I Was Almost A Lesbian Once
When I was 16, my best friend Rory and I were lazing about my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon like a couple of kittens when we had the most brilliant idea in the history of awesome ideas: Rory offered to cut my hair. Here is the point in the story where I must declare two things:
Rory is not gay.
Rory is also not a hairdresser.
I’ve always had decently long hair, alternating between being about shoulder length and covering the bottom of my boobs. I have hair so thick, when not in the throes of a postpartum thyroid crisis that if it were much shorter, I would likely resemble a cactus, I find anything above the shoulder is sort of bad news for me.
So a couple of times a year, I drag ass to the salon and get it chopped to about shoulder length and let it grow on down until I realize that it’s officially gotten “too long.”
“Too long” for me is anything that makes me look like I might be a member of one of those religions that doesn’t allow women to cut their hair, or when wearing it in a pony tail becomes painful for my neck.
I’d always envied those women with the adorable pixie cuts but never quite had the guts to lop off all of my hair into one. It seemed like an awfully huge commitment for a 16 year old whose relationships were still measured in weeks.
But somehow, to Rory and I, who, I must admit were stone cold sober (as a matter of fact), this now seemed like the perfect cure for boredom. So we grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors and Rory lopped away.
Finally, he told me that I could turn around and when I did I was shocked to see a boy with big dark eyes looking back at me from the mirror. Uh-oh. Rory had given me a boy’s haircut. I gulped. Audibly.
Quickly, I raced upstairs and grabbed a shit-load of barrettes that I’d had laying around and began sticking them in the inch long tufts of hair that I had remaining. I grabbed an eyeliner–it was turquoise (hey, I never claimed to be tasteful)–and smeared it on. Satisfied by my appearance, I went back downstairs to show off my new haircut.
Surely, it was just new-hair-cut-jitters. Right? I hadn’t just committed teenage suicide, had I?
About an hour later, Rory and I had been watching The State on MTV (which, I got on DVD for my birthday and holy BALLS is that fucking funny) and the doorbell rang, our band of merry pranksters had arrived and we were off to do whatever it is that you do when you’re 16 and you have money and nowhere to really go but the world is all so new and wonderful and it’s all so fun.
Everyone had been over to my house BEFORE my haircut and, well, 8 mouths dropped open when they saw what had been done to my now-pin head.
To their credit, everyone was kind to me, probably, in looking back, kinder than I deserved.
(This, I should add, is where I’d humiliate myself by putting in a shot of me with my ridiculous hair so that you, My Internet, could tell me that “it’s not THAT bad” while you snicker into your cupped palm.
But, alas, I lost the book of pictures with all these snaps in my last move and I am actually so devastated by this that I cannot make a joke. I have no digital copy, so these pictures are simply lost. They’re gone forever and I cannot get them back.)
It was only from the back that one of my friends spoke the truth, “Hey Becky, you look like a lesbian now.”
I sucked in my breath sharply at this statement because he’d identified it exactly. I was now sporting the exact same haircut as all of the lesbians at school.
Always someone who had her own sense of style, which, one might properly argue is “tacky” and “unrefined” as noted by this iPhone cover that I am currently crushing on, or the belt buckle with my name on it or any other number of awful tacky things in my closet, I’m not always very quick on the uptake with things.
Something YOU might see as painfully obvious, I won’t notice for YEARS. I’m someone who could wear anal beads as a bracelet and not understand why people were snickering at me while I preened over it, so the haircut? Wouldn’t have realized it.
Well, I might have once the lesbian posse at school started hitting on me, but that was neither here nor there.
Truthfully?
I made an ugly lesbian. The haircut I can safely say was never going to be flattering on someone like me, no matter how much glitter I sprinkled, how many barrettes I clipped or diamonds I wore, short pixie haircuts aren’t my thing.
They make me look like I have a baseball where a head should be.
Thankfully, my hair eventually did grow out, although it took painfully longer than you’d think possible, and I had to go through all the stages of awful: cactus, Bozo the clown, Pig in a Wig, and eventually, back to my shoulders again.
And I learned a very valuable lesson that day.
I have a teeny, tiny head.
———————
So, loves, tell Your Aunt Becky all about your worst haircut experience. Was it a bad perm job that took on only a fraction of your hair? A home dye job gone horribly awry? Did half of your hair fall out? Did you routinely get mistaken for a lesbian?
I had long arrogantly straight hair when I was younger. I have always wanted my hair to be curly so I decided that I would go ahead and get a perm. I didn’t want to go to just any place that could do it for the cheapest amount of money so I went to Carlton Hair International. Once the stylist was done with my hair it looked great. I couldn’t wash it for like two days to make sure the perm stayed. On the third day, my hair was back to straight, and I had not washed it yet. I went back to the salon so that they could fix it and so they put more chemicals in my hair and as they started at the front right above my forehead, i could feel a burn like no other. A patch of my hair got burned off….I had to style the front of my hair sideways for months so that no one would notice! Never Again will I try to perm my hair!
Most of my hair-related choices have been uncharacteristically tame, so I’ll tell you about the best haircut I got, which oddly enough was in boot camp. I showed up there with an all-one-length, roughly chin-length bob (of all things, but regulations, you know) so I wouldn’t HAVE to get my haircut while I was in boot camp. I’d heard stories. And I was within regs, but since I was, for the first time since toddler-hood, without bangs (my head, opposite of yours, is freaking huge – out of 40 men and 40 women in my company in boot camp, I HAD THE LARGEST HEAD, with *super-thick* hair, like yourself, right up until post-partum madness) (thank God I have the shoulders and hips to balance it out)(or I’d look even sillier!)(point being, my forehead is like a landing strip you can see for miles, bangs are KEY regardless of the current trends) I wasn’t really sure how to deal with my hair. Our company commanders were particularly “hard-core” and while some girls in other companies could wear barrettes, we were not allowed. So while we were practicing for our “Personnel Inspection” (HUGE DEAL at the time) every time I removed my cover (hat!) as ordered, my hair flopped down in my face. (UNSAT, RECRUIT!!! = that’s not ok, dumbass!) So right before our actual inspection, my company commander walked through and sent those of us who needed them to the “salon” (haha) to get updated haircuts. I was to get bangs, or not even bother coming back. THOSE WERE THE HAPPIEST BANGS I HAVE EVER HAD. Such a freaking relief. AND half the company told me how much better I looked with them. Bonus.
@Sarah Large heads run in my family and it shocks me that my own head could double as a baseball. My children look like bobble heads, and I look like a shrunken head doll.
*sighs*
Who knew?
My head is ginormous. And my fiancee’s is even bigger. I am seriously glad we are not having any kids! There is no way a child of ours is exiting through any orifice in my body without cranes, tow ropes, and buckets of lube. And what kind of way is that to enter the world?
Just to illustrate: I remember Rosie O’Donnell used to complain endlessly about her big head on her talk show. And no wonder, her head is seriously huge. So she measured it on the show once. I don’t remember the measurement, but I DO remember measuring mine just to compare….only to discover that my head was 2 INCHES BIGGER! Than Rosie O’Donnell’s honking big head. Joy.
In case of bad hair day I cannot wear hats. Put a hat on my head and it looks like a freaky circus clown mini top hat, with my ginormous head squeezing out the bottom of it. Pretty picture, no?
I had a shaved (bald) head in highschool. I did have bangs. I did it on a dare. Because I have very curly hair, it was the most awful experience ever, waiting for it to grow back. At one point, Im pretty sure that what I had was considered a mullet. Luckily, my parents didn’t kill me, and I somehow still managed to date (more than usual actually). Guys must have thought bald equals freak.
@Kelly My heart actually cringes for you thinking about what it must have looked like growing back. Because my hair isn’t crazy curly, but it’s pretty curly and I am pretty sure I may have been mistaken for a cactus at one point.
OH! And while the lesbians flocked, the guys didn’t. I had the same experience.
