25 September 2005
The Haircut
Before
Background and The Deed:
Recently two of my very dear friends did me the service of freeing me from long strands of cranial protein. I had beautiful long curly blonde hair. And the maintenance was horrible. It took 10 minutes to brush out after washing, and it took about four hours to dry, my scalp being densely populated with follicles.
Part of my motivation came from my active lifestyle. I'm always out and about, biking, hiking, camping, swimming. I spent one weekend with these good friends, first we biked, then swam, then showered, then it was raining. It seemed like my hair wasn't dry at all during the whole weekend. It was kinda gross.
We poured some drinks, I put on some favorite tunes, and they broke out the scissors and clippers. They took me down to half an inch. I have since moved to 1/4 inch. There are no more visits to the salon, no more $100 bills going to the quarterly cut and highlight. I have to run the clippers over my head every week or so, but that's a much smaller price to pay for beauty.
Reactions:
The buzzcut has been well received overall. Its first day at the office, it was met with both praise and skepticism. As I was coming through the airlock on Day 1, our admin was standing facing the glass double doors. She was about 8 months pregnant, holding a manila folder filled with documents, her jaw dropped, mouth agape. "It looks good!" were her first words. It turns out she had been trying to figure out who I was, and what the heck had happened to me. After it started making sense to her, she was very positive about the whole thing.
Balding men who'd shaved their heads to save their personal image approached me saying, "There's a reason I did this (pointing to head). Your hair was so beautiful. I want to cry!"
Female coworkers have told me how good it looks, how they'd always wanted to do it, but it either wouldn't look good on them or they'd never had the courage to try. I became a minor folk hero amongst the women of the office.
Two weeks after the cut, our company's president came to my desk. He's an older Swedish gentleman, and he told me that at first he had to ask who I was, and did we have a new employee. "Now," he said, "it only takes me a few seconds to figure out who you are."
My parents like it. I've been told I have the perfect head/face for it, and that noone would mistake me for a boy, no matter how bald I am. In fact, I've been told that I have a perfect head, that perfect heads are one in a million, and that I have one of the 246 perfect heads residing in the US.
GI Jane references have been made, as well as allusions to Sinead O'Connor and THX1138. It's very scifi, this haircut. My Dad thinks I look sort of like Annie Lenox, and one of my personal heroines, Ani DiFranco had a very pretty bald head for a while.
It's been a window into another world. Men talk to me about my cut, and we trade tips and talk about which number of guard to use. It's a sort of unexpected fellowship.
It also makes me stand out in a crowd. In my native Metro Detroit, very few women would consider such a radical 'do.
Now I spend my days fuzzy-headed. And I'm loving it. Low maintenance. No hair blowing in my face when I'm cruisin down the freeway with the windows down and the sunroof open. No brushing, no untangling, no paying for haircuts.
I knit hats for the coming winter and trim it down every week.
