February 7, 1990.Photo: Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Obama: A Weekly Trim
In his high-school yearbook photo, Obama is sporting a neat, well-kept Afro. By the time he attended Harvard in the late eighties, his hair was cropped closer, and he wears it even shorter today. To keep it that way, Obama gets a weekly trim at the Hyde Park Hair Barber Studio. “He doesn’t miss unless he’s out of the country,” the shop’s owner, Abdul Karim Shakir, told the Associated Press. Politco’s Ben Smith asked Shakir in February 2007 if Obama was graying. “I’ve been noticing that ever since he made the Senate,” he said. “It’s not very pronounced, though.”
McCain: White Under Pressure
McCain’s hair started to go gray in his early twenties, before it turned bright white during his time as a POW. In John McCain: An American Odyssey, biographer Robert Timberg tells of two POWs trying to determine who was in the next cell: “Plumb and Russell knew their neighbor was a Navy man, but they still could not figure out who he was. One day, in addition to the rags, a pile of hair, much of it brilliant white human hair, was piled outside the cell. ‘There’s only one guy in the world with phosphorescent hair,’ said Plumb. ‘John McCain must be down,’ replied Russell.”