It's Just Hair.
“I’ve never seen you with black hair before,” my partner said.
It was a simple enough statement, but it gave me pause. My partner has seen me—both in person and online—in several hairstyles. Violet pigtails. Guess blonde gamine. Merlot shoulder-length coils. Fire engine red lob.
These days, my hair is simple; untouched. Short, natural black curly afro with a sprinkle of gray.
This is the longest I’ve worn my hair the way it grows out of my head since I was a kid.
My school pictures reflect a litany of styles, braids, ponytails, jheri curls (I grew up in the 80s, hush!) High school, my hair looked like the pictures you’d see in Hype Hair while you sat under the dryer at the salon.
Falls, swirls, freeze curls, finger waves, high buns, asymmetrical bobs, in various color rinses and spray-on metallics. Pretty much whatever styles Mary J. Blige, Left Eye and Faith Evans had in their music videos.
Couldn’t get too crazy with color. It was Catholic school, after all.
I know. I know.
My twenties and thirties were more of the same, with the volume turned all the way up after I had discovered wigs: spiky red mohawks; beachy caramel waves; chocolate Aaliyah-like layers with one eye covered. Wigs and weaves for me were more about fun and expression rather than shame. (Sorry, ashies!)
Hell, one of my favorite red and black-toned wigs had a name: Harley Quinn, after my favorite DC antihero.
When I did a massive spring cleaning a few years ago, the number of wigs I threw away surprised me. As if I hadn’t bought them myself.
Did I keep one or two for fun? Maybe. Allegedly.
On the eve of my 38th birthday, I saw an ad for a pop-up salon in Brooklyn, helping women who wanted to do the big chop.
That was going to be as big a sign as I would get from the universe that it was time to step into a new era of hair.
The hairdresser was nice and I tipped her well, but when she finished the cut, I...didn’t love it. Because she had to blow it out a little to cut it, it stuck socket-straight out from my head.
Walking to the pizza parlor without the crisp March wind whipping my hair around, it was weird.
My head felt naked.
When I left the pop-up, I grabbed lunch and video-chatted with my then-girlfriend. She had never, ever seen me without a wig. I was still very self-conscious, still pushing back nonexistent hair over my shoulder because of it.
But, I didn’t resign myself to hating my hair or anything, it just needed a little TLC disguised as hair dye and coconut oil.
I cringed at the orange finish on the first go; a bit of golden toner fixed that right up. Moisturizing my hair gave me that Al B. Sure! Hawaiian silky texture I used to go crazy over as a child. Without the unibrow, anyway.
Suddenly, I had become my grandmother, who I never, ever remembered with anything other than her signature sandy blond coif.
As I grew out my big chop, it took on many iterations of hue, shape and length. I changed partners. My hair grew. Grays, which used to camouflage well as highlights, became more visible and disrespectful as fuck. Just a bunch of hating ass gray hairs popping up for no reason other than to be annoying.
I took some extreme action.
On first blush, the violet hair dye was a fantastic idea. I found myself permanently displaced at home because of the pandemic last year. Who was going to write me up for having purple hair, exactly?
After accidentally re-painting my bathroom purple (so much so that I am still finding dye in distant crevices months later) the hair I spent the last years growing out turned brittle. No amount of hot oil treatments could save it.
I could have swallowed a million biotin pills; tugging too hard with a comb only made it fall out in clumps.
The dye saturated a bit too well this time; a curious choice for hair that notoriously resisted color unless bleached to hell first. For the first weeks, I needed disposable gloves to style with any kind of product or be stuck cleaning it from underneath my nails.
Mayonnaise-avocado treatments would just stain blue, anyway. And smell, because I think mayonnaise is revolting.
Then, the stubborn color faded out too quickly and unevenly. The roots were rose gold, the tips were vibrantly purple. The middle? Lavender. I was too damn through. Stripping it would only damage it further, so I chose to do another big chop.
“Just cut it,” I said to the barber. “Cut all the purple off.” As someone who has never been attached to hair, this was an easy thing to say. My motto has always been: it’s just hair. It grows back.
For the record, though: I didn’t mean damn near bald. But that’s what I got.
What I gained was healthy hair that my partner loves touching without fear of Barney hands. It’s grown back a good amount since I cut it three months ago; the edges tickle the tips of my ears now.
It is, as she says, “a TWA.” Teeny weeny afro. Even the grays at my hairline are less disrespectful and more distinguished these days.
I am not afraid to allow anyone to see it, or me, in my natural state.
I think I’ll keep it.
For now.
L.M. Bennett is the author of the upcoming Wax and Wane, a short story that kicks off with a terrible dye job…which she is now an expert in. Huzzah!
She also gotta mailing list, but you ain’t hear that from me.