Actually, right before I went to see Brent in Oklahoma, I went and got a (bad) bang trim. I was so pised by the time I got home, I actually broke my wooden brush by beating the shit out of it on the bathroom counter. I should KNOW better then to alter my appearance before a big event! I threw a huge tantrum while alone in my house, cried for about a half hour, then just resigned myself to the knowledge that they’d grow back. And they did.
@Notesfromthegrove. Oh, you poor thing. My frustration for you is palpable. This sort of thing happens to me ALL THE TIME. I tend to break things like box fans (although a brush would have been cathartic too). Glad that it grew back.
Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it. I’ve had good haircuts, but then I have no style sense, so I am the one who makes them look crappy.
I’ve been blond, brown, pink, permed, spiked, etc. But I can only remember looking really really good. Until I got home and did it myself.
@Ms. V I am completely inept at doing my own hair. Completely. I cannot do a single thing with it and am entirely envious of anyone who can.
I am absolutely the opposite. I never have liked how a hairdresser has styled my hair (including the worst styling EVER as maid of honour at my best friend’s wedding), and never know if I even like a haircut until I have gone home, washed it out and styled it myself. I used to have a hairdresser who would let me style it in the salon when she was done cutting. She knew I hated how she did it.
Hopefully the new bling on your iPhone will look better than your lesbian haircut 😀
Please tell me you’re going to post pics of the iPhone!?
I let my mother cut my hair earlier this year. While it didn’t end badly, I still had to wear a hat until it grew out.
@Badass Geek My children AND husband trust me with their heads. I’m really not sure what the hell they’re thinking. Really, they should ALL know better. I mean, you SAW my phone!
I did a very similar thing….my hair was cut SUPER short. As in, they had to shave a bit at the back of the neck so the neck hair wouldn’t show under the horrid bob.
Never again. My hair is NOT meant to be short. At all.
@Mrs. Soup. I am not a bob person, cute as they are on Katie Holmes. I am, no matter how I cut it, Katie Holmes.
Please. I’d have to open a whole new blog to tell you about all of the bad fucking haircuts I’ve had. Ha!
@Kate. I’m looking forward to this entry 😉
I went in to get my hair dyed a light brown once. Instead, they bleached it and it came out orange. I couldn’t get to another salon until the next day so I had to go to class that night with bright orange hair. My hair wasn’t the same for almost 2 years.
I’ve liked every haircut I had. Don’t get all jealous yet, though. I had what I thought was a wicked cute short, layered cut for my naturally super thin blond hair. One of my new coworkers was convinced that I was a lesbian because of my new short hair and the fact I went to an all woman’s college. Unfortunately, she shared this information with my now-husband when he inquired if I was single or not. It took a good 6 months before he asked me out.
My brother got a horrible haircut when he was 10. He has what we call an anglo-fro. The barber barely trimmed it and when he asked if it was an ok cut, my brother said no. So guess what the dude did? He took an electric buzzer to a swath of his beautiful hair. My bro was so shocked, he paid the guy and walked home.
OK, is this a new “design a day” thing you’re doing?
As for my hair… when I was 22 I had shoulder length mostly burgundy hair (with dark roots as it had been growing out) when it came time to interview for co-op jobs. I went to a hair place and told them I wanted a “nice” haircut.
She gave me a caesar (think George Clooney, circa 1996).
When I was 12 or so, my mom decided to save money and cut my hair herself.
1. My mother is not a hairdresser.
2. I have very thick hair that can be cut short, however, it requires many layers and a professional eye.
3. Let me repeat MY MOTHER IS NOT A HAIRDRESSER.
4. I was in middle school, the worst time to be even a little different.
Ahem, my nickname “mushroom head” didn’t disappear until I changed schools.
So, if you must know, I am a wimp when it comes to hair. I do nothing with it. Sure when having wings on each side and a really high poof was ‘in style’ (ugh!) I sported those styles, but for the most part, my hair is almost always bone straight, dreadfully thin, always shoulder length or longer and in need of something……just afraid to do anything different. So, I would suppose that is my bad hair day/lifetime. I still fluff my bangs, which looks awkward but I have a terribly ugly forehead…worse than the fluffed bangs.
Lol, I know the feeling. I have had longish hair all my life. I haven’t had a fringe since I was 7 (only 6 years but to my teensy life that seems huge) but I love the look of those kinda “emo-girl” fringes.. my friend Amy has one and she looks so awesome. I seriously try to steal her hair. I’m too scared to take a pic in to the salon and get it done there… most radical thing I do with my hair is highlights or dying it (my natural color. To get the highlights out -.-)
I was a musician in the 80’s and 90’s and totally had the middle-of-the-back-length perm. No Aquanet on account of that was for sellouts, but for several years I couldn’t ride in a car with the windows down for fear of my hair slapping me to death.
@Ed. Please, oh please tell me that you a) wore flannel and b) have pictures that you can humiliate yourself with. Because, you know, the best thing about humiliation is sharing it.
Oh, one better than flannel — SLEEVELESS flannel. Ripped jeans, acid wash of course. And, just because you asked, http://tinyurl.com/ylfumov
Before you laugh too loudly, I’ll have you know that I once killed a man in Reno just to watch him die.
@Ed Bwahahahahaha! You’re Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Man! Bwahahahaha!
Young lady, you’re about to get your ass kicked by a Sensitive Ponytail Man. Might just have to trot out the old acid wash slash pants for this one. Right after I let them out a bit.
@Ed If you can see past your tears to kick my ass, I’m all yours to beat senseless. After you torture me with your bad poetry.
When I was about 5, I had “the bowl”. Oh,yeah… You know the one. I looked like a refugee child from the Baltic region. Had five-year-old been hip to the lesbian look at that time, I surely would have grown up swinging for the other team.
@injaynesworld. I somehow missed that haircut by the skin of my overly large teeth, but I did manage the awesome bangs. They went approximately to my eyelashes. I’m not sure I saw most of 1986-7 or if that was a bad thing.
Well, I hated the time I went to the hairdresser and asked him to cut all my hair off, and he didn’t, and I ended up with a long wavy cut. Because he liked that better. And when I went back the next day to complain, he wouldn’t cut it off for free.
I actually really liked my mohicans, short haircuts and the time I went bald. (Really.)
I didn’t like the time I got a receding hairline because I’d popped a sprog. That happened twice, actually. Not fun.
@Mwa I’ve considered shaving my head before, but I’m genuinely afraid of how ugly I’d look. Did your hair grow back after the initial postpartum loss? And can I kick the ass of that hairdresser for you? What a jackass.
The day before 7th grade started, I got my hair CHOPPED off. The next day, the first day of school, in homeroom- school hadn’t even technically started for the year!- the teacher said “Sit down, young man.” If you want social ruin in a nutshell, there it is.
@Samantha. Oh Em GE! The same thing happened to me! Only it was an old guy and it was at my job while my hair was growing back, “Follow the nice young man.”
I may have died a little right there.
Well, it all started with my mother, for reasons unknown to me, decided a pixie cut would look cute for my big transition to first grade. Previously had nice longish locks. Yeah, um, thanks mom. I looked like a six year old boy, especially in the nasty brown sweater she dressed me in for school pictures that year. Ugh. Great. Then I was in high school in the late 80’s so I had the hugest bangs poof possible, with one problem, I have a cowlick (is that how you spell that word?) on one side in front, so I had a strangely shapen poof to the left side. Whatever. Can’t beat out the ugly clothes I wore, so it’s all in the past. Lately, the worst my hairdresser has done is convince me that darkening my blond (almost albino-ish) eyebrows would make my blue eyes “pop” like never before. Well, it made me look like I was a fake blond severely lacking a tan is what it did. I live in Miami, so I guess I was just blending in better with all the other fake blonds. I won’t do that again. he he.
@Jennifer B. Oh, my heart, it aches. I’m not sure how I escaped the big bang trend, but I did. I also never had a perm. I know, what the HELL?
