Last week I spent some time at my hair salon. I say “spent some time” because these days attending a hair salon is a rather luxe experience; mine is cluttered with retro-style pastel dressing tables, weeping indoor plants and various adorable tchotchkes. Instead of a glass of water, you’re offered espresso coffees, loose-leaf teas or sparkling wine. The salon’s mascot is a caged budgie whose wings match the pastel furniture.
I was there for a summer tidy-up and in the midst of the frustrating process with which many readers will be familiar - growing out a fringe. My hairdresser Taylor and I agreed on a thoroughly non-drastic trim. As we began, I eavesdropped on the woman one chair over. She was there for a whole new look: a chop, a dye job, even a risqué buzzcut on one side of her skull.
Daunting, exhilarating, only occasionally successful, the radical aesthetic change of a drastic haircut is something I’m well acquainted with. I’ve cut my waist-length hair into a bob; I’ve dyed it from mouse brown to peroxide blonde, to copper, to pink, purple, electric blue. I’ve sported blunt fringes, side fringes, short fringes and long fringes – then spent the better part of a year growing them out.
I’ve also shaved off half my mop in an “undercut” style, an edgier attempt at thinning out my hair, which, when pulled into a ponytail, resembles shipping rope. It’s almost all back to the same length now. To me, mid-length, mid-wave, mid-brown hair has always presented as somewhat of a boring blank canvas.
Matilda Dixon-Smith. Source: Supplied
As I watched my salon-mate, with her nearly identical mid-everything hair, dive into her own radical chop, I wondered at the psychology of these big aesthetic changes. So often they’re seen as the domain of women and the femme, presented as momentous not just in cost but in emotional upheaval.
The Important Haircut has a variety of : the , often administered by a woman herself, using inappropriate apparatus (the kitchen scissors, for example) is one. The buzzcut a character undergoes is another. It’s a useful shorthand for internal struggle to watch a character – especially a female/femme character – lose their ingénue identifier in such a drastic manner, and is often irrelevant.
In entertainment, the act of a woman cutting her hair is so significant it’s actually called .
Beyond trauma, there is liberation. A 1987 Chicago Tribune article I found hair is a form of “external communication” between the sexes, and that long hair is a “primeval” symbol of “sexuality”, “youthfulness” and “femininity”. Perhaps that’s why the super-short crop, or even the buzz cut, is an increasing popular – as a form of radical detachment from traditional notions of “primeval” femininity.
In entertainment, the act of a woman cutting her hair is so significant it’s actually called The Important Haircut.
A about the buzz cut of teenaged anti-gun activist Emma Gonzalez, declares that it’s impossible to “shrug it off as a matter of personal expression”; it must be, in some form, a public political statement. Drawing a comparison between Gonzalez’s cut and the iconic shaved visage of Joan of Arc in the 1928 film, the Times piece asserts that hair, so long as it’s “intrinsically linked to assumptions about power and gender relations”, will always be a representational issue.
Hair length can also have for women and men. Rasta people’s long locks are meant to imitate the mane of their leader, the lion. Many Native American peoples see their hair as spiritually connected to their land, and so prefer to keep it long. In the bible, in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, this rigid binary connection between hair length and gender is reinforced: “Doth not nature itself teach you that if a man have long hair it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.”
These days, the act of a femme person cutting their hair is , and intrinsically linked to emotional upheaval. It was Coco Chanel who said, “A woman who cuts her hair is about to change her life.” When I researched for this piece, the most common writing on the subject I found was about the so-called “” – people, mostly women, undergoing the drastic chop after a big bust-up with their partner. Important Haircuts, ahoy.
Back in the salon, Miss Drastic Chop went off to get shampooed, and I took the opportunity to ask Taylor how often she does an Important Haircut on someone who is looking to create external change to mirror internal upheaval. “Oh, all the time,” she told me. “It’s usually a break up, or sometimes losing a job, especially an office job, which means you can be a little more adventurous with your look.
Source: Supplied
“I always make sure the client really wants the change,” Taylor went on. “The worst thing is a client in the chair at the end of the appointment, and they’re in tears. Or coming back the next day, wanting you to take it back. But I’m all for risky hair.”
Taylor reminded me how often I’ve changed my hair, and how drastic the changes often are. She asked me why I do it, because we so infrequently talk about why. Why do I want to look different, to mask my regular, recognisable appearance? And, perhaps more importantly, why have I stopped? I’m growing my hair back out to mid-brown, mid-length and mid-wave, with no Important Haircuts on the horizon.
, for so long I’ve tried to hide from myself. It wasn’t until I flicked through decade old photos, that I realised I no longer had a desire not to recognise myself. I’m working slowly to look like myself again, and that means no more Important Haircuts – at least for now.
