Heeeeeeeeey! Whoa! Fancy seeing you here! Long time, no blog. Or, rather, long time, no beauty blog. I have missed writing about beauty and style stuff, and I wanted to do it on my terms; this new column, Adventures in Beautyland, marks an occasional foray back into the digital writing that served as my gateway into publishing online.
Please note: the title is a reference to Beautyland, an upcoming book by Marie-Helene Bertino, which you should order.
Earlier today, I saw a friend for the first time since July. We aren’t connected on any social media – we only really talk via Zoom – and she had no idea that I’d cut off my hair in early August. I’d already started working on this newsletter, and I’d actually just scheduled a follow-up appointment with my stylist for a trim, so it was fun to have a first-look reaction several months after The Big Chop.
The last time I did a Big Chop, it was during college. I’d been thinking about cutting off my long, overbleached hair for a while, and then I won a gift card to a local salon, so I decided it was time. I went with a shoulder-grazing bob, no bangs, and the moment I got it cut, I started growing it out again. I didn’t dislike it, but it didn’t feel like me, probably because it was a fairly blunt, heavy cut, and I hadn’t figured out yet that I am a bangs person. That was 2014 or so. In early 2017, I went blonde. In late 2018, I went back to brunette. Then, aside from the occasional Overtone orange or box-bleach highlight, I stopped messing with my hair. Oh! Except when my brother and I got mullets.
From 2019 to 2023, I only cut my hair once or twice a year. And when I say “I cut my hair,” I mean I saw my genius hairstylist, Aggie Kaler of Lazy Girl Cuts. For nearly 5 years, Aggie is the only person who’s cut my hair – except for the aforementioned mullet. For 25 years I was loyal to whichever national haircut chain had the best coupon. Then, twice in one week, my friends got murder-worthy, glamazon, magazine haircuts. These were two different friends, two different social circles, who I ran into at events weeks apart. When I said, “Holy crap, your hair looks incredible!” both of them said “Thank you! I have the best stylist, her name is Aggie.” I felt like I was on Sex and the City or something. So, I booked my own appointment with Aggie. She got my bangs so perfectly right on the first try, I knew I was never leaving her.
I chopped all my hair off in August, right before moving into a new apartment. That wasn’t the original plan, but it was a smart move – I had the shortest hair possible for the sweatiest weekend of my whole summer. I had actually planned to cut my hair in July, but it didn’t work out that way due to back-to-back-to-back events every weekend. I did what I call a “reverse breakup,” in which I cut off all my hair, then immediately moved in with my boyfriend and changed every aspect of my life.
Here’s a brief timeline of my Hair Thoughts from 2023.
MARCH: After a series of stupid hair days, I considered whether I should cut my hair a little shorter. At the time, I was thinking of adding a lot of choppy, shaggy layers, because I was tired of how flat my hair looked.
APRIL: Started researching hair photos. Most of my inspiration pictures were pretty similar to past haircuts I’ve had – I was thinking of something just below collarbone-length.
MAY: Saw Allison Ponthier in concert. Started thinking about copying her shoulder-grazing cut with short bangs. Remembered that my best friend was getting married the next month, and that I shouldn’t make a drastic hair decision yet, lest I mar her wedding photos with weird cowlicks. Saved a bunch of photos of Allison Ponthier to my phone.
JUNE: Practiced pinning my hair up above my shoulders to see if I liked the length. Accidentally went shorter than intended. Loved it. Commenced scheming. Booked haircut for late July.
JULY: At my book launch party, put $8.79 worth of Amazon hair extensions in, as a sort of “last hurrah” for Big Hair Hattie. Scooted my appointment with Aggie to early August. Saved a bunch of bob inspiration photos to my phone.
AUGUST:
Now, here’s the thing. I am someone who has put on Amelie and locked herself in the bathroom and came out with French-flavored regret on her forehead. I am someone who has done that, no joke, 19 or 35 times. But! When it came to cutting ALL my hair, the whole kielbasa, I defaulted to my prime directive, which is six months of extensive research. And that! that, is the gift I can give you today: guidance on how to prepare yourself for the undoing of ~six-ish years of follicular labor.
