and then on the third pass tuck the end into the band. No split. No twist. No second band. A simpler approach for the uninitiated.

As I fumbled through my first attempt, she offered an additional pro tip: “You want to trim up the sideburns so you don’t look like a werewolf.” She cleaned mine up and sent me on my way.

I felt like a high school girl heading out to basketball practice. I made a beeline for the wine store. And let my hair down, in every sense, for the evening.

The next day, I thought my look should be less high-and-tight. So I adopted the sort of sloppy topknot Leo DiCaprio has successfully rocked, and set out for a full man bun of a day.

I started off at my local coffee shop, where I often spend mornings working. The woman behind the counter didn’t register anything new as she rang up my coffee. But I noticed something different about her: she was wearing her hair in long braids for a change. I felt camaraderie. We were both trying out new things, so who was she to judge? We all try new things: maybe we each have a version of ourselves we’ve kept under lock and key.

As I was running errands, I completely forgot about my hair—not the bun, but my hair. For a year or more now, I realized, it’s been in my face constantly. I felt like I had a new set of hands and eyes.

Later, I saw a guy with a man bun walking his dog. And then another guy walking into a store. Soon, I was seeing man bun men everywhere. It’s like what pregnant women say—that when you’re pregnant, you see pregnant women all over. I was now seeing the world through man bun-colored lenses.

My self-consciousness had melted away. I headed home with my man bun head held high.

And then I went to dinner.

Later that weekend (and after that discouraging dinner), I wound up at the Brooklyn Flea, a giant artisanal market in New York’s hippest borough, where man buns are prevalent.

I got to talking with one of the proprietors, Rebecca, a jewelry maker who surveyed the man bun-heavy crowd all day long. I asked her thoughts on the hairstyle. “I like it,” she said politely. I confided my own ambivalence about the bun. She dropped her salesperson front: “I have to admit, I don’t actually like a man bun. I saw your hair, and wasn’t sure how you felt—I wanted to say the right thing.”

Just then, my fashion designer friend Joshua walked up and said, with great enthusiasm, “Hey, man! Your hair looks great! You should wear it like this more often!”

But, as I felt that evening at Mieke and Tyler’s, I knew it wasn’t me. I took out the man bun, returning my hair to its usual “Thor-meets–Foo Fighter–cover-band guy” style. A little voice inside me piped up:

I’d prefer not to.

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