TBOE: The Best Celebrity Haircut

I had a close call with people thinking I was a charity case.

A while back, I took off work to take Sweetie to the doctor for a pregnancy test -- a while being nine months plus 7 weeks plus 2 days as I write this. [Note: This is an old article. That test was positive and the babies are almost eight months old!] I told our receptionist where I was going -- that being to take my wife to the doctor -- and he helpfully passed that to the entire firm.

I also cut my hair that day, and cut it shorter than I usually do because I do my own hair with a clippers and got the wrong attachment on it (that being the day I went from 1/2" long hair to 1/4" long hair.)

I didn't go back to work that day, and was watching the news that night, and saw that there had been a benefit, something to do with Brett Favre, where people were shaving their heads or cutting their hair short to support breast cancer victims. So I had to spend the next day explaining to people that, no, Sweetie was fine (without at that point telling them what the visit was about) and the haircut was simply a coincidence.

That story, as usual, only tangentially relates to the category here, which is The Best Celebrity Haircut. It relates because I include Brett Favre as a celebrity (and if you don't like him or don't like him anymore, don't start with me because you will get a lengthy email detailing his many accomplishments, and I don't always have time to keep writing those) and because (true story) I was once mistaken for Brett Favre. Like I said, true story. The whole story is that I was mistaken for Brett Favre by the girl who would later become The Middle Daughter, and she was only seven at the time, and I think her mom set her up to do that because it was the first time I met her and about the fourth date with the woman who would become Sweetie. But The Middle Daughter looked at me and said, quite sweetly, "Are you Brett Favre?" Brett Favre, too, has a "celebrity haircut," a haircut that has become famous because of a celebrity and emulated by us regular people. Sadly for Brett, his haircut is not eponymous, because his haircut was made more famous by someone else.

The first of the haircuts that I considered for this category, then, was... The Jack: The Jack Brett's version!

When I began watching Lost (another warning -- Do NOT let me know any details, I'm only up to the third episode of Season 2 and don't want a spoiler), I noted that Jack had the same haircut that I, and Brett, have been sporting for a while. (How does he keep it that short on the island? Was there a stylist in seat E, row 26? I know he has to shave, I saw that on one episode.) And I've been seeing more and more "Jacks" around town, and I concluded that The Jack is now a bona fide celebrity hairstyle. Heck, even Natalie Portman went with it for a while:

But the Jack is not the most famous celebrity hairstyle, or even The Best. There are many, many more famous, and more interesting/better, hairstyles to choose from.

Consider:

The Larry Fine The Kojak

Shaggy The Mr. T! The Bolton

Purists will, no doubt, protest that there are other names ("mohawk," or "The Bozo") and that I've left some out (there were a plethora of mulleted celebs, for example) but I'm not trying to catalog them, so I didn't put every possible celebrity hairstyle. I'm also not interested in the actual name, but the celebrity name. Because when I say the "Mr. T" that instantly connotes more than just a mohawk, which could be his mohawk, or could be one of these:

Give me liberty or give me a decent barber!

NCAA be damned! To find this guy, you have to search for "Mohawk Indian."

And those are NOT the celebrity hairstyle, which is Mr. T's puffy, fuzzy mohawk combined with that beard. So calling it the "Mr. T" connotes more. And The Bolton. How could you ever describe it more concisely?

But all of those pale in comparison to The BEST Celebrity Hairstyle. The one that singlehandedly took over television for years, the one that spawned a sitcom (because if you watch the early ones they were not that funny, so it's entirely possible that the hairstyle carried the show), the one that launched a career arc whose trajectory would ultimately cause an explosion in tabloids and celebrity magazines, a career that would include propulsive coverage of marriages, denials of engagements, rebound relationships, denials of rebound relationships, denials of breakups of rebound relationships, a variety comedy show, several movies of middling quality, a lawsuit, orphan-stealing, charity-ripping off... I could go on.

What makes this celebrity hairstyle The Best is not just that other celebrities copied it (that happens all the time -- look at Reagan and Big Boy). It's not just that regular folks like us copied it. (Well, not me, but Sweetie wanted to, I think.) It's not even that it's still memorable years later. It's that this hairstyle had a cataclysmic effect on the world that transcended any hairstyle before or after.

You've heard of Helen of Troy, the face that launched a 1000 ships? I submit to you that without this haircut (which you already have identified unless you've been for the past sixteen years living in a vault underground pressing a six-number combination every so often), not only would the star have no career, but her now-ex-husband would not have been as famous, making his hookup with his new fling less significant, making her adoption of various orphans less interesting and newsworthy (and thereby making Madonna and Jessica Simpson less willing to try that particular bid for attention), making his efforts to become "serious" less comical, making the birth of the Infangelina less newsworthy (and by comparision making Suri worth more), making the new boyfriend less interesting, which means that various movies would not have done as well, so that Owen Wilson might not be famous enough to do this. And the other Spin-offs of the Fame That Hair Built? They are legion: Jake Gyllenhaal benefited by having her in The Good Girl, pushing him out of the Donnie Darko era. Paul Rudd got to be likeable in that one movie with her, whatever it was, and returned the favor by coming back to prop up Friends at the end, and then got himself into Anchorman (among other things). It probably even helped boost DVD sales of that Leprechaun movie she was in.

Yes, The Best Celebrity Hairstyle was a seismic event that propelled its wearer, Jennifer Aniston, into the stratosphere of fame from whence almost every other famous event either flowed or was altered by her proximity to it. So, readers, I give you The Best Celebrity Haircut: