Once a year, my hair gets so long that I regularly chew it while trying to speak. At this point, most normal people would get it cut, but I’m usually too broke/indifferent to do this, so I tend to continue ignoring the increasingly knotted mass on top of my head until my face is almost wholly obscured.
Eventually, I accept defeat and book myself a hair appointment. Well, my mum usually tells me it’s time for an overhaul and orders me to go and get it cut, for god’s sake, and I find a hairdresser that doesn’t look too intimidating/has a student discount and begrudgingly take a seat.
So, this Friday, horribly hungover from the Linguistic’s Christmas meal wine (and cocktails, and Willow tequila), I headed into town to 3D Hair Design on the Shambles. It’s been twelve long months since I got it done last (I’m the opposite of your stereotypical girly girl), and I really wasn’t looking forward to this.
Because I never attend to my hair, going to a hairdressers makes me nervous. I don’t feel particularly feminine enough, I get embarrassed because I don’t understand the lingo (what does feathering even mean?) and I have to admit that I don’t use any hair care- of any kind, by any stretch of the imagination.
You could practically smell the shock registering when my hairdresser untied my locks out of the bun I’d stuck it in. “Wow, there really is a lot of it“. Unsure of how to react to this, I just giggled nervously, then quietly apologised.
After some moments of recovery, she’d convinced me that the only way to make my hair healthy again is to reduce it from it’s half-way-down-my-back length to just over my shoulders. Over an hour later, after a few more stunned comments about my hairs uncanny ability to knot when you weren’t looking, and lopping off over half of my hair, we were done.
It’s still a surprise to me that I can now carry a shoulder bag without trapping my hair painfully underneath the straps, or sleep in a bed without leaving an array of split ends behind. The shock of having such shorter hair (I know it doesn’t look that dramatic, but it certainly feels it to me!) hasn’t worn off just yet, but I actually quite like it. I might even go so far as to say I’m going to actually look after it from now on, though don’t quote me on that.