When I was about 20, the guy that I was dating at the time, decided that we should both go platinum. I have been dying my hair dark brown to black since I was about 15, but because I was in lurve with this douche bag, I agreed to go platinum with him. His turned out fine, after one application, my poor hair had to be stripped 3 times before all the black came out, it started falling out in clumps, and breaking off all around my head. My slightly past the shoulder length hair had to be sheared down to the shortest pixie in the world, and then recolored by a professional to fix it, I ended up a strawberry blonde, with black eyebrows. Scary, scary, scary, scary.
Note to self….never ever let a boy tell you what to do with your hair, unless he’s a trained professional, and/or your gay guy friend.
@Kelly Holy balls. I have black hair, right? Naturally, I mean. And I wanted to, brilliantly go blond. The result?
Orange. My hair was bozo orange.
But this, you poor thing, did it burn your scalp?
Burned it would be an understatement. I had a crusty scalp for a lonnnnngggg time.
@Kelly. My scalp is kind of crawling in solidarity. You poor thing. That happened to me once when I was getting highlights.
*shudders*
Well. It was 1999 and I was living in Las Cruces, NM while attending college. I decided to get a haircut at the same place as my roommate and went in with an idea of short layers.
She didn’t know how to cut layers, but never told me. Instead – I kid you not – she cut rings around my head in varying lengths. It was ridiculously bad. It truly looked like she took a pair of scissors, spun me in circles and just cut and cut and cut.
I went home crying.
Went back the next day to beg her to fix it and she yelled at me for being rude (in critiquing the cut she did) and told me to never come back. Again, went home crying.
I remember it taking almost 2 years to get it all one length to shoulders again. Longest 2 years of my life.
@Anna Oh this hurts me to think about. I think I would have stupidly taken a pair of clippers to it. Because I’m a brilliant person who does brilliant things.
I have naturally curly (as in old school phone cord curly hair). As a child my mother with her stick straight hair didn’t know what do with mine so I had the orphan annie do until I was in the 4th grade.
@Allie This is where I will happily pay a professional. Amelia is getting ringlets and I am clueless.
Well ironically when I came out in college as a lesbian I grew my hair out, bucking my princess di cut of high school!
I have very thick hair and get lazy with it. When it gets too long I chop it and donate it to Locks of Love. That’s usually about the time, as you mentioned, that my damn neck hurts in a ponytail.
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two words….dorothy hamil….
@kalakly Bwahahahahaha!
And I thought I was the only one who would know what Dorothy Hamill was. I’m so sorry.
I want pictures SO badly.
And I like the new digs honey.
@Miss Grace. I think I can find some pictures for you. I know people who know people who would love to humiliate me. And I deserve it. *ahem* butt sex checks *ahem*
Just before my 30th birthday, I discovered my natural color (I’ve dyed my hair since I was 15) was coming out.. and that it was grey!!!!! ACCCCK! *think fetal position and snot bubble crying at the discovery*
I decided to seek professional help. I enlisted a hairdresser that my friend goes to. She ‘frosted’ my hair, which I was kinda digging. I liked it.
By my actual birthday, the frost was growing out and it was time to redo my hair. I’m naturally a brunette (so my baby pictures say). The lady doing my hair got caught up gossiping with another stylist and I think *forgot* about me. By the time she took the chemicals off my head, I was completely blonde!
I was too embarrassed to go out with my friends to celebrate turning 30, and it was a week before I felt safe enough to cover the $80 frost job with a $10 box of color from Walgreens.
Balls.
@Maggie! I cannot believe that I am the only person who has done this. Normally, I relish the opportunity to chew someone out, but I couldn’t bring myself to chew out the nice gay guy who dyed my black hair orange when I’d asked for blond. So Dave dyed it with a box for me.
Thank you for making me feel less nuts.
In the 80’s I had a few perms with the same hairdresser. I have fairly straight hair that took perm solution really well. The last perm I ever let her do:
Pube head.
Overly curly, matted look. What every woman wants on her head.
I shaved my head for charity 4 years ago. Loved loved being bald. Easiest head to take care of ever. Only problem was that I have a thyroid disease that has thinned my hair quite a bit, so the shaved head looked like I had been on chemo, and I got a lot of sympathy treatment, since I wasn’t sick or on chemo I felt wrong about getting seats on the bus, special treatment etc. No not a special bus, just regular transit.
@gaylin I’m in the throes of a thyroid crisis myself so mental note: do not shave head now. Thank you for the PSA.
I know, I call myself pin head and then I confess that I want to shave my head. I am a bundle of contradictions.
Aunt Becky,
I don’t have a pin head, in my family we have pea heads.
little tiny heads, thankfully my head is a nice shape so looked good shaved.
need to find a photo . . .
@gaylin I think a photo is absolutely in order.
I had the chicken pox badly as a child and my head took a pretty big beating. It’s lumpy and misshapen. I suppose that Mimi and I are partners in lumpy heads.
Once upon a time I was 19 years old and going through my punk rock phase. This required things like dying my hair orange to match the dress I bought to wear to my drummer-boyfriend’s show.
The dying of bright rainbow colors required bleaching my hair first. And then again to strip the old color to add a new one. And again. And again.
Now, I have to say, it was actually really cute. I was never an angry dirty punk rock chick, I was one of the *cute* one with the cute clothes and the cute hairstyle and the bright hair and big smile.
My hair was short and kind of spikey and back, and longer in the front, so the back stayed platinum and the front changed colors. Until one day I went metalic blue. And one piece of hair fell across the “supposed to stay blonde” part and now I had a blue stripe where it was not wanted.
So I said fuck it and dyed my whole head dark metallic blue. About two weeks later it was pastel-easter-egg-teal. So I pulled out the bleach and covered my hair and sat and watched it, the second the color was stripped I rinsed it out, this being the 10th or so time I’d bleached in about 3 months time.
And as I’m running my fingers through my hair it starts to stretch. Like a rubber band. With the squeaky noise and everything. I melted it. I rendered it RUBERLIKE.
So I raced to my stylist and flailed a bit and cried a lot and she cut all the rubbery parts off and I was left with Annie Lennox’s hair.
There may exist pictures somewhere, and I plan to digitize them if I ever find them, because I was in tears thinking I had killed my hair forever and wound up with the most awesome hair ever. And I wish I had the balls to duplicate it now, because it was *fun*.
I haven’t been on vacation that long. When did you change the blog? I like it – it has a lesbain feel to it.
And yes, I was mistaken for a lesbian once. But that may have been because I was kissing a girl. Who knows?
@Soxy Deb There is NOTHING wrong with kissing girls. They’re WAY better kissers.
On summer break in high school, I decided that I wanted to dye my hair black. So I did. This lasted about 2 weeks until the consensus was clear, the color was way too dark for me. So we tried to dye it back to it’s normal auburn color. Which turned it orange. I walked around my junior year of high school with orange hair until it grew out. It wasn’t pretty.
@C Orange hair looks good on about 0.000000001% of the population. Tricky to pull that one off.
Holy Crap! I have an appt Nov 4th to get my hair chopped and now I’m TERRIFIED!!
Hair has always been an issue for me…mostly because mine sucks. And I’m determined to stay away from “mom cuts”….let’s just hope I’m not calling you in a month crying hysterically and demanding style tips for short do’s!
I have STRAIGHT hair. Perms do not look good (had several in junior high ’cause I desperately wanted curls that weren’t from rollers or a curling iron). Putting my hair in rollers (my mom’s rollers no less) wasn’t much better. Made my hair all 60s/70s weird curls and flips. Which is how I ended up looking for my senior prom. Somewhere there are pics. Must find and burn them.
Hey there!
I’m a pretty new reader of your blog so, please forgive me for not knowing this but, you say you have thick hair…. is it also curly?
Here’s why I ask.
