My Mid-Length Hair and How I Style It
I chopped my hair off this week. Photos below. Actually, I didn’t chop my hair off (we all know how that would have ended, see this Daily Mail piece from 2020 when my lockdown hair-cutting disaster went viral), my stylist Cassie did, after seven months of my half-arsed attempts to grow it out.
I feel as though long locks are “in”, at the moment, don’t you? Everyone and their aunt seems to be sporting these impossibly long, straight swathes of hair and for a hot minute I thought to myself, I quite fancy those too. But then it turned out that lots of people I saw with this hair actually had extensions in, which seem to be really expensive and time-consuming and I can’t get past the fact that you can apparently feel the little knobbly bits near the roots where they attach the other person’s hair to your own hair, which would drive me mad.
(I once had eyelash extensions. Three times, actually. The first two times were great, really loved them, but on the third session they used slightly heftier lashes to get a fuller effect and oh my God. I picked and picked at those lashes, rolling them between my fingers until they plucked themselves off the lid, taking the host lash along with them. It became compulsive. I just couldn’t stand the feeling of the stuck-on-ness of it all. I plucked and rolled for twenty-four hours until the next afternoon I realised I only had twelve eyelashes left on one eye and fifteen on the other. I was virtually bald on both lids.
I made an emergency dash into the West End (I lived in London at the time) to find a salon, any salon, who did lash extensions (it wasn’t that common then) and ended up in Chinatown in a room above a restaurant, where a woman tutted at me as she removed the final, sad extensions.)
Anyway, I don’t think long hair is for me, full stop. Every time I have shorter hair I think that longer hair is for me, but then as it grows out I realise that I can’t stand it hanging around my face. That I hate it sitting on my bare skin if I’m wearing a sleeveless top, the way it tickles my back or my shoulders. And so when it’s longer, and by this I mean past the shoulder, I end up tying it up into a ponytail or a bun, and that is where it stays for approximately 98% of the time. Giving me the Worst Tension Headaches of all Time™.
