'Bad Hair' never met a mullet it didn't like

P Some punk styles are still influential today.

By Samantha Critchell ~ The Associated Press

NEW YORK -- Call it the car-wreck factor: People can't help but look at -- no, make that stare at -- bad hair.

Many people, and not just the vain ones, fear bad-hair days and they end up spending a lot of money to protect themselves against frizz and flyaways. But sooner or later, it seems everyone ends up with a less-than-desirable 'do.

James Innes-Smith and Henrietta Webb have collected enough embarrassing photos of such styles to fill up a new book. For "Bad Hair" (Bloomsbury), the duo combed through barbershops in England and elsewhere to find "glam shots" that profess to feature the latest and greatest hairstyles but really look, at best, outdated and dorky.

"You can't resist looking at them because of the disbelief that we ever found this attractive or that this was cool or trendy," says Innes-Smith during a trans-Atlantic telephone interview.

Most of the styles are from a generation ago, he says, because hairdos from later eras, such as the punk styles that surfaced in the 1980s and the androgynous styles that came afterward, continue to influence today's trends. "You never know what is funny or bad until you're far removed from it. It happens years later when you ask, 'What were we thinking?"'

Men, he says, are more likely to fall victim to a bad haircut.

"A lot of the men's haircuts (in the book) are from the late '60s-early '70s when long hair was just coming back into fashion after generations. The Beatles and Rolling Stones made it OK to wear hair over your ears, and men went completely crazy after only having short backs and sides," according to Innes-Smith.

He says it's much more difficult to find photos of women with bad haircuts, mostly because they are more self-aware about how they look -- especially in pictures.

"Men have more of an innocence. They are completely unaware about how ridiculous they look," he adds.