Lessons from ‘the TikTok Special’ for small businesses

Same fade. Same curved sharpness around the ears and neck. Same length on top. Same carefully engineered “effortless” texture.

If you have a teenager — or simply exist near them — you’ve probably seen it too and maybe it hasn’t quite occurred to you until recently either, but the utter pervasiveness of the “TikTok Special” haircut can no longer be ignored … because it’s everywhere. 

The haircut is deceptively simple: tight or tapered sides, with a longer, fluffy, often curly or wavy top. It looks casual, but it isn’t accidental. It’s intentionally styled to move, catch light and read well on camera. Online, it gets called everything from the “broccoli cut” to the “blowout taper,” but the defining feature isn’t a name, it’s that “when you know, you know.” 

I first clocked the trend in December watching the “Simon Cowell: The Next Act” docuseries on Netflix. Cowell, whose entire career has been built on spotting patterns before the rest of us, remarks that nearly every boy auditioning across the U.K. showed up with the same haircut. He paused on it and wondered why. I hadn’t much noticed it in the Bay Area, but knew that my son and his friends were preferring longer locks these days.

Last year, I had discovered Waikiki’s TikTok-famous barber Cam Do, who built a following in the hundreds of thousands by posting haircut transformations — many of them the same TikTok special you see around town. Families now plan vacations to Oahu around getting their kid into his chair and a haircut has become a destination business. 

Back home, the trend hasn’t arrived by accident either. It’s been actively shaped by barbers who understand that cutting hair and distributing content are now part of the same job. Walk down Baldwin Street in San Mateo and you’ll see it play out at Beasty Cutz, where transformation videos rack up views on socials and kids walk in asking for what they already saw on their phones. 

There’s also a detail parents trade notes on: Yes, some boys naturally have curly or wavy hair, especially as puberty changes texture, but many don’t. The uniformity you’re seeing is partly explained by the return of the perm which has been rebranded, softened and normalized by TikTok. Gone are the tight 1980s perms — these are loose textured, often only on the top, and designed for movement and volume. Boys with naturally straight hair don’t ask for “a perm” so much as they ask for adding texture.

What’s happening with the TikTok special isn’t about teens copying one another. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t reward novelty so much as it rewards familiarity with a spin. The haircut works because it’s recognizable in half a second, but still lets each kid feel chosen. That same dynamic now governs how businesses are discovered, trusted and selected.

This also isn’t the first time a haircut has done this — the Farrah flip, the Rachel (which I wore proudly in the late ’90s), The Beatles bowl cut and the Edgar cut are all part of generational youth identity cycles. What’s different now is the sheer velocity around the “niche to pervasiveness” cycle.

Which brings us to the real lesson for small businesses heading into 2026: Standing out in today’s world means having a singular consistent point of view that can be captured by both algorithms and people alike. 

The barbers winning right now are not reinventing hair or the haircut, but they are offering a repeatable and clear point of view with relentless visibility and storytelling that lets their clients shine. They show the same transformation over and over, because repetition builds recognition, recognition builds trust, and trust builds demand.

There are three takeaways here.

First, have a point of view that can be communicated in seconds, either visually or with a quick sentence.

Second, share it constantly — daily if possible. Consistency counts.

Third, center your customers as the story. The most effective content right now is more collaborative than self-promotional. Beasty Cutz’s power is in letting teens confidently see themselves in the chair.

So if you’re wondering why you’re seeing double around town, it’s not your imagination. It’s the TikTok special: a haircut shaped by a generation defining its style, catalyzed by algorithms, normalized by social media and teaching us all something useful about how identity, attention and small businesses can stand out in 2026.