When you’re trying to decide on a haircut, I strongly recommend against looking at celebrity photos for inspiration. Celebrities have teams of people who are dedicated to making their haircuts look good. Once you leave the salon, you’re on your own, kid. Instead, if you have a salon or stylist in mind, look at their Instagram or Facebook, specifically at tagged photos. This will give you an idea of what successful haircuts from his particular person/place look like. If you’re sussing out a new stylist, this will help you figure out what their skill set includes. For example, if you know you want a razored shag, but you don’t see any haircuts like that in your stylist’s tagged photos, you might want to reconsider.
This also has a somewhat shady fringe benefit: you’ll see what hair looks like in real life. I’ve found that salons primarily post photos of fresh cuts, just styled, in glowy lighting. If you look under “tagged photos,” you can see how that haircut will look after a commute home and maybe a DIY styling attempt.
Don’t limit yourself to your salon, either! Look at salons in faraway places that do the kind of hair you like. If you REALLY want to go wild, watch a bunch of videos of people getting their hair cut. During my recent haircut, two of the hair inspiration photos that Aggie liked best were actually stills from other peoples’ haircut videos (public on Instagram!), which I chose because they showed the hair “in motion.”
(Note: I know I said that thing about avoiding celebrities earlier – one of these ladies is an actress, but I grabbed my screenshot from a fairly candid video from before she was Big Famous, so!)
It helps if you know what you like about the photos you’re bringing as inspiration. In these two pictures, I had specific opinions about the haircuts. I said that I liked the length of the bangs the brunette lady on the left has, and I like the way they fall on her forehead – the length and shape were both similar to what I wanted. And the blonde lady on the right had the length I wanted in the sides and back. Since her hair is wavy/curly in that photo, I know that if my hair were air-dried, the texture would look similar, and I would want it to dry to that length. Hair “shrinks” when it’s curly, so I made sure to find photos that would represent my “air-dried” length.
I also looked for bad haircuts.
Reddit, Instagram, and personal blogs are all great places to search for the terms “bad haircut,” “bangs fail,” “bad bob,” “new stylist hate my hair.” If you’re looking for inspiration photos, you should also recalibrate your brain by looking for photos of the haircut you want, but poorly-executed, or simly not suitable for the people who got them. Honestly, there were a few people whose “WORST HAIRCUT OF MY LIFE!!!!” photos were, in my view, extremely cute! And I took note of that, because if I wound up not liking my hair, for whatever reason, I wanted to have perspective.
The thing that REALLY sold me on short hair was practice. Now, you can try, all you want, to use apps to visualize yourself with short hair. But depending on your hair type, and the cut you’re considering, I think you should really try a wig, or faking the haircut with the hair currently on your head. You can do this if you’re considering bangs by taking part of your ends and styling them onto your forehead (look up some tutorials!), or with clip-in bangs. If you just want to experiment with shortening the length, try pinning your hair up and under itself for a fake bob.
Here’s my fake-short-hair, as created with bobby pins, and worn around my old apartment until the pins fell out from sweat:
I ended up going even shorter than this! I really like having my hair this length, but I definitely made some tradeoffs. My hair is less versatile now. I can’t do as much with it. Unless I really CURL it, it looks pretty much the same, whether I blow it out and style it, air-dry it, scrunch it with mousse/salt spray etc. That speaks to the almighty strength of my curl pattern, I guess – when I first met Aggie she told me I had a great wave pattern in my hair, and I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I get it now. I don’t really DO anything to my hair. I don’t even have to brush it if I don’t want to. I get out of the shower and it’s just Like That. In these two photos, I had just been wearing a helmet for over an hour (riding a horse / roller skating) (not simultaneously but that would be SO COOL), and it looks pretty much identical to my hair…any other time:
Meanwhile, when I was Long Hair Hattie, if I decided to just leave my hair to its own devices, it did this:
The effortlessness and reliability are a fair trade, to me, because I feel more “done up” even though I’m actively doing less to maintain my appearance. I’ve also had a lot of fun watching my hair grow out. It doesn’t seem like a lot, the difference between just-above-my-chin and just-below-my-chin, but since having short hair, I feel like I’m waking up with New Hair every day.
I’ll probably grow my hair out long again, but not for a while. Maybe next summer I’ll resume my growth-oriented activities, popping biotin and massaging my scalp with various infused oils. But for now, I’m going to enjoy this lazy, laissez-faire, spontaneous hairstyle, which frees up time so I can spend hours and hours and hours getting my eyeliner exactly right. Finally!