If You Want To Be Taken Seriously, Don’t Go To Work With Wet Hair, Says A Career Expert
You have to take different hair lengths and textures into account, though.
Fleur Kaan | Unsplash We’ve all been caught running late in the morning and have had to make some tough decisions about what we choose to leave out of our routine. Sometimes, you just can’t fit in breakfast before work, so you’re stuck grabbing a protein bar and running out the door.
Another thing that takes up a significant amount of time during a morning routine is showering. The biggest time suck when it comes to showering? Drying your hair. But one career expert definitively stated that it's not something you can forego without hurting your professional reputation. Yup, you heard that right.
The career expert said wet hair at work is a bad career move.
A woman who makes a living doling out career advice said that you absolutely should not go to work with wet hair under any circumstances. TikTok creator and career expert Grace McCarrick made a statement that ruffled some feathers.
In a since-deleted video, she stated, “In a real world, you just aren’t gonna get that mad about people telling you wet hair is unprofessional, ‘cause you know it is.”
Author and TEDx speaker Selena Rezvani made a stitch of the video with her own thoughts before it was deleted. She was pretty upset by what McCarrick said and argued that her thoughts were discriminatory.
“This kind of comment honors the worst parts of corporate culture — superficial judgments, subjective professionalism norms, and having zero flexibility,” Rezvani said. “It’s also class-coded, gender-coded, it ignores hair textures and differences … Also, anybody notice that it’s rarely the guy with the hoodie and bed head who gets lectured?”
Despite opposition, the career expert doubled down on her views.
McCarrick called the people who took offense to her views “smart people being obtuse to get views.” She went on to say, “No one knows if you have curly, coily hair, and it’s not dry. People don’t notice. I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about people who have hair like this, who leave it dripping wet out of the shower and then go somewhere.” She grabbed a chunk of her own straight, fine hair to illustrate her point.
“If I show up with this hair dripping wet … making a dripping thing on my back, on my button-down shirt at work, that is going to give people a flash perception of me,” she continued. “And that is the thing I’m trying to avoid with you guys. That’s it. It’s not that deep.”
Experts were at odds on the issue.
Newsweek spoke with two different experts when the same subject made the rounds on TikTok in 2024. Jo Hayes, who founded etiquetteexpert.org, said that wet hair at work was indeed a sign of a lack of professionalism. “It demonstrates a lack of care and attention to one’s personal grooming and presentation,” she said.
Meanwhile, workplace well-being and personal growth strategist Dr. Heather Lamb felt a little differently. According to her, “Whether wet hair is unprofessional or not is highly contingent on the culture within your company.”
There are two legitimate sides to this issue.
On the one hand, if you show up at work with hair that is dripping wet, as McCarrick said, it is going to look a bit off, especially if you work in a very formal office environment. However, there is also the issue of fairness to consider. Men tend to have shorter, finer hair than women do. Obviously, their hair is going to dry much faster. This puts women at a disadvantage.
cottonbro studio | Pexels
People of color are also unfairly targeted by the assumption that wet hair is unprofessional. They tend to have hair that is thicker and more curly. According to electronics company Laifen, which sells high-end blow dryers, it can take curly hair two to four hours to air dry, and you have to be careful about using a blow dryer because of the texture. For thick hair, it’s 30 minutes to an hour to air dry and 15 to 30 minutes to blow dry.
That’s an awful lot of time to add on to your morning routine. And, the longer it takes you to get ready, the earlier you have to wake up, so this could seriously affect your sleep schedule, too. People might think that wet hair is unprofessional, but it’s not really fair to think everyone can easily dry their hair in a reasonable amount of time. If you see someone at work with wet hair, try to give them some grace.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
