The modern men’s perm is loud for a hairstyle so soft. On TikTok, the hashtag #menperm, referring to one of the latest hair trends to be born from the app, has garnered more than 20.7 million views.
Those videos often begin with a man in a salon chair, pictured from the shoulder up. The camera orbits around his head just before a final shot of his crown: silky, voluminous waves lacquered with the aplomb of K-pop boy bands.
“I came across an Asian influencer on TikTok with curly hair, and I’m like, That doesn’t correlate, because most Asians have straight hair,” said Brandon Dhakhwa, 20, a student from Durham, England. “And then I did some research, and that’s when I realized he got a perm.”
Once popular primarily among Korean and Korean American men, the coiffure has gradually expanded beyond these groups in the past four years — thanks, in part, to the meteoric rise of TikTok and K-pop. While the hairstyle is nothing novel in South Korea, its wider embrace signifies a notable shift from the early 2000s, when the term “metrosexual” — used to describe aesthetically attuned men — became popular.
In South Korea, beauty standards are intimately tied to the music industry, “symbolized by the K-pop idol with perfect skin, immaculately dressed with perfect hair,” said S. Heijin Lee, who, as an assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, researches Korean pop culture, beauty and digital media.
Those same revered features — or, in this case, men’s perms — are then circulated using social media.
Brendan Noji, 25, an L.G.B.T.Q. youth services worker who lives in Los Angeles, stumbled upon the hairstyle online during quarantine in the early days of the pandemic.
Mr. Noji said he had a long history of “mismatches” that could be mapped onto every male hair fad of the past two decades: a buzz cut (Brad Pitt in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith”) turned Justin Bieber mop (a bowl cut seemingly written in…
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