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cimoreneThe first time I cut my own hair I was twenty, and my mom had helped me dye my hair, which was long and curly, fire engine red with Manic Panic; but it faded, and every time we tried to reapply it would fade to orange faster and faster, and it was frizzy instead of curly.
After my dad got into the car crash that made him quadriplegic in 2003, while I was house sitting since my mother and little sister went to stay with him at the spinal rehab hospital three hours away, I was increasingly isolated and barely saw any other people from day to day, plus my untreated depression and anxiety were ballooning with practical and existential worries like whether my dad would survive. My hair became so laughably unimportant that it really was trivial, and I just wanted the icky bleach- dried stuff gone. It couldn't look any worse, and the last thing I could care about was what people might have thought about my hair.
So I just stood in front of the mirror and cut it down to the roots that were showing, more or less. It was the first time I had my hair short all over and not just in a layered bob, and it looked surprisingly good considering my state of mind. It wasn't completely even, but it looked better than a number of haircuts I had paid for over the years.
The next few times I wanted to cut it, I still didn't have any real reason to worry about it, and I'd already done it, so it just got easier. By the time I was trying to get a job again a year later, there was no real risk of unpresentable mishaps. So I just kept cutting my own hair... for the past twenty years.
I have made mistakes, but usually that meant cutting a bit shorter than I meant to. You can always fix this by making the whole haircut shorter, and I'm always willing to do this. I've worn my hair cut very short - less than an inch long all over the head - on purpose multiple times in the past, and I liked it, and other people thought it was cute, so I was always prepared to just do that again if something I attempted went wrong.
And while my hair was ringlety at age twenty, overall it's more wavy, and the key reason, I think, that cheap haircuts from age ten (the first time I had it shorter than shoulder-length) to age twenty usually didn't work is that cutting it wet doesn't work. In those ten years I only had one expensive, nice haircut, and the amount of training for the little walk-in chains of hair cutters in American malls of the 1990s was like, what, three hours? I'm pretty sure they are only taught to cut hair wet, following exactly the same method each time, and that is famous for not working on curly hair.
I'm not going to iron or blowdry my hair straight, which means the cowlicks and the waves are going to determine which way it curls and crucially, how long it is. Teenaged me always wore a bob, or what they might now call a lob, that was longer on one side because it had been cut wet.
So it was always easy to say "It can't possibly be worse, and at least if I do fuck it up - probably not as badly as they did - I won't have paid for it."
I converted Wax to this method long ago, and eventually we got an electric hair clipper, which was mostly for trimming the bottom edge of the back at first. But recently I got a nicer trimmer, and last weekend I was having a lot of fun experimenting with it and what it could do and accidentally made a stripe that's really short up onto the side of my head (I was trying to use the shorter length just for the back edges). I managed to mostly even it out in another 20 minutes or so, but the clipper was running out of charge and it was late at night before I had to work the next day, so I stopped there.
But I have been... a little self-conscious... this week, even though I do like it, because there's an uneven transition to the longer bit on top still visible on one side. Maybe for the first time I can remember, in these twenty years! I think I can fix it this weekend, though. (I did consider going to a salon, but Wax said she thought it looked fine already and encouraged me to sleep on it.)
I've already learned that it's too short for September in Finland, to my sorrow. The back of my head has been cold on and off all week. Too bad, because cutting it all off is still really fun.
After my dad got into the car crash that made him quadriplegic in 2003, while I was house sitting since my mother and little sister went to stay with him at the spinal rehab hospital three hours away, I was increasingly isolated and barely saw any other people from day to day, plus my untreated depression and anxiety were ballooning with practical and existential worries like whether my dad would survive. My hair became so laughably unimportant that it really was trivial, and I just wanted the icky bleach- dried stuff gone. It couldn't look any worse, and the last thing I could care about was what people might have thought about my hair.
So I just stood in front of the mirror and cut it down to the roots that were showing, more or less. It was the first time I had my hair short all over and not just in a layered bob, and it looked surprisingly good considering my state of mind. It wasn't completely even, but it looked better than a number of haircuts I had paid for over the years.
The next few times I wanted to cut it, I still didn't have any real reason to worry about it, and I'd already done it, so it just got easier. By the time I was trying to get a job again a year later, there was no real risk of unpresentable mishaps. So I just kept cutting my own hair... for the past twenty years.
I have made mistakes, but usually that meant cutting a bit shorter than I meant to. You can always fix this by making the whole haircut shorter, and I'm always willing to do this. I've worn my hair cut very short - less than an inch long all over the head - on purpose multiple times in the past, and I liked it, and other people thought it was cute, so I was always prepared to just do that again if something I attempted went wrong.
And while my hair was ringlety at age twenty, overall it's more wavy, and the key reason, I think, that cheap haircuts from age ten (the first time I had it shorter than shoulder-length) to age twenty usually didn't work is that cutting it wet doesn't work. In those ten years I only had one expensive, nice haircut, and the amount of training for the little walk-in chains of hair cutters in American malls of the 1990s was like, what, three hours? I'm pretty sure they are only taught to cut hair wet, following exactly the same method each time, and that is famous for not working on curly hair.
I'm not going to iron or blowdry my hair straight, which means the cowlicks and the waves are going to determine which way it curls and crucially, how long it is. Teenaged me always wore a bob, or what they might now call a lob, that was longer on one side because it had been cut wet.
So it was always easy to say "It can't possibly be worse, and at least if I do fuck it up - probably not as badly as they did - I won't have paid for it."
I converted Wax to this method long ago, and eventually we got an electric hair clipper, which was mostly for trimming the bottom edge of the back at first. But recently I got a nicer trimmer, and last weekend I was having a lot of fun experimenting with it and what it could do and accidentally made a stripe that's really short up onto the side of my head (I was trying to use the shorter length just for the back edges). I managed to mostly even it out in another 20 minutes or so, but the clipper was running out of charge and it was late at night before I had to work the next day, so I stopped there.
But I have been... a little self-conscious... this week, even though I do like it, because there's an uneven transition to the longer bit on top still visible on one side. Maybe for the first time I can remember, in these twenty years! I think I can fix it this weekend, though. (I did consider going to a salon, but Wax said she thought it looked fine already and encouraged me to sleep on it.)
I've already learned that it's too short for September in Finland, to my sorrow. The back of my head has been cold on and off all week. Too bad, because cutting it all off is still really fun.
