In August 2025, the Salvadoran Minister of Education Karla Trigueros (by profession, an army captain) ended the “Edgar cut”, at least among schoolchildren of his country. He Edgarshaped like a bowl, was a hairstyle that the Bukele government had already banned in educational centers when it imposed uniform standards (with its corresponding sanctioning regime for students and teachers) very similar to those that govern in barracks around the world.
This militarization of hairstyles in classrooms has scandalized many Salvadorans, who consider it the umpteenth sign that they live under an authoritarian regime. When one of these regimes seeks to impose its discipline on its citizens, it is common for it to intervene on its appearance. The famous catalog of the 18 haircuts accepted by the North Korean regime is known, which also prohibited haircuts in 2021. mullet.
It is also happening closer, in Morocco, where thousands of young people denounce on their social networks that the police carry out mass arrests and lawyers like Sara Soujar confirm that “wearing a backpack, hairstyles or the way you dress” can make the difference between sleeping at home or in the cell. And in the United States, with indiscriminate raids (and recently authorized by the Supreme Court) which means, in practice, that ICE agents choose their arrestees based on their skin, their accent or… their dark curls.
In his famous Symbol Dictionarythe mythologist and art critic Eduardo Cirlot indicates that hair has always been related to energy and fertility. Perhaps that is why, from Ancient Greece (according to myth, Medusa’s beautiful hair was transformed by Athena into terrible vipers) until today, hair has been subject to the intervention of powers of all kinds: religious, political, health and economic. When the philosopher Michel Foucault explains in Monitor and punish The fact that exclusion always begins with the identification and individualization of the “stricken” refers to processes such as the previous ones: it is enough to have hair that is too long or curly for an entire repressive mechanism to be set in motion.
Of course, these mechanisms have been challenged on many occasions. It is no coincidence that the young people who participated in the countercultural movements of the sixties and seventies of the 20th century identified themselves and others as hairy and what songs like Almost cut my hairde Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1970) talk about what their hair meant.
So the association seems simple: long hair or messy, original hair means rebellion and youthful energy, and neat, trimmed hair means adherence to the system. However, lately some individuals and ideas have complicated everything: while leaders of the populist right (such as Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Javier Milei or Geert Wilders) display increasingly unusual hairstyles and their followers opt for aesthetics that reward a supposedly modest naturalness that, in reality, requires as much effort and artifice as the most elaborate of backcombing.
When the right enters the hair salon
In 2016, the collaborator of the Washington Post Monica Hesse compiled the hundred best descriptions ever written about Donald Trump’s hairstyle. It was not a nightmare straight out of a creative writing workshop, but confirmation that Trump’s bangs are indescribable even to the most skilled journalists. In 2023, the columnist of The Guardian Andrew Anthony wondered why so many populist leaders They look so messy hair. Again, from Milei to Johnson, the columnist concluded that politicians need to build a recognizable brand and that, in the absence of discourse, they are aware that “the best actors build their characters based on a striking physical defect or trait.” It is not the first time that the right uses a hairstyle to distinguish itself. During the Spanish postwar Those who wanted (or needed) to identify with the winning side wore the curious “bangs up Spain” that bordered on rockabilly.
“Racism has operated throughout history establishing the guideline that white is beautiful and superior, therefore, the lighter the color of the skin or the less tight the curl, the closer the person will be to beauty.”
Alejandra Ntutumu, president of the Afromurcia Association
“Hair is a triple identity marker: gender, generation and ethnicity,” he explains to ICON. the anthropologist Carles Feixaexpert on youth and urban tribes. “Hair can be both a source of control and transgression. Governments, especially authoritarian ones, have always tried to homogenize the population through haircuts. Not only in El Salvador where the only thing it does is extend the military cut; with the paradox that the gangs [organizaciones criminales que operan principalmente en el Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica] They also did that same thing before, because when the Mara Salvatrucha was in California they were heavies with long hair and when, via deportation, they arrived in El Salvador, they chose to shave. Also during the Franco regime, for example, public haircuts were organized for young people who dressed in Beatle with the moralistic argument that this generated sexual confusion,” he continues.
Moralistic arguments against long hair are not exclusive to authoritarian governments, but are repeated at all levels. For example, still in 1960, the literary critic Pedro Romero Mendoza wrote, in a text about the romantic poets of the 20th century. XIX: “To a sentimental poetry that is even so maudlin, at odds with light and air due to the gloom of its ideas and the sickness of its affections, there must necessarily correspond a deliquescent and vague psychology, lugubrious tastes, poorly cared for hair and shabby clothing.” However, although the pressure that men feel regarding their hair is high (which is why hair transplants are the most requested aesthetic operation for them), everything is amplified when it comes to women’s hair.
