Richard Armitage’s rear hairline, or: Looking at the wrong things

It seems like everything I want to write lately is longer and more serious. Not only is that harder to write, but there are certain emotional steps I need to take to get there and my emotions were not going there today for love or money. And so I distract myself with this kind of thing.

OK, so here’s where this rabbit trail started.

Richard Armitage as Claude Monet in episode 3 of The Impressionists. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Yes, everyone is observing Monet’s painting technique and the doubtlessly important painting he’s working on. In contrast: I’m looking at that little strand at the nape of his neck.

I had thought some time ago that Richard Armitage has an interesting rear hairline. His nape is noticeable or intriguing enough that at least one RPF fanfic author has written it as an Armitage erogenous zone.

It was particularly noticeable in Strike Back, I thought.

John Porter (Richard Armitage) stands by as Sister Bernadette (Sibulele Gcilitshana) says an impromptu prayer in Strike Back 1.4. My cap.

Yes, everyone else is looking at the muscles in Porter’s back, and I’m looking at his hairline. It has a pronounced lean to the left of Armitage’s body.

In the process of looking at that, I was thinking, doesn’t John Porter have awfully long hair for an Army guy? I wondered about that and started reading about British military haircuts. Doing so, I learned that the British Army does not have a single regulation haircut for recruits, but that the regulations are issued by regiment. Not only that, but some regiments even have the rule that the hair cannot be shorter than 3/8″. They’re not supposed to shave their heads or look like skinheads. Fascinating and very different from the buzz cut or “high and tight” cut customary in the U.S. military.

I don’t want to get so much into haircuts because I know nothing about them and when I started reading about them tonight my brain started to fray at the corners. (I have the U.S. professional woman’s inverted bob, but I belong to the “get my hair cut every six months whether I need it or not” crowd. I do usually remember to brush it before I leave in the morning.)

However, I always thought that Lucas’ rear hairline was scraggly and that Armitage’s haircuts were not standing up to the demands of the character. Stylish Lucas, I felt, would have cared more about his hair, especially after that Russian prison. Being a senior case officer at MI-5 would have demanded more. And instead we got this kind of thing:

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) recoils from the gun suicide of Marlin in Spooks 7.3. My cap.

Everyone else is looking at Lucas’ recoil and response to seeing Marlin shoot himself right in from of Lucas eyes, and I’m slowing down playback in order to catch a look at his hairline.

So, okay, Armitage has very fine hair, and Lucas was supposed to be kind of peaked-looking, but the fact that he couldn’t get a decent haircut bugged me. Even on his stylish days he looked downmarket. To wit:

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) plays Banker “Pete” to get Ros (Hermione Norris) out of Meynel’s office to chat, in Spooks 7.5. My cap.

So everybody else is observing — what? How hard Lucas looks at the beginning of this scene? His masquerade? I know a lot of people really like this suit, but this is one of the positions from which it looked its worst. Anyway, everyone else was observing something else and I was critiquing the hairline.

So, as this was bugging me a lot tonight for some reason, I started to do some research (i.e., I googled) and learned that men’s haircuts in the West have three basic styles of rear hairline: Block, round, and tapered.

Suddenly, everything was clear to me!

Armitage has a relatively muscled neck. Not hugely muscled, but his neck is thick enough that his shirt collars don’t fit all that comfortably. In this case, for a neater look, the barber’s advice is to choose a rounded neckline. (A blocked neckline actually adds width to the neck, making a slim neck look more masculine — and also requires more frequent cuts for maintenance, as often as every two weeks.) There’s another alternative, the tapered neckline, which also slims the neckline, and grows out more comfortably than either the blocked or the rounded neckline. But it doesn’t look as clean.

So that’s it. Porter had something like the rounded neckline, while Lucas had the tapered one. It was as easy as that!

It seemed to me that in Wellington, Armitage had the rounded cut again. I like this a lot better than the tapered cut, frankly, for a guy in such a crisp suit.

[Right: Rear view of Richard Armitage at Wellington premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey — detail of photo by Kellyduck. Source: Musings of a Wandering Duck]

He also seemed to have a version of the rounded cut in Michigan, as well — we can conclude his hair was cut less than a month before this photo, because we saw him with different hair in San Diego for ComicCon:

Richard Armitage, detail of photo by RALover, August 15th, Michigan. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

And here you can see why people sometimes object to the rounded neckline. It has a bit of feminine cast to it — especially when it gets long.

I’m about to get kicked out of my café, so I’ll just end by nothing that I don’t care that much about how Mr. Armitage cuts his hair in his real life. I like it character-appropriate in his roles — and if he’s going to wear such spiffy suits, he should have a haircut that stands up to them — neat, trim, masculine.

So yeah. You can see where I get in life by constantly looking at the wrong things.

~ by Servetus on May 29, 2013.