Although I don’t have a singular bad haircut story, I have long, curly, incredibly thick hair also… so, let’s just say that for more years than I care to count, I had “bad haircuts”. And, then I discovered a salon in NYC called Ouidad. They use a special haircutting technique that actually thins out your hair and makes it much, much, more manageable. I remember my first haircut there.. I left the salon quite literally bouncing because so much weight had been lifted from my head! It was as if the heavens were smiling down on me, I could here birds chirping, I could swing my head to the left.. to the right… but, I digress (sorry, I get all excited when I talk about the moment I got my head back!). Anyhow, they have certified salons all over the country and it might be worth checking out?? http://www.oudiad.com (I swear,I’m not trying to be an infomercial for them!)
Sorry for running off on a tangent! And, by the way, I’m loving your blog! Please stop by to check out The Hubby Diaries if you get a chance! http://thehubbydiaries.wordpress.com
I decided to get a “quick” trim at the place across the street from work before leaving on vacation.
Like you, I couldn’t quite place exactly what it was that made the result just so very horrible as the women in my life said things like, it’s not THAT bad, and it’ll grow back.
Then my husband took one look and said, “Oh my God. That woman gave you a fucking mullet.”
He was quick to assure me that I was still sexable with my wonderful new do, but the feeling was gone.
It has been almost 6 months and I am still growing that shit out.
My regular hair stylists just tsks, every time I go in…
I can do a pixie cut sometimes. When my hair is feeling curly I look freaking adorable with a pixie cut. When it is feeling straight I look sort of like a horse, with a long thin face. I can do shoulder length and longer. I can’t do the length in between though. As my hair grows down from chin to shoulders I wear bandannas. Lots of bandannas, because it is too short to clip back. In fact I have spent most of the last 3 months in bandannas because my hair seems to have given up feeling curly and I am tired of looking like a horse. I’ve sort of been wishing I could wear a burka – hide the hair, hide the results of the evil dip…
LOL! Pig in a wig!! I once had aterrible scare with Bangs…. cut from the center of my head. I cried when I saw it.
I to have had the pixie cut in the past– though I was a tiny little single girl on the prowl (for a man) and it was cute– I could not pull it off any longer… that is for sure!
I have had two AWFUL hair experiences…one was a pseudo mullet (eeek) and one was when I mistakenly tried to chemically straighten my gloriously think, curly hair. It was a major mistake…frizz city!
Oh my goodness, let me tell you! My poor hair…I have murdered it. Multiple times.
1. When I was 12, I wanted to give myself these cute little wispy things in the front. So while leaning on my elbows on my bed, I brought 2 tussels of hair to the front, and chop. But right as a chopped, my elbows slipped off the edge of my bed. So I chopped my hair off about 1 inch from the scalp.
2. The next year, I got a coupon to dye my hair for free at some new salon. It ended up maroon so I went and bought a box of brown hair dye. It started falling off in chunks the next morning.
3. And lastly, last October, I cut 13 inches off of my hair (to donate to Locks Of Love). I brought the ponytail home, and my dogs ate it.
I think I win.
Nel, you’ve got my vote. Good God. You poor thing.
I’ve had a few bad experiances… I’ve got naturally very dark brown hair. I decided that I was tired of just dying it auburn, and I wanted it to go COPPER. So, of course, the only way to do that is to bleach the hell outta it, and then dye it red. Um. Well.. Turns out that bleach is heat activated. So, the hair near my scalp was baby blond, the tips were barely light brown/red. Figuring that it wouldn’t hurt anything, we went ahead and dyed over it. Yes, we were sober, no we are not stylists.. You ever watch 5th Element? Yeah. That’s what color it was at the roots. At the tips? Muddy red. *sigh* I ended up dying it dark brown over top a month later, because I could see my dark roots. Never again!!
The other one.. Well, a few years back, like 5, I had a lil boy. He kept pullin my hair. It drove me INSANE. So my brilliant plan? Cut off all my hair, and spike it! It was totally fun, for a while. I got mistaken for a boy, constantly. I’m not petite, or narrow. I’m definately curvy. lol, then.. When I tried to grow it out, it kept turning into a damn mullet! I had to cut my own hair, just so that I didn’t fufill any stereotypes. I was living in Kentucky at the time..
Dear Lord. I have so many hair disasters. The time my hair started falling out by the handfuls after a bad dye job. The time I cut all of my hair off into what I thought was a pixie cut, but instead I looked like John Candy. The time I went to the cheapest hair cut place in town and came out with a Mullet. I had to wear my hair in pigtails for 3 days until I could go to a real salon to salvage what I had left.
Will I never learn?
I am a total emotional hair cutter . . . bad day? Let’s go get a haircut! I was all about rockin’ the pixie cut until I was walking Cooper to school last fall and heard some little girl refer to me as a man. I am now in the process of growing it out (again – for like the 47th time.) I am loving the headband right now.
The cell phone cover? AWESOME! You’ve earned it, baby!
@Nicole. I’m pretty sure if I bought that cell phone cover, Dave would disown me.
My worst hair experience was when my gay uncle and his boy friend thought it would be a great idea to colour red, then perm, then shave half and spike the other half of his lesbian niece’s hair.
I rocked………
And you would make a great lesbian! I would get the toaster for you.
ugh…..In 5th grade my mom cut my hair short. It was horrible. And she did this right before class pictures. So my 5th grade picture is the worst by far of all of my class photos. Not only was I sporting this awful doo, but she made me wear a dark green dress with a white collar….and….white cartoon mushrooms. Yep. I have a picture of me wearing 70’s shrooms. After school one day, I got off the bus, sporting said shorty short boy cut, when one of the neighbor boys started teasing me about it. “You are a boy! You are a boy!” Little prick. So I told him “You think I look like a boy? OK. I will act like a boy!” And I proceeded to beat the crap out of him in his front yard. One and only fight I was in my entire life. (unless you count verbal fights and then well…that is just endless) Thing that pissed me off the most was that I was called to the Principles office the next day and I got in super big trouble. My parents were called in and everything. I didn’t think the school should have gotten involved at all. I didn’t beat him up at school or at the bus stop. It happened in his front yard. Not fair!
A couple of years ago I chopped off all my hair into some sort of 80’s swoosh flock of seagulls sort of thing. I had a devil lock ala the misfits. So then the boyfriend St the time convinced me to let him shave it into a mohawk.
I have super thick, coarse, wavy to curly hair (read: naturally ridiculous) so no matter what I did, it curled at the top and I looked like the grinch who stole Christmas.
So I shaved it off. I left bangs in front that I straightened and wore to the side and honestly, I loved that haircut. When it grew out a few inches I had the super cute spiky slash poufy thing going on in the back with the chin length bangs in the front all straightened with the emo swoosh thing going on. It was awesome. Oh, and it was pink. Which was grand.
Now I have long, unmanageable, curly in come places wonky in others, stupid hair. But I don’t have the facial structure anymore to hack it off. Ah, hair.
I remembered another one! When I was 13, all the cool kids were putting “Sun-In” in their hair, I desperately wanted to be blonde, and had my mom dye my hair blonde, right before school started. We went to a family picnic at one of my parents friends houses, who had a pool. I didn’t want my new “color” to get screwed up, so I wore a swim cap ALL day long. I was a swimmer, and since there wasn’t anything to do, I swam laps the whole time we were there. When it was time to go, I took the cap off after swimming all day, my hair had turned Oscar the Grouch Green. The people that owned the house had just done a “super” cholrine treatment on the pool, whatever that was. This was the week before school started my 8th grade year. We tried lemon juice, we tried another hair color, I sat in the sun, we tried peroxcide, NOTHING would get the green out. I was mortified.
Needless to say, my last year of jr. high sucked, big time. Girls can be very mean, it wasn’t “cool” to have green hair then either, otherwise I could have just punked it out.
Hmmm. I thought I saw a pic of a lesbian-ish 16 yr. old on FB which was tagged with your name. No?
I have had too many bad hair experiences to mention in a comment. Home perm – yes. Crooked bangs – yes. Too short bangs – yes. African American-style cut on lank white-girl hair – yes. Orange via home dye job – yes. Bad assymetrical cut – yes. Mullet – yes. Etc, etc.
