Teenagers get hair waves

Teenagers get hair waves

“It used to take me up to an hour to do my hair,” says Charlie Weiss, 12. “It was really straight, so I had to keep messing with it. I’d look in the mirror and be like, Is this good? No, no it’s not. Is this better? It’s still not.” Weiss, unsatisfied with his hair, ended up wearing a hat most of the time. “I would flip my hair back before I put it on, but that made it worse because I looked like a president from the 1700s when I took it off,” he says. “My friends told me I should just buzz it.”

Instead, Weiss saved up money from umpiring softball games and paid $150 for his first perm, which he got earlier this year. For his second perm, he bought a kit on Amazon and had his mom’s friend do it. “Now all I need is salt spray and I let it air-dry and it looks good,” Weiss says.

Brooks Eddy, 17, got his first perm at a salon last year (his mom paid $70 for the treatment). “I had short, straight hair my whole life, and I wanted something different,” he says. “It started getting long last year, but it was still really straight. So, I got natural curls. I didn’t want it to look super wiry or like that typical permed hair that’s short in the back, with the really big floof-y part in the front.”

Some think the Gen-Z style — a pile of fluffed curls, with stacked layers for height and a close cut on the sides and in the back — resembles broccoli. Moms on TikTok say their sons look like llamas. And then there are the alpaca memes. But most of the permed teens and tweens I talked to don’t seem to notice their resemblance to cruciferous vegetables or pack animals — or if they do, they don’t care.

“I guess some kids call it ice cream, because when you have curly, fluffy hair all around your head it looks like a scoop on a cone,” says Quinn Goncalves, a newly permed almost-12-year-old. He used to use a curling iron and styling powder to do his hair every morning, but then a kid at school mentioned he got a perm, so Goncalves asked his mom for one. They heard about a salon some kids were going to and paid $120 for his first perm, which didn’t take. Goncalves’s mom did some sleuthing and found a hairdresser who did it for $40. “This one is better and curlier,” says Goncalves. “My friends thought it was cool.”

Zane Probus, 13, and his brother, Levi, 10, got their perms at a cosmetology school, where it cost about $30. “My mom was gonna make me either get short hair or a perm, so I got the perm,” Zane says. His brother, Levi, chimes in: “She says she wants our hair out of our eyes so she can see us,” he explains. “She also helps us style it.” Zane fires back: “She helps you,” he says to his little brother. “I do my own. All I do is take a shower and let it dry, and it looks good.”