Lena Dunham Believes Everyone Should Cut Their Own Hair at Least Once
Writing this week for Vogue, Lena Dunham makes an emphatic, poetic pitch about why everyone should cut her own hair at least once in a lifetime.
“I will never forget the first time I cut my own bangs: the power, the adrenaline. I was twelve years old, standing in the fluorescent light of my parents’ bathroom with a pair of orange-handled craft scissors, unaware that I was standing on the precipice of self-definition,” she writes. “The sound of the first chop, thick and harsh, was thrilling. I watched my hair pile up in the sink, then looked into the mirror: I had given myself blunt, successive layers that resembled a staircase headed to nowhere. Nothing about the haircut could have been perceived as skilled, fetching, or even sane. But I had never felt more alive.”
Dunham writes that other self-chops followed, including an oddly shaped pixie cut and blunt Bettie Page bangs. “Each episode was met with sighs from my parents and confusion from my peers,” she notes, “but I remained committed to the notion that my hair was just for me, another avenue for radical self-reinterpretation.”
I can’t say I’ve ever been brave enough to cut my own locks; even when I wore my head shaved, in utter simplicity, I never quite trusted myself with the clippers. But I’ve known others to heed the call — our very own Yahoo Beauty editor Laura Kenney, for one, who says she’s been cutting her own hair from time to time since she was a teen. “I get inspired and then impatient and then impulsive,” she explains. “Nowadays it usually happens late at night when I’m up, in bed and on my phone, and I see a celebrity who is brunette, like me, who has hair I want.” She adds, “Back when I was a teen, I’d often cut it too short and then cry about it, whereas now, as an adult, if I mess up I don’t care — as I know I have an amazing stylist who I can go to, who understands and can fix it.” (But just FYI: She does a great job.)
My 8-year-old daughter, for another, took scissors to hair at around 3 years old (don’t ask), though she couldn’t quite understand the consequences of her actions until she made the cut — just one decisive one, right alongside her forehead — and then stood there, tearfully regretful, with that silky chunk in her hand.
And then there’s my dear old friend, who has been shearing her own short hair for well over a decade — an act first inspired by the misogyny and homophobia she experienced when professional Brooklyn stylists refused to serve her. “So I went to CVS and bought my own clippers,” she tells me. “I could have looked for someone else but was pissed — the salon said they only did ‘women’s cuts,’ and the barber right across the street said they only cut men’s hair. My mom is a hairdresser, so I knew the basics about how to do it, and I still cut my own hair to this day.”
Of course, distressed female TV and film characters are always cutting their hair off as an act of anger or mental breakdown (including, interestingly, Dunham’s own Hannah in the “Girls” first season finale, as evidenced above). Still, noted a recent Bustle story about being your own stylist, “Cutting your own hair doesn’t have to have the negative stigma it sometimes carries… There are lots of reasons people cut their own hair. Maybe you’re actually a stylist yourself. Maybe you’re just saving time and money. Maybe you’ve got a phobia of salons. My own reasons are pretty simple: I’m not usually going for a drastic style change (obviously I’ve gone to a professional for the big or difficult lock transformations), I’m more comfortable at home, and — oh yeah — there is that thing I have about letting other people do stuff for me. I’ll admit I’m a slight control freak.”
Even models and others in the fashion industry are starting to recognize the power of the home cut, Dunham points out in her essay, referring mainly to Grace Hartzel, who first carved out her own bangs three years ago. “I was feeling really stuck,” the 21-year-old told Dunham. “My parents were like, ‘Your career is over. You’re done.” But, on the contrary, French designer Hedi Slimane chose Hartzel as his fall 2014 exclusive, crazy bangs and all. And lately the model has been collaborating with stylist Guido Palau on a DIY-hair look for Vogue.
“The idea of a ‘home haircut’ is really about taking control,” Palau told Dunham, who, she writes, “has mastered the art of the transformational, punk-inflected makeover, adding a certain level of ‘wrongness’ to the cuts he dreams up at needle-moving shows, like Alexander Wang, so it looks as if they were self-administered by someone with a strong vision of her own identity.” Added Palau, “I never thought we’d see a resurgence of this kind of haircutting, but we are. I think there’s something really empowering about that.”
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