Hegseth’s New Dress Code of Honor

Eyelash extensions and facial hair are out; government-funded laser hair removal is in

Hegseth doing pushups with sailors aboard the USS Dewey | Department of Defense

Pete Hegseth loves to have his picture taken doing jumping jacks, jogging with the troops, and hanging with buff special ops commandos. In fact, the Secretary of Defense is all about appearances, making a constant show of being more virile than anyone who’s ever preceded him.

In the name of warfighting and military readiness, Hegseth is self-appointed commanding general of the war on wrinkles. 

His obsession has provoked a slew of new rules and regulations about “standards” of grooming and appearance, a deadly serious effort encompassing everything from banning eyelash extensions to offering government-funded laser hair removal procedures. With an emphasis on rules that most impact women and minorities, Hegseth wants to establish his own wokeness, a campaign that stresses looks over actual excellence.

Looks like DOGE missed a spot

The new grooming standards, one Army directive says, are “in support of Army readiness” — military speak for the ability to act swiftly and effectively. Far from some obscure policy, Hegseth believes that disciplined hair care will lead to a disciplined military, restoring the “warrior ethos” he often laments the armed forces have lost. 

“We’re looking at overall fitness standards, overall grooming standards, overall basic standards across our formations that we believe have slipped certainly under the previous administration, but over decades,” Hegseth told Congress last month.

“It’s almost like the broken windows theory of policing: when you ignore the small stuff from criminals … it creates a culture where big stuff you’re not held accountable for,” he pontificated at a town hall meeting in February. 

Army briefing on “Male Grooming Standard” | Defense Department

Here are three new grooming standards that particularly caught my eye:

1. Shaving, particularly for soldiers who seek waivers to standard policies due to health complications that daily shaving can cause. This is most common for black and brown folks who have curly hair; so common in fact that the directive makes explicit mention of “pseudofolliculitis Barbae,” or razor bumps, which can become infected.

   The directive enumerates three phased treatment plans corresponding to mild, moderate and severe cases. A fourth phase provides the option of laser hair removal to soldiers unresponsive to the previous treatments or with chronic issues. 

   

2. Eyelash extensions are now banned. No real justification is given but I’m sure it’s a coincidence that this also impacts black and brown people the most. Similarly, nail polish must now be “clear or French or American Manicure only,” a sacrifice to the gods of uniformity which feels more arbitrary than purposeful. 

   

• Petty changes to uniforms are being directed, from a ban on duty identifier patches, to shorter boots (“8-12 inches”), to important contingency plans on how to wear one's sleeves (“the cuffs will remain visible, and the sleeve will rest at, or within 1-inch of, the forearm when the arm is bent at a 90-degree angle”; though “Commanders may prohibit rolling of sleeves and folding of cuffs.”)

  It is a hodgepodge of “new” directives that are mostly costly annoyances but overall leave enlisted soldiers I’ve talked to feeling like the Pentagon and “leadership” are just playing a sadistic game of Simon Says.

  

Clean-shaven soldiers, however, aren’t going to bring the U.S. military closer to an end to the war in Ukraine or create greater security in the Middle East. More creases aren’t going to help tackle the challenges of drones and artificial intelligence, or fight the new Cold War with China. 

In fact, Hegseth seems to be taking a page out of the Russian military playbook, which upon suffering over one million casualties in Ukraine, is also trying to stress appearances over serious failures of policy and humaneness.

Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has launched his own campaign to improve troop discipline by clamping down on non-standard haircuts, according to British intelligence, which assessed that this caused him to be “focused on presentation over substance.” In Russia’s case, a laughably undisciplined and corrupt force indeed needs to reform. But emulating Gerasimov is more of an insult to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces.

But this is more about Hegseth, for whom “presentation over substance” seems like his entire worldview. Here he is posing on the Pentagon lawn while signing an order on drone production, a piece of paper that was delivered by drone. The contents of the order didn’t get much attention but the image of the smartly dressed Secretary plucking the paper from the drone instantly became a meme.

Since his first appearance at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in February, when Hegseth mistakenly got ahead of President Trump’s negotiations by declaring Ukraine’s intent to regain its territory as “unrealistic” — prompting criticism from his own party’s Chair of the Armed Services Committee Sen. Roger Wicker, who called it “amateur” — Trump’s secretary has not had a hair out of place.

In every photo I can find, Hegseth’s hair seems painstakingly coiffed, right down to the occasional, ostensible cowlick. He looks like Christian Bale’s depiction of Bruce Wayne but with a MOAB-sized helping of hairgel. 

The irony is that, amid all the chaos — of his alleged sexual misconduct, to the mass firing of his staff, to Signalgate and on and on — the man is always perfectly manicured. One has a sense that Hegseth will be more pleased in being named best-dressed of 2025 than anything else.

— Edited by William M. Arkin