Ponytail

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Ponytail

A ponytail is a hairstyle

Hairstyle

A hairstyle, hairdo, or haircut refers to a styling of head hair. The fashioning of hair can be considered an aspect of personal grooming, fashion, and cosmetics....
in which most or all of the hair

Hair

Hair is a protein filament that epidermal growth from hair follicle deep within the dermis. The fine, soft hair found on many nonhuman mammals is typically called fur; wool is the characteristically curly hair found on sheep and goats....
on the head is pulled away from the face, gathered and secured at the back of the head with a hair tie, clip or similar device, and allowed to hang freely from that point. It gets its name from its resemblance to the undocked tail of a horse

Horse

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A ponytail is a hairstyle

Hairstyle

Hair

Horse

The horse is a hoofed mammal, a subspecies of one of seven extant species of the family Equidae. The horse has evolution of the horse over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature into the large, odd-toed ungulate animal of today....
or pony. Ponytails are most commonly gathered at the middle of the back of the head, or the base of the neck. Depending on fashions, they may also be worn at the side of the head (over one ear), or on the very top of the head (allowing the hair to fall down the back or one side of the head).

If the hair is divided so that it hangs in two sections they are bunches or pig tails, and if it is plaited, it is called a braid

Braid

A braid is a complex structure or pattern formed by intertwining three or more strands of flexible material such as textile fibers, wire, or human hair....
or plait

Plait

A plait may mean either:* A braid-like knot* A pleat* Plait , a fold in the columella of a gastropod mollusc* an opensource shell based playlist generator and command line jukebox...
rather than a ponytail. It is common for those who wear tight ponytails to experience Traction alopecia

Traction alopecia

Traction alopecia is a form of alopecia, or gradual hair loss, caused primarily by pulling force being applied to the hair. This commonly results from the sufferer frequently wearing his/her hair in a particularly tight ponytail, pigtails, or braids....
, or baldness.

Ponytails on women

Women (as opposed to girls) of the Georgian period, and up until the 20th century, would never have been seen outside of the boudoir with their hair in such an informal style as a ponytail.

Today, women commonly wear their hair in ponytails in informal or office situations (they are likely to choose a more elaborate style for a formal occasion). It is a practical choice as it keeps hair out of the eyes. They are also popular with school-aged girls, partly because flowing hair is often associated with youth, and also because of its simplicity. A young girl is likely to be able to retie her own hair after a sports class for example.

As a men's hairstyle

In the late 1980s, a short ponytail was seen as an edgy, "in-your-face" look for men who wanted to stand out from the crowd, but keep their hair flat and functional (cf mullet

Mullet (haircut)

Steven Seagal

Steven F. Seagal is an United States action movie actor, Film producer, writer, Film director, martial artist and singer-songwriter. He belongs to a generation of movie action hero actors who were featured in many of the Hollywood blockbuster action films of the late 1980s and 1990s....
's ponytail in "Marked for Death

Marked for Death

Marked for Death is a 1990 in film action film directed by Dwight H. Little. It stars Steven Seagal as John Hatcher, a former Police agent....
" is an example of such.

Men who wear their hair long, or sometimes in mullets

Mullet (haircut)

A mullet is a unisex hair style that is short in the front and long in the back. The mullet began making appearances in the popular media in the 1960s and 1970s but did not catch on with the masses until the early 1980s, continuing in vogue among afficionados till the early 1990s....
, frequently tie it back into a ponytail, but avoid the top- or side-of-the-head variants.

In the second half of the 18th century, most men in Europe

Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
and North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
wore their hair long and tied back into what we would now describe as a ponytail, although it was sometimes gathered into a silk bag rather than allowed to hang freely. At that time, it was commonly known by the French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken around the world by around 80 million people as first language, by 190 million as second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired tongue, with significant speakers in 54 countries....
word for "tail", queue. It was a mandatory hairstyle for men in all European armies until the early 1800s, after most civilians had stopped wearing queues. The British Army

British Army

The British Army is the Army branch of the British Armed Forces. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdoms of Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707....
was the first to dispense with it, and by the end of the Napoleonic Wars

Napoleonic Wars

The Napoleonic Wars were a series of conflicts involving Napoleon I of France First French Empire and changing sets of European allies and opposing coalitions that ran from 1803 to 1815....
most armies had changed their regulations to make short hair compulsory.

"Queue

Queue (hairstyle)

The queue or cue is a hairstyle in which the hair is worn long and gathered up into a pigtail. It was worn traditionally by certain Indigenous peoples of the Americas groups, Indian Brahmins and the Manchu of Manchuria....
" was also the word used to refer to the waist-length pigtail which the ruling Manchu

Manchu

The Manchu people are a Tungusic peoples who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the seventeenth century, with the help of Ming rebels , they conquered the Ming Dynasty and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until its abolition in 1911 after the Xinhai Revolution, which established Republic of China in its place....
s made Han Chinese

Han Chinese

Han Chinese are an ethnic group native to China and, by most modern definitions, the largest single ethnic group in the Earth.Han Chinese constitute about 92 percent of the population of the People's Republic of China , 98 percent of the population of the Republic of China , 75 percent of the population of Singapore, and about 19 percent...
men wear during the Qing Dynasty

Qing Dynasty

The Qing Dynasty , also known as the Manchu Dynasty, followed the Ming Dynasty in History of China, and was the last ruling Chinese Dynasties of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 ....
in China

China

China is a Culture of China, an ancient civilization, and, depending on perspective, a national or multinational entity extending over a large area in East Asia....
.

Ponytail

Ponytails on women

As a men's hairstyle

See also