List of North Korean State-Approved Haircuts Reportedly Down to One for Male Students, Kim Jong Un’s

In the totalitarian regime of
North Korea, men have already been limited to just ten haircuts to
choose from, and now, according to the BBC, for male university
students may be down
to one:

The state-sanctioned guidelines were introduced in the
capital Pyongyang about two weeks ago, Radio
Free Asia reports. They are now being rolled out across the
country – although some people have expressed reservations about
getting the look.

“Our leader’s haircut is very particular, if you will,” one source
tells Radio Free Asia. “It doesn’t always go with everyone since
everyone has different face and head shapes.” Meanwhile, a North
Korean now living in China says the look is actually unpopular at
home because people think it resembles Chinese smugglers. “Until
the mid-2000s, we called it the ‘Chinese smuggler
haircut’,” the
Korea Times reports.

The BBC notes that NK News reports recent tourists to North
Korea not noticing a difference in the hairstyles. NK News,

in fact, considers the story “unlikely” to be true because of
the lack of first hand witnesses, although the site’s reaction was
to an earlier version of the BBC report, which claimed all men in
North Korea were required to get the buzz. Slate, too,
expressed skepticism about the story, pointing to thin sourcing
and the lack of confirmation from visitors to the country
highlighted by NK News. That story was also responding to the claim
that all men were required to get the cut. The BBC has since then
updated its story to reflect that reportedly only male university
students are affected by the new law.

The skepticism about the story is borne of a lack of information
about North Korea, and, more specifically, because quite a few
organizations got burned by the “uncle
fed to starving dogs.” The stories are similar, in that both
are based on things actually known about the North Korean regime.
Kim Jong Un and his predecessors fairly regularly executed former
members of their gangs, and North Koreans’ fashion choices are
already severely limited. But the stories are different too. The
starving dogs stretched credibility, even for the North Korean
regime (though probably not for its horror as much as for its
logistical impossibility. The haircut story, on the other hand,
seems par for the course for the petty tyrannies that go along with
the prime ones in the nightmare that’s North Korea.