I do things sometimes, impulsively, and then sometimes I regret them. Sometimes I’m aided in these impulsive actions by scissor-wielding accomplices; they call themselves “hair stylists.” Other times I do them myself, like when I was a second year college student studying for final exams and I went all OCD one procrastination-filled evening and started snipping the edges of my shoulder length brown hair.
By the end of that episode, four inches of hair lay limp and broken on the tiled bathroom floor, my hair just grazed the bottoms of my ears, and I still had a paper to write. I was not a pretty site. Thank god I was still in my tom-boy phase. The only thing worse than having hair shorter than my then boyfriend was a few months later when I was forced to appear in a hideous, poofy peach bridesmaid dress with my mushroom cap hair at my step brother’s wedding. I was the only white girl in the bridal party and I did not do myself proud.
A month ago my hair was long and super annoying. So annoying that I booked myself an immediate appointment with my former hair stylist, blazed into the salon and instructed him grandly to cut it all off. Well, not all of it. Only about 5 inches. The intent was to transform my limp and lifeless locks, which I had become positive were pulling my face downward ever so unattractively, into a chic, flirty bob. For the first week after the cut, I couldn’t have been happier. By week three – this week – my hair was beginning to annoy me. Rather than chic bob, I appeared to have been saddled with a matronly triangle cut, my hair plastered to my head, jutting out in a frizzy mess two inches past my chin. Ugh. How can a girl even consider taking up Internet dating again under these frazzled conditions?
So, I did what any quick thinking New York girl would have done in similar conditions. I called up my therapist’s stylist – using a number she had given me weeks ago when I noticed her new fantastic hair cut (good stylists are almost as hard to come by as good apartments) – and took the first appointment she had available: 3:00 pm Tuesday afternoon. Even lawyers can play hookie when faced with an emergency situation. I have an event tomorrow night! Did I mention that my bike helmet had been exacerbating the triangular shape of my first foray in to the world of bob? Hideous.
The new stylist was great. Definitely more talented than my former stylist, and for that reason alone I might keep her, even though I’m not loving her most recent creation. She gave me everything I asked for, a style, a chic bob, a haircut with sophisticated flare, and she did it all with a dry-cutting, rapid-snipping technique that would have made Edward Scissorhands envious. The problem you ask? It’s just a tad too short for my tastes. The kind of short that from moment to moment has me flipping between thinking “oh my god, it’s an old woman haircut that makes you look like a boy – dig a hole and don’t come out until it’s grown out,” to “omg, it’s kind of cute and flirty, let me see it again from that angle, with that lipstick, with a little product, you could totally work it.” I’m so torn.
Because burying myself like an ostrich is not an option, the only thing to do, like so often in life, is to fake it until you make it. I choose to imagine that it looks sexy and flirty and to wear absolutely fabulous earrings tomorrow night. For the record, I want to state that I did not, at any point in my discussions with my new stylist, request that she give me Victoria Beckham’s hairstyle. But, that’s what she did. Did I mention that my hair has not been this short in TEN years?
She should have given me Beckham along with the haircut. I would have been ever so much happier at the moment…
