"Ponytails" redirects here. For the girl group, see The Poni-Tails. "Ponytail" redirects here. For the art rock group, see Ponytail (band).

A ponytail is a style of arranging hair that resembles the tail of a pony. It gets its name from its resemblance to the undocked tail of a horse or pony. A single ponytail is most commonly gathered at the center back of the head or the base of the neck. Depending on fashions, it may also be worn toward one 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 into two symmetrical ponytails, they are simply two ponytails, bunches, also called "pigtails" in the U.S. (not to be confused with "pigtails" as a term for two side braids).

Ponytails on women

However, ponytails have always been popular with school-aged girls for the style's ease, as a young girl can tie back her own hair long before she has learned how to plait it. A ponytail also displays the flowing hair that has been traditionally associated with youth, especially in eras when married women were expected to completely cover their hair or at least wear it "up" in a chignon or similar formation.

Ponytails on men

In the second half of the 18th century, most men in Europe and North America 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 word for "tail", queue. The hairstyle was mandatory in all European armies until the early 1800s, after most civilians had stopped wearing queues. The British Army was the first to dispense with it, and by the end of the Napoleonic Wars most armies had changed their regulations to make short hair compulsoryFact: date=November 2007.

"Queue" was also the word used to refer to the waist-length pigtail which the ruling Manchus made Han Chinese men wear during the Qing Dynasty in China.

During the 19th century and much of the 20th, Western men continued to wear their hair much shorter than women, making male ponytails impossible. In the 1960s, long hair returned as a fashion trend for young men, some of whom wore it in ponytails instead of in the loose, flowing style favored by most hippies.

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 while keeping most of their hair flat and functional. Steven Seagal's ponytail in "Marked for Death" is an example of such. Men who wear their hair long, or sometimes in mullets, now frequently tie it back into a ponytail, but avoid the top- or side-of-the-head variants.