You have seen the trend. The "rain on me ponytail," the sleek draped effortless high ponytail with that waterfall-smooth front section that looks like someone's hair personally chose to behave, made an appointment, and showed up professionally. It's been all over my TikTok and I have watched it probably forty times and every single time I think: that looks incredible. And then I think: my hair would simply never.
For those who don't know what I'm working with: I have a lot of hair. A SIGNIFICANT amount of hair. It is red, the kind of red that used to scandalize people in my hometown because it is not subtle, not a "natural highlight," and it is aggressively visible from a distance. It is thick and it is long and it has opinions. I do not have a casual relationship with my hair. My hair is a whole situation. And attempting any trend that requires hair to "lay flat" or "be sleek" is an act of optimism that I occasionally make and almost always regret.
But I love a trend attempt. There is something about the low-stakes play of trying a look you saw on TikTok, failing at it in your bathroom mirror at 9pm, and then posting the attempt anyway that I find deeply joyful. It is the opposite of the kind of content I grew up around, where everything you presented publicly had to be curated and correct. The beautiful mess of a trend attempt gone wrong is, to me, genuinely fun. So I tried it. I documented it. This is the report.
act one: the preparation (optimism phase)
The preparation for the rain on me ponytail, as far as I could gather from watching the tutorial videos, involves: a smoothing serum, a good brush, sections pulled tightly, a strong hair tie, and ideally some kind of smoothing spray at the end. Possibly a rat-tail comb for the parting. Definitely some kind of holding product for the front section, which is the critical part, the part that separates the looks-like-I-did-it from the looks-like-I-tried-and-something-went-sideways.
I own: one brush that has been through a lot, some dry shampoo that I was using as hair spray which I'm now realizing is not the same thing, a hair tie I found in the bathroom drawer under a year's worth of guitar picks that have migrated there somehow, and an attitude of determined optimism. I also have half a bottle of a smoothing serum I bought for a different reason and have never fully understood the instructions for. I decided this was close enough. I started.
The first problem emerged immediately: the section. You know how in the tutorials the creator effortlessly parts their hair and the section lies flat? My hair does not have a natural part that is crisp. My hair has an area of suggestion where a part might theoretically live, but it's been arguing with me about this since I was twelve. I parted it. It re-suggested itself. I parted it again. We negotiated for about six minutes before I achieved something that was either a center part or a very confident side part, depending on the angle.
act two: the middle (where it gets interesting)
Gathering my hair into the ponytail was the real adventure. Here's the physics problem: the amount of hair I have, when gathered at the crown of my head, creates a circumference that requires the hair tie to wrap fewer times than a normal hair tie would wrap. Which means the tie either sits too loose, or it bites so hard that it hurts, or what actually happened: the whole construction shifts to one side almost immediately because the hair on one side is slightly thicker than the other and the whole system goes asymmetric.
I fixed it. Or I thought I fixed it. I applied the serum to the front section. And this is where I need to tell you about the serum specifically: it is designed to fight frizz and create smoothness, which it does, briefly and enthusiastically and then all at once, everywhere, including places I did not apply it, because my hair distributes product on its own schedule and does not ask permission.
The front section was briefly, beautifully smooth. I saw myself in the mirror for approximately four seconds and thought: we've done it. The rain on me ponytail is happening. The hair is cooperating. I am having a main character moment.
Then the humidity in the bathroom (elevated, because I'd showered twenty minutes prior) remembered it existed. And the front section remembered it was actually my hair. And we were back.
the red hair tax: a comprehensive accounting
There is a specific set of challenges that come with thick naturally-reddish or dyed-red hair, which I want to document because it is underrepresented in the beauty content world that assumes one kind of hair experience:
Volume is constant and non-negotiable. Every product that adds volume is the enemy. Every product that promises "sleek" is an optimist. The physics of my hair default to maximum volume regardless of what I'd prefer. Flat irons work for approximately forty-five minutes in non-humid conditions. Humid conditions are frequent. I live in a city. The city has weather.
Shedding. I shed everywhere. My guitar has red hairs on the strings regularly. The studio headphones have encountered my hair. The notebooks. My secondhand chair. Biscuit, the neighbor's dog, comes back with a strand or two after a visit, which I feel vaguely guilty about. Red hair is an extremely visible tracer and mine traces everywhere.
The upkeep of the color is its own essay, which I will not write today, but involves a level of investment in time and product that I resent and do anyway because the color is, to my eye, worth it. The red is mine. It is specifically mine. It is the color I chose for my exterior when I finally had the freedom to choose, and I defend it even when it makes my bathroom look like something happened in there.
All of this is to say: the rain on me ponytail, designed as it is for hair that cooperates with gravity and product, was not designed with me in mind. This is not a criticism of the trend. The trend is beautiful. It's just that the trend lives in a different hair universe than I do.
the attempt, posted: why I don't edit out the failures
I posted the video on @vixenraefr, the whole process, the optimism, the four seconds of success, the correction, the final result which was a high ponytail that was perhaps 40% of the way to rain on me and 60% its own chaotic thing. I captioned it something about the hair not having received the memo. The response was, genuinely, some of the warmest comments I've gotten.
Because people are tired of everything looking perfect. The beauty content space especially has been colonized by an aesthetic of effortlessness that requires an enormous amount of effort and product and sometimes genetics to achieve, and most people watching it know somewhere that they're looking at a performance of naturalness rather than actual naturalness. The moment you let the attempt be the point, when the video is honest about the try instead of presenting only the arrived, something opens up.
I got DMs from people with thick hair, curly hair, fine hair, natural hair, heat-damaged hair, all saying some version of "THANK YOU for not making it work perfectly." Which, first of all, made me happy. And second of all, made me think about what we're actually after when we try trends.
The trend isn't really about the ponytail. The trend is about play. It's about joining a thing, being part of the collective joke and beauty of people all doing the same thing simultaneously, experimenting with your own aesthetic in a low-stakes space. And you can do all of that without achieving the perfect result. The attempt is the participation. The mess is half the point.
what the ponytail has to do with the record
I'm gonna do the thing where I connect a hair tutorial to songwriting, because apparently I can't help myself.
There's a version of making music that looks like the perfect rain on me ponytail, polished, sleek, exactly what was planned. And I've heard it. It sounds incredible and also sometimes like very little about it is actually a person. The records I love most, the ones that land in my chest and stay there, have some of the mess in them. The breath at the wrong moment. The guitar slightly ahead of the grid. The vocal that's going somewhere it didn't exactly plan to. The attempt showing through.
The record I'm making has some of that. Not because I can't clean it up (I can, and in places I do) but because the mess is sometimes the proof of life. The evidence that there was a person here, doing this for real, and not every moment went according to plan, and that's exactly right.
My hair, in the end, does what it does. The ponytail was approximately correct. The video was better for not being perfect. The red is still there, extremely present, making itself known. That feels accurate. That feels like me.
To everyone who tried the trend and couldn't quite make it work: welcome to the real version. We're here. Our hair is doing its own thing. It's fine.