Now That's Devotion: Mac Hairstyles and Tattoos

by , 12:00 PM EDT, August 5th, 2002

A trio of Wired News articles detail the stories of Apple fans who wear the logo with pride in their hair and on their skin.

If you're a regular MACWORLD Expo attendee, you might have seen Peter Cohen's colorful head buzz-cut into the shape of the Apple logo. Mac Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow tells us about Peter's hairdo and how he started styling it that way.

"It's what I'm known for," Cohen said from his home in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. "I just show my loyalty to Apple in a different way than most people do. It's fun being a celebrity for a little while, as freakish as it may be."

Cohen usually shaves his head, but for the conferences he grows his hair and has it styled into a large, eye-catching ad for Apple.

"I start growing my hair out four-to-six weeks before the show to give the artist a palette to work with," he said.

As well as the Apple logo, he's also had large, colorful "X" haircuts, celebrating Apple's Mac OS X operating system.

In Tat's The Way Mac Heads Like It, the Mac fans go one step further: these guys have Apple logos and designs inked onto their skin.

"So many tattoos are about love, loyalty and bravado," said Amy Krakow, author of The Total Tattoo Book. "Don't Mac users fall into all those categories?"

Krakow, a Mac fan, said no other brand inspires as much loyalty, love and devotion as Apple. And in the face of Apple's single-digit market share, Mac fans have to have "an awful lot of bravado. We are loud, vocal, vociferous. And we want the world to know where our loyalties are."

Professor Christof Koch, a leading neuroscientist, got his arm tattooed with the rainbow Apple when he and his eighteen year old son visited Israel.

Koch was surprised to learn he is not the only person with an Apple tattoo and that there are dozens of others. "It's pretty crazy," he said. "There's a whole community of us.

"I bet you there's no person with a Microsoft logo," he added.

Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame chose his Apple-related tattoo for a different reason: after painstakingly recovering piles of data from his fried SE/30, he had the Sad Mac icon etched into his right arm.

"I hardly bathed or ate, and smoked hundreds, if not thousands, of cigarettes. When I emerged, triumphant and exhausted, I felt reborn.... I was a new man, and needed to commemorate the event."

You can read all three of the articles and view photos at Wired News.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Brand loyalty is a funny thing. It's one thing to say that you always choose WonderWash over Brand X because your clothes are whiter, brighter and smell nicer, but it's another thing entirely when your interest in a brand becomes less about the product and more about the lifestyle that 'surrounds' the brand.

The idea of a computer as a lifestyle object, rather than a technical 'tool,' is something that is slowly working its way into the collective consciousness, and we think this is due in no small part to the way Apple has almost always marketed and designed their machines with the user in mind. It's not surprising that Apple users are the ones who don't find it strange or unusual to make that part of their lifestyle a permanent part of their bodies.

Wired News: Tat's The Way Mac Heads Like It