Quarantine Review: Growing Out a Bad Haircut
On a scale of 1 to 5 stars, what would you give this quarantine?
This review was written back in May 2020.
It’s been a little over 3 months since I last got a haircut. When we first went into quarantine, I had a rather unflattering pixie cut. Now, I’m happy to say, my hair seems to be past all the awkward phases that come with growing out short hair (particularly the mullet phase).
From talking to friends and scrolling through viral social posts with #quarantinelife, I know that a lot of people aren’t happy with their #quarantinehair. What’s left of my dad’s salt-and-pepper (more salt than pepper) hair has reached a wild, mad-scientist state. Neither hat nor hairbrush does him much good right now. My mom’s hair doesn’t look too bad, but I know how shapeless short hair can feel if it isn’t trimmed every few weeks.
I would be begging for a haircut, too, if I weren’t on a mission: to grow my hair as fast as possible. There aren’t many upsides to lockdown, but being able to hide from the world while I grow my hair out is definitely one of them (as future reviews will show, it’s really the only one). What this pandemic has offered me is a metaphorical comforter to hide under and cry (hey, even Jo March cried over her short locks).
This wasn’t the worst haircut I’ve ever had; I just didn’t like it. It was cropped too short. It made my face look heavy. My overall critique: The pixie cut wasn’t attractively feminine (I’m a feminist, but...). When the hairdresser turned my chair so I could face myself in the mirror, the painful memories from the time I did have the worst haircut took turns punching me in the gut.
I was in first grade, and I had somehow ended up with a mullet. My mom’s friend was a hairdresser, and she used to give us budget-friendly haircuts in the basement of her house. Maybe that’s why my mom didn’t stop the mullet from happening; she didn’t want to hurt her friend’s feelings.
If I’m honest, I didn’t think the haircut she gave me was bad until I got to school the next day. Suddenly, I was no longer invisible to my classmates, something I always strived to be. Well, I didn’t want to be invisible, exactly. I just didn’t want to stand out, to be noticeable. But the day I walked into school with my mullet for the first time, I might as well have been a piñata at a child’s birthday party for everyone to take a swing at and try to break open.
“You look like a boy.”
“That’s the worst haircut I’ve ever seen.”
“Your hair is funky!”
“Don’t talk to me with that haircut.”
I cried for days until my classmates found another victim, someone else who didn’t conform to their rigid standards of what’s normal or cool.
The woman who cut my hair before quarantine didn’t know it, but she was forcing me to confront a 25-year-old trauma. I cried on my walk home from the salon and wished (obviously not knowing what was to come) that I wouldn’t have to leave it again.
A bad haircut doesn’t go away overnight—you have to live with it for a while. For months, you have to get up every day and look at yourself in the mirror, giving up before you even start to try to get your hair to behave. Then you have to watch it go through levels of hell, where the back grows faster than the sides, before moving to a level where one side takes the lead over the other. The darkest level—I like to call it the level of no return—is when I have no choice but to wear hats.
When New York City went into lockdown back in March and it was clear that I wouldn’t have to see anyone for a good few months, it felt like perfect timing for my pixie cut—I would be able to go through the levels of hair hell required to get it back to bob-length in private.
To be clear, I didn’t immediately think, “Oh, great, no one will have to see me while I’m in the midst of hair follicle misery,” when I learned the city was shutting down in order to help slow the spread of a deadly virus. It’s one of those silver linings that we’re all trying to find in this global dumpster fire. Are there silver linings to a pandemic? No. But we need reasons to keep going. I need reasons to keep going.
As I write this, we’re in the month of May. My hair has come out of the level of no hope, which also aligns with restrictions being lifted in New York and New Jersey. I can at least pull it back, with the help of 20-25 bobby pins, as it continues to grow.
I feel a little self-conscious about how much time I’ve spent writing about growing out my hair in quarantine. Given all that’s going on, maybe it shouldn’t be that important to me. I’m the only one who cares what my hair looks like, right? Let’s go back to my first-grade trauma, shall we?
All the kids in my class seemed to care that my hair was hacked into a mullet. And they let me know. Are adults really all that different from first graders? The only difference, I’d argue, is that adults will talk about your bad haircut behind your back. (Still undecided on which I’d prefer.)
What we’ve learned, here, is that anyone who tries to tell you that a bad haircut is all in your head, that no one even cares as much as you do is full of shit.
I’ll end this review with a quote from the late Nora Ephron, who I really wish had lived to write scathing reviews of the Trump administration: “Sometimes I think not having to care about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
Thanks, Nora. I give growing out a bad haircut during quarantine 4 stars.