“Hair is another form of gender expression and identity. So when it is repressed, it is repressing the identity of the person who is considered uncomfortable or socially dangerous. It is not trivial to worry about hair, but quite the opposite, because you are communicating to the world who you are.”
Noemí López Trujillo, author of ‘They drew me like this’
In They drew me like thisthe essay by Noemí López Trujillo recently published by Península, the author explains it like this: “To maintain the subordination of femininity, it has been presented as a natural expression of perversion and malignancy. The worked and produced appearance is the greatest symptom of how the feminine woman conceives her deception, starting with the hair.” López herself expands on this in conversation with ICON: “Hair is another form of gender expression and identity. So when it is repressed, it is repressing the identity of the person who is considered uncomfortable or socially dangerous. It is not trivial to worry about hair, but quite the opposite, because you are communicating to the world who you are.” So, in Spain we also have something to worry about? The writer believes that in our context we are already seeing “how attempts are made to homogenize identities and establish gender standards that make it very easy to be the discordant note and subject to repression in the future.” “In this setback, a standard of supposedly natural feminine beauty is being established that is not annoying, that is not noisy… There is a dangerous standardization and the possibilities of expression are being greatly reduced,” Trujillo summarizes.
Texturism and racialized hair
Malcom conk that would shine for several years. The cut conk It was very popular among African Americans during several decades of the s. XX and involved using a very corrosive relaxer made up of bleach and other chemicals. The activist spends several pages explaining the negative connotations of that process and, after applying it to himself, confesses that he endured a lot of pain “literally burning my skin so that it looked like a white man’s hair.” Despite initiatives like the one that has turned afro hair into a civil right In much of the United States, racialized hair has not yet been freed from persecution and ridicule that in Western countries dates back to colonial times and is called “texturism.”
“Racism has operated throughout history establishing the guideline that white is beautiful and superior, therefore, the lighter the color of the skin or the less tight the curls, the closer to beauty. Whoever approaches that ideal will find fewer obstacles and racism will affect them to different extents,” explains the writer and engineer Alejandra Ntutumu, also president of the Afromurcia Association. “Beauty canons take on a new dimension in racialized women who, through different strategies, have tried to whiten their skin, straighten their hair, change its color or have even used wigs. All of this to be accepted, fit in, get a job or, in short, overcome the obstacles that generate inequality and discrimination,” continues Ntumumu.
“When I was young, barbers were older people and today many barbershops are run by young people of foreign origin, such as Dominicans and Moroccans. Not only are they cheaper, but they offer new, more cross-cultural haircuts, there is a cultural hybridization that corresponds to musical hybridization”
Carles Freixa, anthropologist
Trujillo believes that, especially for racialized women, the margin of what is tolerable has always been narrow, but that, in recent years, the demand has been even greater: “The idea of naturalness that is being built is an even more artificial lie. The artificial shows how it has been created, how it has been worked on, the ideas, enthusiasm and passion of those who generate it have generated that artifice; naturalness does not give those clues and of course it has been built, sometimes for more hours and with more effort.”
A paradox is thus achieved: the objective is a deceitful naturalness, the product of much care and image strategies, while racial naturalness continues to be punished. “Men, in reality, do not want natural women, but rather they create a standard of naturalness that does not exist,” defends Trujillo. “By not giving importance to the work of feminization and beautification, which are practically equivalent, they consider that many women they see with camouflage makeup are natural. They cannot bear to consider that there is not something inherent to the feminine: precisely my book is about gender being an artifice; no less real or intimate, but constructed,” the essayist continues.
In any case, while some discourses seek an unattainable white naturalness, in the neighborhoods some things are changing. Feixa observes this, who remembers very different barbers from those who occupy the premises today: “When I was young, the barbers were older people and today many barbershops are run by young people of foreign origin, such as Dominicans and Moroccans. Not only are they cheaper, but they offer new, more cross-cultural haircuts, there is a cultural hybridization that corresponds to musical hybridization. Just as today the musical rhythms that dominate, such as reggaeton, come from the global South, there are original haircuts that come from the global South.” As almost always, two opposing trends are also fighting to establish themselves over our heads. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering Chesterton that in 1910 when, to avoid plagues of lice, children in the British suburbs were compulsorily shaved, he wrote: “With the red hair of a slut in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl must have long hair (…) there must be a redistribution of property and there must be a revolution.” “Only through eternal institutions like hair, can we test temporary institutions like empires,” concluded the Englishman.