@kyslp Oh yes, that was me. The one where my *ahem* butt sex check friend *ahem* was making fun of me? That was me. Not my picture and I’m not NEARLY smart enough to figure out how to put it up here.
So. I had highlighted my hair for a few years and when the Dixie Chicks came out, they made platinum cool. Well, I didn’t go all platinum, but I sure chunked out the highlights. I had made friends with my stylist in our small town where our husbands worked together. We were more than just a client relationship, but still not lesbians.
One day I went in for an appointment and she looked totally stressed out. It had been a busy as hell day for her and she was running late. So she asked if I minded if she cut this guy’s hair while I sat under the blow dryer. No prob. There was another stylist there who had time to rinse out my highlights, and also to help out my buddy.
So I get to the sink and the gal starts to rinse out my highlights. Unbeknownst to me, instead of grabbing the normal shampoo, she grabs the old lady True Silver Shampoo. This stuff is a lovely shade of periwinkle/purple blue. So, I begin to see the panic on her face as she looks for the normal shampoo. She doesn’t say anything and just keeps washing. She put in the conditioner and toweled me up and then said, “your hair soaked up the color in the shampoo.” As if it was my hair’s fault. My friend was MORTIFIED! She did her best to try to fix it, but I had to wait a few days before blue hair syndrome went away. I was 28 years old and had the coif of a corpse. To top it off, the drunk ex-wife walked in about the time the towel came off and had to run her mouth about my purple hair and had the nuts to ask if I wanted it to look that way. THAT was hell.
@Dr. Dre. Oh holy hell. You just can’t make this shit up. You can’t. That’s crazy.
I just realized that it sounds like I had a drunk ex-wife. Nice. No, she was the ex-wife of my husband’s boss. She was/is a loon.
When I was a crazy punk rocker I dyed my hair black with purple stripes, tried ot bleach it and got dead pink tufts so I had it cut in a flat-top. People told me I looked like Annie Lennox but I think there was a bit of lesbian thrown in.
@GingerB. Ain’t NOTHING wrong with that.
My mom gave me bangs when I was about 12. I have a widow’s peak and a wicked cowlick. It looked like there was a tarantula on my forehead. It was… terrible.
@Cat Now that is a visual that will have me rolling all night long. “allll niiiggghhhttt longgg!”
My BFF convinced me to put Sun-In in my hair then lay under the hot Virginia Beach sun for like 9 hours. She’s white and blonde. I’m not. ‘Nuff said.
I tend to ruin other people’s hair. I once convinced my little sister to get this supershort haircut, it was practically peach fuzz everywhere but her bangs, which were left chin-length and we backcombed into submission. She hated me for a year. I also home-dyed my husbands hair. He used to be a tow-headed babe in elementary school and when it darkened as he got older I bet him that he would never let me dye his hair. He lost…big, orange-y time.
@Tanya. Did he forgive you after the dye job?
As I am practically ancient, I had the 1983 attempt at a Farrah Fawcett feathered style. It was awful. Fortunately, I went to a good salon (where people knew how to cut hair – the old Neiman Marcus on Michigan Avenue, now Victoria’s Secret I think, used to have newbies cut hair for $15 on certain days) and got the pixie/mushroom cut. It was very cute on me, although I did get the boy comments. Then I decided to grow my hair out to shoulder length. At that time, you could go to Vidal Sassoon in Water Tower Place and get cheap haircuts from the trainees, so I got my hair cut there. The stylist did a really cool layer thing that gave my super flat hair some body (but when wet, looked like the above commenter’s (Anna) rings, but just on the bottom. Trust me, it worked). My next haircut, though was at a Supercuts in Carbondale, where the girl was like “Who cut your hair this way? This is awful! Where did you get your hair cut?” Then I said, “Vidal Sassoon.” And she shut up.
My final hair story: I had my first miscarriage and I was really sad and upset, so I determined that first, retail therapy would be necessary. After that, I wanted to change my appearance, and be someone else for a while. So, I went to see Bob. I told Bob that I wanted my hair colored, but they only scheduled me for highlights. The cut was fine, but the color looked like what I get after a summer spent in the sun. So, Bob asked me what I thought, and I said, “it looks great, but I could have done this myself with some sun.” So, Bob invited me back a few days later to fix it for free(since the whole process cost me $165, that was a good move on Bob’s part). It still wasn’t the dramatic change I was looking for, but I didn’t want to torture the man any more.
@A I totally remember going to Vidal Sassoon at Water Tower Place. Holy crap! I never had the Farrah Hair, but mine is so damn thick, I don’t think it would have worked.
I have long hair. Sometimes even religious cult “are you ALLOWED to cut your hair?” hair. I’m too afraid to see what it looks like short …
Because as a kid my mom kept it super short, all the time. Mullet-style even. And sometimes? She’d curl it.
Oh the pictures. It’s awful. (Especially when you get a load of the dresses she’d put me in. The 80s were just not a good decade.)
But I was never mistaken for a lesbian because of my hair. No no. Only when my best friend TOLD everyone I was and she was my lover. Yup, took until college to shake that myth.
@Cathy What shocks me is seeing the 80’s come BACK into fashion. Like, are perms next? Seriously, are they?
I NEVER routinely get ‘mistaken’ for a lesbian. Its very sad. When I’m around, the gaydars, they die. Maybe I should give in and get a lesbian hair cut..
I have two worst hair stories – one, my mom used to cut my hair. She claims we were too poor for a hairdresser. The fringe started PAST the centre of my head. Way past. Like it was ALL fringe, with just a bit of hair fighting for its life in the back.
Two, the one and only time I used box dye on my hair it turned orange. Our oak front door had just been varnished a lovley orangey shade, and when I stood against it I dissapeared. You could just see eyes. My once blonde hair became one with the door. Since then I’ve spent a fortune on proper hairdressers…
@aneke Comment of the Year. You win the award. I’ve been laughing all afternoon. Thank you.
My ex-MIL was learning to cut hair and she cut bangs on me, combing through them and cutting them. The problem (and it is huge) is that I have naturally curly hair, which is pretty elastic. When you pull on curly hair and then cut it to a length, the end result is as much as THREE inches shorter than you cut it. I had bangs up to my hairline. NO JOKE. We were both crying and my ex-dumbass got mad at ME for making his mom feel bad.
@Caron Oh, oh, oh. You poor thing. Bangs, oh, you poor thing.
My former hairdesser once sent me home looking like Leather Tuscadero. I didn’t freak out, since I’m never able to make it look like the hairdresser does, so I figured that wouldn’t really know how it looked until the next day.
Well, the next day, I discovered that he had given me too many layers, with no instruction on how to tame all the shorter hairs that were sticking out like they wanted to be frizzy when they grew up. There was sobbing. There was recutting. There was the search for a new hairdresser.
@Jen I tend toward the beauty school in town mainly because they’re never awesome, but they’re often better then the salons. And CHEAP.
Regarding the cell phone cover that you’re lusting over, is that actual pink meringue on the back? little pieces of candy? lol Holy moly I’ve never seen anything like it!
@Kelly I am pretty sure I would either be the awesomest person I know, or the worst person I know if I owned that phone.
I have two all time worst haircuts. As background info I have thin brown hair, but it seriously holds a curl; left to its own devices it is slightly curly. So in 7th grade I decide to get a perm with my mom. She ends up looking like a poodle with tight short curls. I end up with bigger ringlets, think Nellie Olsen on the tv show Little House on the Praire. But I have bangs, which when you perm them, make for short poofy fuzz balls. When I tried to straighten the ringlets out I got the dreaded triangle head–with poofy bangs. awesome.
The second was more recent. I got what I thought was a cute cut but my husband looks at me and says “you cut your hair?? I thought it was a wig” yeah, I burst into tears.
@Elizabeth Oh, that just breaks my heart. He thought it was a WIG!?! Did he then think it was someone else’s foot making contact with his ass?
