(No.4) Beauty grief and short hair
Revelations born and cut (haircut) of the same cloth
In April of 2020, I cut off my long (expensively faux) blonde hair into a bowl cut. It was a capital-b Big deal but not until a good deal after the fact. I want to share the note I made in the months right after the haircut and some of the ways I coped (cope) with my shift in beauty perception and the grief I felt for the very specific and very curated beauty I rejected.
I wasn’t nervous leading up to it or during or after. The decision was a confident one. Maybe as part of a breakdown, but every season we break down, the leaves change, and every night we break down, we sleep. The dull awareness of my appearance in every single situation gnawed at me. I wanted a keener experience of the world. I wanted to move differently.
And so, driving the store to buy clippers, I wasn’t nervous or scared. I was giddy. I wanted to squish squash my version of the world by making it unavailable.
For the first few months of short hair, I was living in Jackson, WY, so the pandemic felt like a far-off dream because of doorstep outdoor recreation,1 and my experience was colored by that dream. It was joyful and I’d like to share the joy I felt after the complete overhaul.
My revelations now, some 2ish years later after cutting it, are mostly about craving beauty. In the shallow end, driven by appearance and privilege, and way over in the deep end, a lust for a textured life. After the joy of cutting it wore off and in the grow-out stages, I began to feel deep regret.
I stewed and stewed on the loss of pretty privilege and how ashamed I was of my fragile self-image, interwoven with gross (Eurocentric colonialist patriarchal) beauty standards. I was somewhere in the ether of the public. Not a type that anyone could mentally file quickly or a type I understood either, so looking at myself in the mirror was unsettling.
In the summer, I moved to a smaller town in Wyoming called Thayne where I worked on a farm, becoming hardened and strong, tan with a bowl cut, and (for the first time since grade school) a non-made-up face.
At the farm, my mind had a lot of time to wander while my body tired out. I uncovered memories I had long suppressed and slept like a rock. I was often mistaken for a man and started to actually wear my glasses, admitting that my need to see clearly (and dislike of contacts) was more important than my appearance.
While I was free diving, unrecognizable, I came across another definition of beauty. Little piglets needing bottles, elaborate homemade dinners among fellow farmhand characters, complete isolation, complete dirt-covered body, people who knew me only as this and never before—and still liked me. I started to feel valuable for something other than beauty, which I’m sad to say was a new feeling.
Pretty privilege is a powerful drug, especially as a white-bodied person, and I don’t blame myself for spending way too much time and money maintaining a standard. (It was roughly $200 every 6-8 months for blonde dye.) I vividly remember the first time I went through an airport with the new short hair—the TSA agent didn’t smile, no one offered to help me lift my suitcase to the overhead containers, and a woman in the bathroom told me “this is the women’s room.” I grieved my pretty privilege like any other loss. I had lost my security blanket and I was cold.
I wanted a total overhaul, but it was jarring and harsh when romantic interests and even some friendships dwindled. No doubt this was because my personality changed as well; it had to—I felt so different. I was annoyingly philosophical and in my head, angry when men didn’t notice me, only wanting to rest and retreat and regret.
I was keenly aware and sickened by the performative way I had been living. I wasn’t sure I enjoyed my hobbies. I couldn’t tell who I was attracted to. I subconsciously rooted for the most beautiful character in movies, regardless of actual plot points. I knew there was a dissonance between what I told myself and what my subconscious reflexes were.
A key refrain I got when I had short hair was, “you’re so brave,” and I always agreed, whether I admitted it or not. The business of beauty is menacing and punitive. It wants to keep you, keep your buying power and dependence.2 Not because it wants to help you feel beautiful, but because it wants to you to forget what beauty is.
I still find myself prodding my eyebrows with tweezers for an hour and complimenting toddlers for their looks. But I do have a newfound ability to trust my intuition on interests, hunger, and love, communal, platonic, and romantic. I didn’t even know about the moving force of communal love until the farm. I went on to live in multiple different communal situations after that, first on a converted dude ranch in Santa Fe with loving neighbors and then with my grandparents in their Floridian retirement community.
My hat tips to women with short hair. It’s a specific and special type of self-actualization. I’m positive they wear it well. It doesn’t give you a choice not otherwise.
I don’t think the cosmos would want us to fuss over inches of hair, but my lizard brain sometimes begs to differ.
[Fin]
For your consideration:
It’s also worth noting that the residential community in Jackson is very homogenous, and my notes reflect that of a middle-to-upper class primarily white reflection and reaction.
If you stayed with me this far, I’d like to recommend a companion to this thought train, the holy grail of anti-beauty beauty journalism—the Unpublishable. I find myself swimming in the links at the end of newsletters so I will only leave you with this one. The Unpublishable dives into the capitalistic nature of beauty standards and reminds often that there is no difference between diet culture and beauty culture.