Mid-Length Hair: Is It Ever Perfect?

Is there anyone - anyone in the world - who procrastinates more than somebody who has mid-length hair but can’t decide whether to cut it or grow it? Jeepers creepers.

It’s like a curse!

Catch me with my hair at any length that ends between jawline and shoulder and I am the world’s greatest bore about it, reeling off the pros and cons for wearing my hair shorter (‘it just looks so good when it’s styled!’) or longer (‘it barely needs styling and I can tie it back!’) and greeting any advice with a look of anguish, as if to say, you just don’t understand my plight.

Because it’s true: people without mid-length hair don’t know how unsettling it is to be stuck in hair purgatory, neither here nor there. Wandering about in hair-do hinterland. Those who have chosen a mid-length on purpose are fine - some people just love that free and easy swing that neither touches torso nor skims the chin. They are mid-length by choice and are not wracked with the same constant sense of indecision as the mid-lengthers who are “just passing through”.

Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? For anyone who is growing out a shorter cut. Or, conversely, experimenting with cutting their long hair shorter but not quite up to committing to a bob. The mid-length is a transitional phase, a waiting room, but one you have to stay in for so long you start to wonder whether you might not just save yourself the bother and head for the exit to get things over with. Cut it all off again. Slice in a fringe. Anything - anything! - but suffer the boredom of the mid-length era.

Two things: I am by no means calling mid-length hair boring, I am calling the growing-out phase boring. Secondly, I do realise that there are far greater things to be concerned about in life, that the entire planet seems to be in destruct-and-destroy-mode and AI is potentially about to take over the world, but I’ll say it again: those without mid-length hair simply don’t understand our plight.

We can visualise ourselves with long, luscious hair - hair that falls silkily down past the shoulders and is weighty enough to hang just so, but we also flick through pictures of ourselves with the short, French Girl bob and lament the loss of our coolness. We grieve the sexy little do that took ten years off and made our necks look long and elegant. The haircut that could be tonged into some kittenish, choppy-looking thing in around eight minutes flat. The style that looked different, fresh and - forgive the use of this word - sassy.

The growing out phase between jaw and shoulder forces us mid-lengthers to swing between our two options almost ceaselessly - it’s mental torment! How long should we wait? Will we wait and then realise it was all in vain and we should have just kept it short all along?

It’s the hair equivalent of that scene in Braveheart where William Wallace rides along the nervous army telling them to Hold! Hold! Hold the line! He wants them to wait, not to charge too soon. He wants them to grow their hair that bit longer, have a bit of patience.

(Good God, this has to be the worst illustrative example I’ve ever used.)

William Wallace doesn’t want to waste all of that preparation time, all of the anxious gearing-up-for-a-fight pep-talk period, by suddenly panicking and rushing in all guns blazing. (They didn’t have guns, though it wouldn’t have surprised me if they had in the film - Braveheart isn’t exactly known for its historical accuracy.) Had they surged forward, it would have been like chopping all their hair back off before they’d had a chance to see what it was like long.

No, no. This has all fallen apart, this weird little analogy.

All I’m saying is that when you have mid-length hair, because you’re growing out shorter hair, you tend to spend quite a lot of time wondering which way you want to go with it.

I tell you all of this spectacularly useless preamble because last week I had the joy of filming with Sam McKnight again. Sam McKnight MBE; super-hair-stylist, maker of iconic looks (he famously cut Princess Diana’s hair short) and one of the most prolific and inspirational hair stylists in the world.

We were filming him styling the ultimate “Supermodel Do”, which gave me a chance to read some of my brand new book to him (it’s OUT, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock - How Not To Be A Supermodel is available here) and gave him a chance to regale me with some of his amazing stories from back in the day. It was like Jackanory in the studio on Friday, it really was.

But the notable part of the conversation was this - and bear in mind that I had gone into the studio feeling less than ecstatic about the length of my hair, wondering whether it was going to be a bit of a dowdy length to be doing a supermodel makeover on: when I asked Sam how he’d cut my hair if he could do anything he liked with it, he just said, ‘I’d leave it exactly as it is.’

Imagine that! One of the world’s greatest hair maestros telling you that your hair length, which you’d previously thought was a bit of a “wet blanket” sort of length, was just about spot on! Versatile, he called it. Cool.*

It’s possible he just didn’t want to have to get his scissors out, of course. Maybe he thought that I’d say ‘go on then, chop a bit off!’ and he’d have to wearily start the process of wetting my hair down and putting a gown around my shoulders, etc etc. In a way, he gave me the cleverest answer - who wouldn’t be flattered by being told that their current hairstyle was quite simply the absolute best one for them?

I don’t care: I’ll take it. At the very least it’ll put a stop to my daily deliberations - grow it, cut it? - and motivate me to learn some new styles and techniques. At any rate, I’ve managed to get myself past the treacherous Lord Farquaad stage of mid-length, where the hair sits in a blocky wedge of triangle and makes you look like a medieval lute player.

(I wrote a post about clever tips for growing-out hair on my website here, it’s one of the posts I need to move across to Substack for easier reference.)

And so: I think it’s possible I’m at a rare truce with my never-quite-right hair. And I have Sam to thank for this new lease of mid-length life. Maybe I really am at the sweet spot - could it be…perfect? Because I can tie my hair back but also give it shape and bounce if I curl it but also make it look long and sleek if I straighten?

I was around six weeks away from chopping it all right off again, but perhaps when I go in for my next appointment I’ll say instead,

“Just a little trim.”

You can watch Sam creating the ultimate mid-length glamorous style in our Youtube video here.

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*I cannot promise that he said the cool bit, I had to think of another word for the sake of rhythm and flow.