When I was about 11, I wanted a perm. Why, you ask? Well, sweet Becky, it was because my mom had one, my older sister had one, everyone had one. My hair isn’t thin, but it’s very, very fine and straight as a pin. At the time, it was down to my waist, and I decided I needed it to be shorter before I got the perm.
You probably don’t remember, but there was a show on at the time (or a miniseries?) called Rags to Riches, and one of the characters had blonde hair (LIKE ME!), and it was wavy and shoulder length (like I wanted). So, Mom took me to get it cut and then permed it herself. Instead of being beautifully wavy, it was curly and ugggggggly. It was only really curly for a couple of weeks, but it was the only perm I’ve ever had or will ever have.
P.S. I think I saw a pic of your lesbian ‘do before on Facebook. Maybe KC or someone tagged you?
P.P.S. I love that iphone case, and I want to eat it.
@Ginger Magnolia, oh yes, on Facebook there is such a picture of me, Your Lesbian Aunt Becky. Sadly, I don’t know how to get it from here to there. Some day I hope to be that smart. Perhaps KC can help the cause.
Oh Becky, I remember that haircut. In fact, I think I saw someone post a picture of it on facebook recently. My worst haircut sounds very similar. When I was around 16, I was at my friend Paul’s house, and he decided to give me a trim, which then turned into what looked like steps of hair. Each piece was cut about an inch shorter than the last, until he refused to cut any more. I wore a winter hat downstairs and his mom knew instantly that something was wrong. Fortunately, she was able to even it all out, and I wasn’t quite at pixie length.
I did go on to try a pixie cut in college, and it was definitely not flattering on me. I let it grow until it looks like my face is a mile long, and then it gets cut to my shoulders.
@BB. Oh yes, that picture was LOVINGLY put on FB by KC because she loves me oodles. And by “loves me” I mean that she’s still mad about the time I told her that she “looked rough” one day in school.
I guess payback sucks, eh?
Dude…you totally have a picture of that haircut and you know it. I posted one on FB. And you looked cute.
@KC. I looked stupid and you know it.
Let me begin first by saying OMG about that iPhone cover! I literally laughed out loud when I saw it! 🙂
My worst haircut happened the summer between my sophomore and junior years of high school. I went in for a trim (shoulder-length hair) and came out with hair much like Princess Diana’s when it was at its shortest. The haircut itself wasn’t so bad, and she was really popular at the time so a lot of people had the same haircut, but it was just so drastically different than what I’d had before – and totally NOT what I went to the salon for. Grr.
@Chrissy I’ve never managed to walk out of the salon with a different haircut than I requested. YET. But then again, I haven’t asked for anything stylized. I suppose if I asked for the Kate Gosslin, I might end up screwed with a mullet or something.
Ha! I turned 16 and my mother offered to pay for a real, grown up, in-a-salon haircut. (Big stuff, as either she, I, or our weird neighbor with the salon chair in her basement always cut the hairs).
So I took my waist-length wavy hair to a salon and asked for something less “little girlish”…
Sadly sadly sadly, I turned 16 in 1986. Do you know what was the big look in Utah in 1986? Cher hair.
Here’s a link to the look my woefully wrong hairdresser gave me: https://salempress.com/Store/pdfs/hairstyles.pdf
Except that my hair is frizzy, so it was just a big, lovely mullet. Forever. And then I died. The End.
@rebekah Will you be my BFF? Like move in with me so we can stay up late and hang out and braid each others hair and maybe start slam books or something? Because I want to be your BFF now.
I was around 21 when I decided to get the Gwyneth Paltrow, you know, when she was with Brad Pitt and she cut it super duper short? I took a picture of her to the salon and thought I was so hot when I came out with my super short do.
Until I went to work and my coworkers told me I looked like Ellen Degeneres.
Apparently I too make a very sad looking lesbian.
Alright, this is going to date me fo shizzle. But it happened when I was farily young 3rd grade or so, so if the kids were laughing at me I 1) dont remember, or 2) am blocking the memory. I also have the picture.
My mother was obsessed with me being so blonde (that was only when I was a kid, I now have dark hair). She of the brunette persuasion who had to dye her hair blonde was obsessed with how I should look like Christie Brinkley, you know straight, shiny hair? She was always trying to blowdry my hair and it would take her HOURS. For me to look like a lion. (my hair is VERY curly). She didnt know how to straighten hair to save her life.
ANYHOO – I doubt you remember this but there was a thing called a wedge? You know the DOROTHY HAMILL haircut? Why the HELL would the BARBER did not know that my hair would not do that.. Oh wait.
To say the least. My brothers and sisters still take out that school picture of me that year out around the holidays and point and laugh.
@Melissa I am sorry, genuinely sorry that I do not have my drivers license picture to show you. Even with long hair, I manage to look like a Mexican male. A stoned one.
It used to be the ONLY thing that would cheer up a large subset of my friends.
Having a bad day? Have Becky whip out her wallet to show off her license.
I gave myself a mullet in 7th grade.
If that’s not lesbian-look, I don’t know what is.
@MK. I will pay to see this.
Oh…The perms. THE PERMS. I have deleted the memories from my mind. However, in my early 20’s … when I was COOL..(damnit, I was) I colored my hair so much – it ended up purple for quite some time. That’s a REALLY good look at a funeral.
@Minivan Soapbox How the HELL did I sneak by without a perm? I think that I need a perm now. Just to complain bitterly about it now. Besides, that’s GOT to be the next thing coming back, right?
Let’s see…
My mom cut all my gorgeous, thick, wavy golden-brown waist length hair off when I was 9 and gave me Q-tip head. She was a beauty school dropout!
I did the Sun-In thing in High School and had crayon orange hair for a while.
I went to get a cheap cut when I was about 25 and the girl was horrid and she gave me 2 different haircuts on the 2 sides of my head. I’m not kidding. I think she had several personalities and they all wanted in.
But my hair grows super fast and there’s a ton of it, so nothing really bothers me for long.
@Coco OH EM GE SUN IN. Holy CRAP! I’d forgotten about Sun-In!
Polo shirts. I look like a lesbian when I wear polo shirts.
@DG Very few people can really pull off the polo shirts well. I certainly can’t. My hooters are too big.
for years my mom strictly enforced the dorothy hamil cut, because “she didn’t have the time for me to have long hair”. that may be why my current hair identity is ever so slightly schizophrenic…
@tangeria That would make TOTAL sense.
My bad haircut story isn’t mine, but it is my fault…. When I was 13 or so, I became the local home perm expert. On a cold and rainy afternoon, my friend Lisa called upon my expertise and asked that I perm her thick, straight hair. To help out, my friend Jen offered to roll half her head. Sounded good to me. We had all of her hair in rollers and I had just started squeezing on the perm solution when she grabbed the bottle and thinking I had used my half, used the rest on her side of Lisa’s head. I knew immediately this was not going to end well. We waited the appropriate period of time then rinsed Lisa’s hair and unrolled it. Just as we expected – straight on one side, tight curls on the other. What happened? was all we could say…Poor Lisa had to live with that for months and we never admitted what had happened.
@Laura. I never, ever would have told poor Lisa. I cannot believe she didn’t suspect you, but I never would have said a word to her if I were you.
SUN IN!!! I had really dark brown hair, and my friend and i used to get the sun-in and lemon juice, and soak ourselves in it, then go sit in the driveway in the sun all afternoon. I decided that it wasn’t working fast enough, so I put a bunch on, then dried it with the blow drier every day until it was like a blond/orange color. After it grew out, I just did a section in the front (wtf?) like a big misguided blond streak. After that, I had the hair cutting guy shave a spot above each ear and put shaved stripes in it (wtf). The last super bad one, not a stupid-kid haircut/hair coloring stunt, was about 8 years ago when my friend sent me to her hair dresser. She (my friend, and the hairdresser) was african american and I? am not. she cut my hair so short. Before the haircut, my hair was to my shoulder blades and i loved it. She cut it to the bottom of my ears in a short bob, and I cried like heck all the way home. It was definitely a lesbian haircut. I, unfortunately, have a fat face, so I felt like the agoraphobic brother on Benchwarmers. God.
