About

Power of a Haircut is a series of videos where barbers show footage of a client before and after their haircut to demonstrate how much better they look after the haircut. As early as February 2024, the videos became the subject of parodies where a clip of a completely different person is shown after the pre-haircut clip.

Origin

In February 2024, a trend began spreading amongst barbers on TikTok where they post videos consisting of before and after clips of haircuts under the caption "the power of a haircut," meant to show how much better the person looks after getting their hair cut. The earliest known example was posted on February 6th, 2024 by TikTok^[1] barber @qa.theartist, garnering over 20 million views in three months (shown below).

Spread

Later in February 2024, as "power of haircut" videos were further popularized on TikTok, some users began parodying the videos by taking the pre-haircut clips and adding a video of an unrelated person as the post-haircut clip. The earliest known viral example was posted by TikToker^[2] @tamsruff on February 23rd, 2024, garnering over 32 million views in three months (shown below, left). On February 28th, TikToker^[3] @choccymoneyshot posted a version of the meme that gained over 15 million views in three months (shown below, right).

On April 16th, TikToker^[4] @kfadez posted a video following the meme, garnering over 3.7 million views in a month (shown below, left). On May 8th, TikToker^[5] @12pell posted a video poking fun at the genre of videos, garnering over 196,000 views in two days (shown below, right). On May 9th, X^[6] user @weirddalle reposted a video of the meme trend, garnering over 47,000 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References