Scalp Popping / Hair Cracking

Submission 19,054

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

Scalp Popping is the practice of taking a small section of your hair, twisting it tight, and pulling on it, resulting in a popping sound similar to cracking your knuckles. The practice is allegedly linked with Mexican culture as a headache remedy, but little information relating to it exists online. Scalp popping became a trend on TikTok in late 2020. It is potentially dangerous to perform, and should not be attempted.

Origin

According to a comment^[1] by /u/Ok_Consideration_761 on a post to /r/Esthetics^[2] from July 4th, 2020, where /u/lizfromdarkplace describes how an Asian salon performed the practice on her, scalp popping is allegedly a Turkish/Asian technique, meant to rid the user of tension and headaches. This, however, is debated as there is so little information on the technique to confirm the claims. One of the earliest videos of someone popping their scalp was uploaded to YouTube on August 4th, 2016, garnering over 120,000 views in 4 years (shown below, left). There are also videos of barbers popping people's scalps, with an upload from October 12th, 2019 hitting over 369,000 views in just over a year (shown below, right).

On November 21st, erikabretado uploaded a video to TikTok^[3] in which her mother pops her scalp, captioned, "My mom's own Mexican Remedy for headaches," suggesting the origin of the practice is Mexican. The video garnered over 1.8 million views in 2 weeks, and is the first known scalp popping video on the platform.

Spread

On November 26th, yanasemerly uploaded a video of her friend performing the technique on her followed by her doing it to her friend to TIkTok,^[4] garnering over 5 million views in a week (shown below). In the caption, she directly credits erikabretado's video as inspiration. On November 28th, gizzybautista uploaded a video to TikTok^[5] of herself popping her scalp, gaining over 925,000 views in 6 days (shown below, right).

On December 2nd, Health.com^[6] published an article describing scalp popping and speaking with a licensed massage therapist about the safety of it. In the piece, Musgrave backs up the claim that the practice is Mexican, and confirms that it's not particularly safe as pulling on your hair wrong can result in head pain and losing hair. He cannot confirm what makes the popping sound, but speculates that it happens when skin is pulled from the skull quickly, causing a vacuum "like pulling a suction cup off the shower wall." On December 3rd, PopBuzz^[7] and The Daily Dot^[8] also published pieces on the trend.