@baseballmom. WTF happened to Sun-In? I wonder if that garbage is still around? I have black hair and it never worked on me…
What, ME BITTER? NEVER.
(okay, maybe a little)
By my senior year of high school I had been dying and bleaching my hair for years and when I decided I wanted a perm (wtf was I thinking?) and was too impatient (and cheap) to go to a salon, my hair decided it had had enough.
Half way through the time the curlers were supposed to be in, my hair started changing colors. My friends who had put the curlers in dragged me into the bathroom and started pulling them, and my hair, out. It broke off in clumps, and what didn’t actually break stretched like weak rubber bands. It smelled nasty, and looked a hell of a lot worse.
I’ll never forget one of my friends saying “I’m so sorry, if you have to shave your head I’ll shave mine too.” And the other one – “I love you dude, but I’m not shaving my head!”
Thank GOD it wasn’t so bad as having to shave my head, but I did end up with very short and awfully crimpy looking layers. Ew.
@melissa_413 Oh, you poor thing. I’m glad that you didn’t end up having to shave it. That was sort of what my mother used to scare me away from putting too much product onto my hair. It worked. Although, not well.
I got a spiral perm. With this hair. That hair you can see outside right now, even though I’m on the other side of the country. I looked like Bernie from Room 222.
However. If I had that iPhone cover? I would never be sad again.
@June. That is exactly the argument I am going to use on The Daver. “You see this iPhone cover? It means I will never cry again. Ever.”
My worst haircut story is entrenched in family drama. My brother (who is not gay) was going to beauty school at the time (he has sinced graduated),and I was 3 or 4 months pregnant. He wanted to do my hair as a birthday gift. I said I wanted a TRIM and carmel lowlight with highlights. Idid provide him with a picure of Heidi Klum so there was no mistaking what I wanted. Now, I didn’t really want him to do my hair because his communication skills are lacking, in addition to his recent “quiting” drugs. I didn’t think our relationship could handle the added dynamic of hair dresser/client. But because I like to please my mom, I said yes.
Well, my trim ended up with lots of texturizing layers. The hightlights turned out yellow and the carmel lowlights were orange complete with an orange scalp. Since he came to my house, he rinsed my hair in my bathtub. I don’t know which was worse, the dye burning my skin or inhaling all the fumes with the steam from the water. When I told him as nicely as I could that it wasn’t what I had in mind, he got mad and left. So I cleaned up my bathroom and called my regular girl to fix it in a hurry.
Did I mention that I was pregnant and this was suppose to be a birthday gift?
And as you mentioned in your last blog, my family sees this event TOTALLY different than me.
@Mommy On The Spot Of COURSE your family didn’t see it that way. It was YOUR fault, right?
I have long, thick, shiny blonde hair, and I’m a bit vain about it. I have no hope of ever being 1)tall, 2)skinny, or 3)graceful, but damn have I got nice hair. About 6 weeks before my wedding I went in for a TRIM – long layers in the last few inches, I said. The bitch basically shagged it. It was totally hacked, but with a few token bits left long… I ended up telling her not to cut any more hair and was bawling by the time I made it to the car. I could see the shock on my then-fiancee’s face when I walked in the door, which he quickly replaced with a noncommittal expression and started saying all the right things that a girl needs to hear in that situation. (there’s a reason why I married him!) I wore it in a ponytail for WEEKS and the hairdresser who was styling my hair for my wedding actually had to do a some cutting to repair it because it was so freaking uneven she couldn’t put it up right until she fixed it! To this day I am still pissed at that woman for mutilating my hair!
@CatP I am cringing, literally, cringing, reading this. You poor thing.
I did it all in my teens and early 20’s… pretty much every color (including denim fabric dye, once, on a dare… bad idea. It faded in a week to Old Lady Blue). Since then, my hair has been mostly board-straight and shoulder length, although I did get a supershort pixie cut just before boot camp. If I had that hardcore figure still, I’d do it again.
The worst haircut? Yikes… pick one… Mom Bangs, bowl-cut, overenthusiastic “feathering” that looked more like fuzzy baby chicken feathers (this became a mullet, so that’s a twofer) and a perm when my hair was too short to pull it off… Ronald McDonald hair. After accidentally dying it magenta my sister called me Crayola Head.
I’m Irish, and all my life I’ve wanted the stereotype… curly auburn hair. Did it once a few years back, then stupidly cut it all off when my thyroid mutinied and my hair began to fall out. Since it’s finally long enough again (and I’ve got thyroid pills, heh) last week I got my first perm in ages, a sproingy spiral, and it’s light auburn with blonde highlights (natural ones). I don’t even care if perms are in or out, I LOVE it! 😛
@cjupiter I admire the usage of blue dye on your hair. Having had black hair for my whole life, I could never dye it any other color unless it was bleached first.
And I’m SO glad that it’s now the way you want it to be. *shakes fists at sky* Stupid Thyroids.
The only horrific haircut I can remember was the one my cranky-ass, drunken Irish grandmother gave me when I was six. My hair was down to my waist, and I loved it. So did my mother.
It drove my grandmother crazy for some reason, and one day while she babysat us, she took the scissors to my head. My mother came home to me in hysterics, my little brother crying because I was flipping out, and my grandmother smoking a butt at the kitchen table.
When my mother saw me, she screamed, and my angry midgit of a grandma said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, it looks pretty. You all need to stop your carrying on right now.”
Yeah, it was pretty, all right, if you’re a fan of the most crooked Dorothy Hamill cut on record. Mind you, no one had ever heard of Dorothy back then, so my drunk, chain-smoking grandma actually invented that famous cut 😉
@Lola I kind of want to be just like your grandma when I grow up.
As I was dragging a brush through my daughter’s waist length hair today while she proclaimed that I might kill her with the pain I was inflicting, I was reminded of the my fourth grade hair cut. I went from hair I could sit on to a shag. All my friends had the cut. God, it was hideous!
@Betts TELL ME THAT YOU HAD THE HEXAGONAL GLASSES TOO. PLEASE?
In middle school a friend of mine convinced me to use one of those temporary wash out dye to dye my hair black. At the time my hair was platinum blonde froma ton of time spent in the sun & pool all summer. When I went to wash it out my hair turned pink then evntually faded to copper. I was know as copper top that enitre year of school.
@jen I wonder if they still make those wash out dyes. I should totally put one on Dave’s hair to piss him off. That would RULE.
Well, I used to shave my head is high school and in between dye my hair many colors. I still go to get my hair cut and tell the hairdresser to just “do whatever” so clearly I am not hung up on my hair. But I did accidentally dye it gray once when I was about 16, which was a little weird…
@Io But did it look cool grey?
That cell cover is ALMOST tackier than your former bejeweled phone. Yikes.
My junior year of high school….school pic time rolls around…..I call those my Ugly Year pics. I had a fresh poodle-looking perm, giant glasses with black frames, a purple turtleneck, and a v-neck sweater that was the color of newborn baby shit. I can’t figure out how the hell I actually snagged a boyfriend that year. And he was NOT BLIND! Go figure.
@Mama Cas That cell phone cover is probably more artfully created than my bejeweled phone. I am not an artist and those jewels? Popped off all over the damn place and added 38 pounds to the phone.
I suck.
My mom got me a perm for my 8th grade graduation pics. I look like I have a hanger of friz stuck on my head. I swear, it is a perfect triangle of frizziness. I would also like to take the time to say that pixie cuts are not ever my fave for lesbians. Most of my friends who are lezzy’s have really long hair, and my partner *really the most beautiful woman in the world*, has hair almost down to her butt. That’s probably more than you wanted to know, but really! 🙂
@Becca Most of the lesbians I know now have beautiful long hair, too. All of the ones in my high school had the same hair cut that I did (you can see it on Facebook).
