As far as bad haircuts go, the bowl cut is a lot like the mullet. It was popular around the 1980s, and it’s definitely not a good idea in the Year of Our Lord 2019.
Actually, the mullet is probably better: At least there’s a party in the back.
Sadly, bowl cuts have influenced us all, whether or not we’d like to admit it. Even Bradley Cooper didn’t escape childhood unscathed.
“People thought I was a girl when I was little because I looked like a girl — maybe because my mother would keep my hair really long in a bowl cut,” he lamented to the Huffington Post. “I was in a coffee shop once and the waitress was like, ‘What do you want, Miss?’ I was 10 or 11 — the worst age to have that happen.”
But now, to make matters worse, the bowl cut is actually racist, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
Both the awful haircut and the OK hand gesture made it the group’s hate symbols list last week. As for the OK gesture, the ADL itself admits, “The overwhelming usage of the ‘okay’ hand gesture today is still its traditional purpose as a gesture signifying assent or approval.”
Some white supremacists tried to spin the innocuous symbol into a sign of hate on the internet, but that’s not how things work. In real life, it’s still as normal as a thumbs up sign.
But the bowl cut is supposedly “problematic” too. The ADL reports that white supremacists online have used it to praise the perpetrator of the Charleston church shooting, who wore a bowl cut himself. That association arises on the darkest corners of the internet. But in real life, it’s just a bad haircut.
Celebrities from Charlize Theron to Joe Keery to Celine Dion have tried it out, proving that no, you’re never too beautiful to make yourself look terrible. The bowl cut is making an inexplicable comeback. Maybe the ADL can help prevent that tragedy. That would be … okay.
