TikTok Declares Banana Clips Are Back Without Consulting Me First

And now, it has been brought to my attention that the youths are attempting to bring back the banana clip. On TikTok (where else?) they’re having quite the moment, and Gen Z folks who’ve perhaps never even heard of them before or have only seen them in old pictures of their moms are getting weirdly excited about the contraptions.

TikTok user Adara Tran shared a video of the difference a banana clip makes when it comes to making her ponytail seem longer, thanks to the way her hair beautifully cascades down. “TikTok made me buy it. I’m obsessed,” the voiceover says. She bullet-points the benefits, in her opinion: “looks way longer, better for hair health, better than claw clips for long or thick hair.” 

And she’s not wrong. Stylist Chloe Swigert of He+Loe Studio in Delray Beach, Florida, says banana clips are a friendlier alternative to elastics for pretty much every hair type. “Clips are much easier on the hair than hair ties, and they don’t create weird dents, so they’re a better go-to if you don’t want to mess up your curls,” she tells Allure. She also appreciates how much fuller they can make ponytails look.

As someone with naturally wavy-curly-hybrid hair that tends to get pretty poofy, I scoffed at the idea that a banana clip could actually work for me. “Just you wait,” I thought, mentally warning Tran that her newfound love would be short-lived for reasons I couldn’t really articulate, followed by, “When I was your age…” and then I just sort of trailed off when I caught myself turning into an old geezer yelling at children to get their banana clips of my lawn.

Amazingly, even though they make a more robust, updated style of “banana combs,” Scünci still makes the same basic, super simple ones from my youth. And even though I normally ignore what the kids (also known as full-grown adults who just happen to be about 20 years younger than me) are declaring trendy and just do my own thing, I decided, after all these decades, to give banana clips another chance.

Unlike Tran, I had to flip my head over to ensure I was getting my air-dried, unbrushed, humidity-amplified, second-day hair entirely into the banana clip (sans bangs). Perhaps this is because I don’t have her silky, straight hair, or perhaps it’s because she’s in her mid-20s and I’ve had consistent shoulder pain throughout my 40s thus far. The world may never know.