4 Women Around the Globe Prove Why the Buzz Cut Is Bold and Beautiful
A shaved woman’s head has long held a variety of associations. In ancient Egypt, razors were found in women’s tombs—tools for fashioning a style to beat the heat, it’s believed. Joan of Arc, a renegade for the ages, buzzed her hair to ward off sexual advances as she pursued a military career, a professional move that resulted in her execution in 1431. In the centuries that followed, a forcibly shorn head was meant to shame, until adherents of the women’s liberation movement took scissors into their own hands. Singer-slash-hell-raiser Sinéad O’Connor and disco pop icon Grace Jones both adopted an androgynous look, helping to pioneer today’s bald role models: Adwoa Aboah, Cara Delevingne, and student activist Emma Gonzalez, who took to Twitter to buzz her hair before this year’s Women’s March. Her message? Baldies get the job done.
Now the cut is serving a slew of street style stars who also have something to say. For singer-songwriter Ama Serwah “Amaarae” Genfi, cutting and then coloring her hair proved an effective means of self-actualization. “Coming from a Ghanan family that always said to do this or do that, what I saw when I cut my hair was me taking control of who I wanted to be,” the 24-year-old says.
That person is inventive, soulful, pragmatic (“I don’t have the patience to take care of my hair,” she readily admits), and bold—as proven by her vivid color-blocked dye job. “As much as people are generally accepting of [my hair], there are more traditional people who see that kind of style as being demonic,” she continues. “But I must be doing something right if I’m challenging that point of view.”
Andrea Valle, a singer and model from Philadelphia, also counts her “big chop” as a defining moment in her personal and creative evolution. A self-described Renaissance woman, Valle delights in her hair’s opportunities for transformation, whether in color (blonde, Day-Glo green, and varying shades of pastel pink are a few of her go-to hues) or silhouette. “Switching up your look adds flavor to your life,” she says.
Regularly flitting between the grungy, the femme, and the utilitarian in her day-to-day dress code, Valle will occasionally finish an outfit with a jaunty beret or bucket hat, proof that some of the very best hair accessories require little to no actual hair at all. “When I cut my hair six years ago,” she says, “my mom understood it as a phase, hanging out with artists and different creatives. But it was more than just a phase.”
For Brazilian model Heloísa Muniz, her cool, clean mien—characterized by blue-green eyes and pouty pink lips framed by a textured, platinum-blonde halo—emerged another way. After a chemical-straightening treatment caused her natural hair to fall out, Muniz made the intrepid decision to shave it all off. “I love change and needed to empower myself, to free myself, to accept and [finally] rescue me,” she says of the faulty procedure, which caused her much distress at the time. “I’d always had low self-esteem, and mainly because of my hair.”
If before Muniz stood out because of her height (at 5 feet 7, she falls several inches short of the industry standard), however, after the cut, the charm of her shorn head and golden skin won her top campaigns with the likes of Dior and Yves Saint Laurent Beauty.
“I think every woman should feel the [inner] power that they have,” Lisbon-based model Lex Vieira says. Vieira shaved her head this past July, after first experimenting with a low cut as a teenager.
Now 21, she’s found that drop earrings and a dab of lip color (if that) are all she needs to feel confidently like herself. “I needed to prove to myself that I’m beautiful in any kind of way,” she says. “Sexiness, femininity, it’s all inside you.” Muniz agrees: “It is the most incredible sensation of freedom, to look in the mirror and say, ‘My God, how beautiful I am,’ with or without hair.”
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