So You Don’t Want to Look Like Kim Jong-un

Well, too bad!

Men in North Korea are now required to get the same haircut as their leader Kim Jong-un, it is reported.

There are worse human rights violations than a bad haircut, of course, but this is a spectacularly poor one: the “Dear Leader” is a deadly alliance between the Macklemore, the mushroom cap, a weird butt, and that thing that boys did in middle school where they’d gel their hair into voluminous center-parted waves.

A North Korean now living in China says the look is actually unpopular at home… “Until the mid-2000s, we called it the ‘Chinese smuggler haircut’,” the Korea Times reports.

Here’s an alternate name. Yeah, story checks out.

It seems that haircuts have been state-approved in North Korea for some time — until now people were only allowed to choose from 18 styles for women and 10 for men. Earlier, North Korea’s state TV launched a campaign against long hair, called “Let us trim our hair in accordance with the Socialist lifestyle”.

A report from 2005 on this long-hair-don’t-care-if-we-sound-like-psychotic-maniacs-because-that’s-really-our-thing campaign:

The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding. It stressed the “negative effects” of long hair on “human intelligence development”, noting that long hair “consumes a great deal of nutrition” and could thus rob the brain of energy.

“Seven Centimetres of Upper Hair,” coming to the saddest erotic bookstore near you, while North Korea keeps testing missiles and ruining its citizens’ lives. [BBC]