Just one week ago, I was standing at a Brooklyn bar waiting for the surly bar mistress to notice me, when I realized that maybe half of the guys in the room had long hair. And I was really hot for it.
Let me back up. I grew up in the kind of hippie college town where long hair on men was basically de rigueur. But they all either looked like Daniel Day-Lewis circa The Last of the Mohicans or wore it pulled back in a low ponytail. Either way, I’m pretty sure neither conditioner nor Shu Uemura Essence Absolue was involved. So my version of rebellion was to lust after shorthaired guys. This was the era of Dylan McKay’s pompadour on Beverly Hills, 90210, after all.
Around that same time, I watched My So-Called Life, which aired its one and only season—cry with me in solidarity right now, if you desire—during my senior year of high school. Jared Leto played Jordan Catalano, the show’s illiterate, choker-wearing love interest. I spent a lot of time in 1994, as I do in 2014, thinking about boys, and after some amount of rumination I came to the decision that Jordan was just sort of… okay? I liked the romantic moments of the show, but his blankness and that mid-length hair and shearling jacket definitely did not do it for me.
In the ensuing years, I didn’t think much of Jared Leto. I was vaguely aware that he was in a corny band and seemed to have a deft hand with eyeliner. Does he date models? He seemed like the kind of guy who dated models.
But I’m here to tell you now, that I take it all back. Something changed in me this year. I’m not sure if it's the emergence of his perfect hair or the fact that he seemingly doesn’t age or just the general case of extended adolescence/extreme spring fever I seem to suffer from, but I am so into Jared Leto right now.
When I think of having sex with Jared Leto, which, given his awards season ubiquity, is often, it pretty much centers around his luscious ombre hair sort of making its way down and brushing my body and getting tangled in my limbs and my own blonde hair. I have visited his editorial from Flauntabout five times a day—last night I had to get out my phone to show a group of friends. The golden skin! The piercing eyes! The right amount of facial hair! The Saint Laurent! But most of all, that perfect hair. My fixation with him is only increasing as the Oscars approach. Will he wear a bun or will it be long and loose?
I know that Jared is still in the kind of band I couldn’t even pretend to be interested in and still probably dates models, or at least not semi-hermit writers old enough to be a fellow child of the 90s like me, but that’s where Brooklyn’s new crop of men with luscious hair come in. I’m here to say that I currently own six different kinds of conditioner. And I’m sure we could learn a lot from each other.
