Can Instagram’s Favorite Haircut Happen Over Zoom? Lena Dunham Logs On

Vogue has been responsible for the majority of my major hair moments over the years. In my intrepid beauty reporting for this publication, I've sliced a severe bob, gone fire engine red—and then shaved my head as a result of those choices. So, when quarantine left me with a mess of locks that vaguely resembled a badly baked sheet cake, I knew where to turn.

Let me start by saying that this sheet cake is not nothing to me. When an auto-immune disease and the hormonal shifts of a hysterectomy left me with thinning, patchy strands, the era of endless hair experiments that defined my twenties (bleached bowl cuts; green rockabilly curls; a severe auburn Posh Spice look; endless pixies) ended. When you have no hair to play with, there will be no play. I committed myself to growth techniques—both holistic (scalp scrubs with salt and honey; washing and not washing), and more populist (biotin supplements, Sugarbear hair gummies)—and while I can't say for sure if it was due to any of these direct measures, or my body just re-balancing with help from my medical team, over the last two years my hair has grown fast and loose, and now I have more than I bargained for. It's important to state here that I do not believe hair makes the woman, nor that femininity is dependent on Crystal Gayle levels of length. My hair came to represent a period of real loss (relationships, fertility, the carefree nature of youth) and its return was something hopeful, even spiritual. But when my mother started asking me to part it like a curtain on our daily quarantine FaceTime call, I knew something had to change.

As far as I can tell, hair trends are always at pace with cultural ones: the excessive eighties breeding perms of all shapes and sizes; the ease of the Obama-era causing liberals to let their beachy curls shine. This moment— so complex and delicate, requiring all of us to just try our best to survive the ups and downs—calls for its own haircut, too, one that asks almost nothing of us except that we let it go wild. If Jane Birkin and Chrissie Hynde had a baby with Alicia Keys’ no-makeup ethos, that would be the haircut of now. Bye-bye stick-straight blowouts and polished lobs; hello to the easy, semi-French shags that have taken over my Instagram feed of late. I felt ready to pick up the kitchen shears again. The only problem was how to achieve this kind of cut when physical contact with a professional remains a no-no.

Enter Sally Hershberger. If you don’t know her, you know her work: all the decades of Meg Ryan's layers, each film telling its own hair story; Joan Jett’s iconic Blackheart’s shag (and Kristen Stewart’s version in the 2010 biopic, The Runaways, for which director Floria Sigismondi consulted Hershberger); her in-demand salons, and the Deco black-and-gold packaging of her products. Or maybe you've watched The L Word. (Hershberger is heavily rumored to have inspired lesbian lust object, Shane, which she would neither confirm nor deny when I told her I live in the neighborhood said to have inspired the noughties Showtime series’s lusty spider’s web of trysts and turns.) Sally is also responsible for Miley Cyrus's recent move from relaxed Malibu flow, to choppy Klute vibes. “Miley was the first person I did a Zoom cut with,” she reveals, adding that there was a bangs incident that required straightening out. (Relatable.)

Now, I got to be the Miley. The Zoom was planned. The supplies delivered. The anxiety about whether I could master this by myself left me twirling my hair like a popular seventh grader.

Sally appears on Zoom from her home in the Hamptons where she is dressed in her signature jeans and layered t-shirts; gotta love a signature look during quarantine, especially considering I was wearing a K-Mart bathrobe that she promptly announced was too bulky for my hair to "sit properly." After a quick change into a leopard halter top and bike shorts, she said I was "looking pretty punk," and we were ready to go.

In addition to her life as a high-flying styling god/possible heartbreaker of television infamy, Sally is also a longtime educator, having spent much of her decades-spanning career teaching other stylists her signature moves, skills that are evident in the easy way she guides me through this daunting task. Prior to our call, she had sent a selection of her products (much needed since I only have five kinds of hairless dog shampoos in my London rental, and some shaving cream left over from a previous tenant)—and the tools she considers essential for her work: ARC scissors ("sharpest in the world!"), and a razor that allows for the feathered flirtiness she espouses.

We start with dry hair, which Sally finds easier to control with the added benefit of allowing results to be seen in real time. She instructs me to create a center part, and begin with my bangs. Reader, I nearly died. In addition to having zero spatial skills, I was also terrified of pulling a Miley, aka winding up with bangs so short I would have to wear a bandana—and not over my mouth as has become an unexpected style statement of the COVID-19-era. But with Sally's firm patience (and some help from my quarantine roomie Liz, whose commentary includes warnings such as, "that is not chin length that is ear length!") we manage the front layers.

Self-isolation requires something easy to maintain, and that's where razoring layers around the crown of my head comes in. Sally has me measure the layers against each other, making sure that they are basically even, but the nice thing about a shag, she points out, is that "you can build on it." While the scissor cutting feels oddly natural (when I think of the whole thing less as a disaster-in-the-making and more as a crafts project, shearing the layers becomes almost meditative), the razor takes a moment to understand as it requires only a gentle tug, not brute force; ditto the concept of cutting upward, rather than straight across, to create a feathery line. As the look begins to emerge, Sally and I both see where it needs to go. Because the shag can take so many forms—short and tight, long and wild—we decide on a happy medium where I can maintain my length while getting rid of some of the bulk.

I emerge from my hour with Sally with my strands infinitely more flirty and manageable. Feeling refreshed and as pretty as a ’70s starlet, I'm ready for yet another new quarantine challenge: prepping for a talk show in my bathroom (Watch What Happens Live expects glamour!) Following Sally’s directions to “let the shag evolve,” I style a teased half-up Bardot look, razoring a few more face framing wisps and snipping a bit more at the waves descending from the crown. What I feel even more than cute, is capable. And in a time where we've all had to lean heavily on our own inner resources, isn't that the goal?

Originally Appeared on Vogue