Are you ready for hot horn girl summer?
If you’ve scrolled through TikTok lately, you may have come across a particularly striking hairstyle: little tiny sprigs of hair on each side of the head, maneuvered upright, sometimes in various shapes like hearts and stars, sometimes just like the devil. Meet hair horns.
“My client, Allison Ponthier, whom I’ve been cutting for years, came up with the initial idea and I was game,” says Mischa G., a stylist and owner of the salon Treehouse Social Club. Mischa posted a video of the hair horns process on Instagram, and Pronthier did the same on Tiktok. “We collaborated on the whole process. It was the most fun I’ve had doing a cut in a while – this is definitely a Tiktok trend I can stand behind.”
“It’s about being playful, but also naughty,” adds Mischa of the trend. “Especially for queer people like Lil Nas X, to play with a heaven and hell narrative. It’s a sort of F-you to social and even religious norms.”
@allisonponthier inspired by @bloodypinecone and yes I am wearing my own merch at the beginning of this vid :) Link in bio
♬ last september mashup - thquib
“It's also a built-in accessory that looks super cute, but if the horns aren't styled, they can blend it with their layers.”
As well as getting it professionally done at the salon, people are DIY-ing the look themselves at home. The #hairhorns hashtag has over 40 million views alone, with TikTokers from across the world styling their horns in creative ways.
On Tiktok, hair horns are a definitive part of the E-girl style vocabulary. When Dazed first explored the E-girl and boy aesthetics in 2019, the community was culminating in mixing alternative looks like chokers and drama eyeliner with softer, anime-like sensibilities with blooming blush and pastel hair. Just like how heavy blush across the nose, little heart facial stamps, and kohl-ed eyes have become ubiquitous in this micro-commmunity, so too have hair horns. They are being worn with short bobs, chunky mullets, and even on modified pixie cuts. And just like Mischa said, they’re actually extremely versatile in that if you don’t want to wear them, you can just let them blend in with the rest of your hair layers.
“I enjoy doing things that make people say ‘Uhhhh???!’,” adds Mischa. “I love collaborating with my clients to make whatever we can dream up become a reality. Also who doesn’t look adorable as hell with little horns?!”
For many, too, the trend is an easy way to shake up their look amid the pandemic with little effort or commitment. Sure, you can go to a salon to get them cut into your hair, but it’s also a style that’s easy to DIY – and the many, many tutorials on TikTok prove it. Cutting and styling the look yourself takes less than five minutes.
“The inspiration behind my hair horns was mostly me just trying random things while cutting my hair,” explains Abigail McAuliffe, who did the look at home. “I thought it would be a fun little thing that not many people have. I love that I can make them a ton of different shapes like hearts, antennas, cat ears, and horns! I also love that I can use colored hair spray and make them any color I want!”
McAuliffe has been quite experimental with her horns: “The way I’ve been styling it lately was by spraying red dye on it and curling them upwards and also making the cat ears and adding hair clips to them.”
“A friend and I watched a TV show where the main character was a girl with horns, and I thought it was super cute so I wanted to cut my own,” adds Callianna Priebe, who also recently cut in some horns. “I love that when I don’t want to wear them up, I can hide them easily in the rest of my hair. When I wear them up, I get lots of compliments.”
If you’re considering getting the look at home, Mischa recommends her tailored hair horns formula: “When I was sectioning out the hair for the horns, I took the hair from just under the surface of the hair, so if the horns aren't styled, they just blend in under the top layer. I rubber banded my sections off, and snipped the hair on an angle about 2-3 inches from the head, then point-cut into them to break apart the ends of the hair.”
The most important part is the styling – the horns don’t stand up on their own, so you’ll need product and tools to make sure they do. “Usually I use mousse and hair spray and a flat iron to curl the horns and they hold up pretty well. You can also use a hair gel or styling paste,” says Priebe.
Likewise, Mischa uses a hard hold hairspray and a flat iron to get the perfect swoop, using her fingers to shape the horns into shape. “If your hair is super straight and silky, I would go heavy on the texture product and add a little backcombing to the base of the horns. The more product, the better,” she says. “I like using a hair straightener to heat up the spray, almost gluing the hair together.”
So, are you ready for horn girl summer?