Punk hairstyles are in the category of hairstyles that are simply hard to ignore. Wear a punk hairstyle, and you can be sure that you will leave heads turning everywhere you go. Of course, while there are many similar hairstyles, hard to notice hairstyles, as it were, what sets hairstyles apart is the fact that they tend to be conspicuous in a nice way (as they mostly tend to be decently neat), so that the people 'noticing' the wearer 'notice him or her for all the right reasons.' Obviously, this is in great contrast to many 'head turning' aka attention-grabbing hairstyles, which tend to convey the wearer as a bit too frivolous. Even for the most conservative folks, punk hairstyles tend to at least ace the decent test.
The roots of punk hairstyle can be traced to a few decades back, with the emergence of the punk sub-culture that rocked the world greatly about two to three decades ago. The punk sub culture was of course not just about the punk hairstyle, as it came complete with it is own music (punk music, if you remember), and even its mannerisms that subscribers to it adhered to according to some unwritten code.
Perhaps in keeping with the 'law of cycles,' we are seeing a rising resurgence of interest in hairstyles, with many youths who surely could not have been there at the height of the punk subculture, donning them proudly. Resurgence aside, of course, there are older folks (or rather middle aged folks, to use the right term) who have always kept their punk hairstyles since their heyday to this day. For long, such folks have been treated as a bit 'eccentric' for having gotten 'stuck in a time warp' but with the renewed resurgence of the punk hairstyles, we might find people forming kinder opinions on them.
There are too many punk hairstyle to mention individually, but they all share a number of common characteristics, while also differing in a variety of ways. What sets apart the punk hairstyles is ultimately, then, the color of the hair, the cut of the hair and the general style of the hair.
The defining feature of hairstyle, color-wise, is that they tend to come mono-chromatic, or at least with as little color variation as possible. To be sure, some of the colors employed in punk hairstyles, for instance, purple or pink (especially in ladies) can be outrageous, but the outrageous ness tends to toned down by the fact that the typical punk hairstyles that are pink are usually wholly pink and those that are red totally red, so that the contrast factor that would make the colors more accentuated is absent. It is of course, this lack of 'too loud colors' that puts punk hairstyles into the ranks of what are considered 'decent hairstyles.'
Cut-wise, wearers of punk hairstyles have a wide range to choose from, from the highly regular (and almost geometrical) cuts to the highly irregular punk hairstyles that are defined by their asymmetry.
Style-wise, wearers of punk hairstyle have a similarly wide range to choose from; so that at the end of the day, the border between what actually qualifies to be classified as punk haircut and what doesn't qualify for the same can be very thin indeed.