131 comments?! fuck me!! well, i guess you’re gonna be busy for a while. fuck. i’d ask why you’re so popular but well, duh. everyone knows you put out on the first date.
haircuts? well. i have had a grand total of maybe 3 (yes, that’s THREE) decent haircuts in my life. when i was 16 (what is it about being 16 that makes us purposely do things to uglify ourselves?) i got a haircut, that i paid *cash money* for, that i STUPIDLY let the hairdresser do whatever she wanted. she shaved the bottom half of my head and gave me a bowl cut. at the time, i didn’t hate it or anything, mostly i just thought my neck was cold. looking back now, i have only this to say about it: i was an unfortunate looking teenager for all of my teen years. this was just one more example.
@Stone Fox Half of the comments are actually me responding to the comments. Thanks to threaded comments, it makes me appear cooler than I actually am. Because, obviously.
I think I need a picture of this haircut.
When I was little I had beutiful long blonde hair. My mom thought it would be a good idea to get it cut because she was sick of dealibng with it. So I got the bowl. My head looked like a pumpkin and my hair turned noticably brown instantly. It was aweful.
When I was in high school I decided to get my hair chemically straightened. (Kind of like a reverse perm) My hair did not like it at all. The top layer broke off at bout an inch long and became a mohawk for about a month. Now I just let my hair do what it pleases. Lifes easier that way.
@Katie I’ve considered the chemical straighter before. About half of my hair is curly and half is straight so it gives me an afro halo in the right humidity. Now I’m pretty glad that I didn’t. *shudders*
Loving the stories!! 🙂 Mine is a little different…I hate, & I mean shrieking, scratching, biting, where’s the white jacket hate, people standing in my personal space but out of my field of vision (ie, behind me) & while the whole “look, you can see me in the mirror” thing helps, having my hair cut has got to be the most traumatic experience of my life – I would, seriously, rather have a pap smear every six weeks than have a regular hair trim!
Needless to say my hair – which has always been very thick, very straight & the muddy color of dirty dishwater, is stupidly fucking long and I am way too old to find pleasure in being able to sit on my hair *sigh* & yet, still, the thought of sitting through a hairdressing session long enough to have it cut & styled has me running for my own prescription pad (if only they wouldn’t jail me for that!?!. The kids and hubby simply refer to me as “the crazy, hippy cat lady – without the cats” 😀
In short, my worst hair cut, is that I won’t 😛
@Angie I think we’re related. No, I think we are. I effing HATE getting my hair done. There is NOTHING more torturous than having to go to the salon and PAY someone to cut my hair for 59 hours.
GAH.
Ha! You bring up a very good point, I had forgotten about the whole “having to PAY to be tortured” thing! Perhaps we should look through our family trees for intrepid travelers – I’m on the other & underside of the globe 🙂
@Angie Ben’s grandparents on the other side of his family are on your end of the globe. The underside of it. But I am not, by blood, of course, related to them. They do rule, though.
good lord! you have 153 comments!
@Emily. Most of them are me replying to comments in the comments.
So after havung had hair from my sholders to my hips and back up again, I decided that it was hot, and I was miserable during one Florida summer. I wen to the lady who had cut my hair as a baby, and gave her a picture of what I wanted it to look like. It ened up nothing like that, because for some reason ( my formerly stright as a pin hair in childhood) hair decided it was curly. So I had a layered curly bob type thing. But it looked great, and I rocked that haircut until it grew down to my sholders, and was sort of shaggy, and I had a job interview.
So I went back to the same lady, and said to do it just like she had last time, but did not bring a picture. I ended up with a weird pageboy blob of curls that was super fluffy.
I hated it with a violent passion, and was about 2 seconds from shaving it all off, job interview or no. Instead, I broke out the scissors, and cut off some of the under layers, which helped the fluff.
But it still was awful, and as it grew out I developed ear tails, like a bad manga. I’ve finally gotten it long enough to try to do something with it, but I’m terrified to try.
Maybe I should just go for the lesbian look.
I have had short hair pretty much my whole life, while my sisters grew up with long, silky hair. What prompted my mom to chop mine off at a very young age were all the comments about “why is that little girl wearing a wig?” Plus I was white blonde at the time, so I looked like a marilyn-monroe-wannabe baby.
My hair is crazy thick, ash blonde, and grows about twice the normal rate. So not kidding about that. I grew my hair out once, exactly once. Just because I said I would. For one year. I got it all cut back off on a year to the day that I said that. And had a nine inch ponytail to show for it, having come from a head of hair that was totally shaved off in the back. All told, it grew about eleven inches in that year…
I have always been adventurous with my short hair, mostly because I have two big advantages when it comes to trying new styles. 1) If I hate it I have to wait maybe two weeks before it grows into something entirely different. And 2) my hair is not only thick but coarse, and will not hold either perms or colour for more than the same two weeks. There is no real terror involved when you know nothing is permanent. So I have had super-short cuts, dyed the underside of my hair burgundy, put in pink streaks….was so sad to see those go. I own not a stitch of pink clothing, but put in pink streaks on a whim and totally loved it. It faded out WAY too quickly. I did my sister’s at the same time, and she was praying for hers to go away, as she hated it. Pink totally didn’t work on her. And hers stuck around for months.
Life is so not fair.
Worst haircut involved my cowlicks in front. The hairdresser tried repeatedly to get the front straight….only to have the cowlicks mess it up. She kept cutting and cutting…until I had about an inch left in front. Two days before school pictures. Mmmhmm.
@TeDiouS Damn, that is some wicked fast growing hair, my friend. Mine grows relatively quickly, but nothing quite like that.
I have ringlet, curly as all hell kind of hair, and since my mother’s hair is wavy, childhood was kind of rough. What made it worse was the hair salon our entire family went to claimed to know what they were doing with curly hair. They in fact had no fucking clue, which led to a lot of weird bastardizations of the bob. Then we went to a ‘fancy’ salon (I grew up in a small city) where they gave me a mediocre haircut and sold us some weird expensive hair product that made my hair curl even tighter and made it more poofy. Yeah, that really helped guys. This led to a declaration that I was growing my hair out and to this day a haircut once every couple of years, only when I absolutely have to.
Funny story though, when my hair would grow out, apparently I used to get really worried when women would say, “I would kill for your hair!” because I was still too young enough to really understand it was just an expression, and there was no murderous plot to obtain a toddler/young child’s curly locks.
@Katie When I was in nursing school, we were warned to be VERY careful what to say to children. You know, “it’s just a little stick?” for a blood draw? They’d imagine a little STICK. Like a BRANCH.
So yeah. That made me giggle. You poor kid.
About half a year ago, I decided to redo my blonde highlights. Got out the old ash blonde Nice n Easy hairdye and got ready to dye it (with mum doing it).
HOWEVER… there was a knot. And I got this ash blonde streak. Which has now faded to a white/grey and starts halfway up my head.
I’ve done everything – I even dyed my entire head to try to get rid of it – but it’s still there, mocking me. Being the sort of person that prefers their hair to reach their arse… well, it’s going to take years to get rid of my grey streak. Brilliant.
NEVER EVER giving myself highlights without NITCOMBING my entire head of hair.
I got a horrible haircut by some Polish broad when I lived in Oklahoma. I even brought in a photo!! She didn’t even style it like the chick in the photo. It was supposed to be short, cut close to my head and more slick but she blew it out and it was HORRIBLE. With tip it was $80 and once I got home I knew I had to get it fixed. I went to a different salon and paid $50. It looked cute but was waaaaaaaaaay too short. She had to cut off so much because it was uneven. I called the owner of the first salon and he refused to refund my money. I wanted to stab him.
8th grade picture day. My dad trimmed my bangs, by pulling them into a clump, and then cutting them shorter than he was supposed to anyway.
Short + Crooked = Worst.Bangs.Ever!
(I say that even with my history of having poof bangs in the late 80s/early 90s!)
As one of you lesbian readers, I have to say that I am hurt- deeply hurt- by the disparagement of the mullet in these comments. I am notifying my local chapter of Wymmyn United for the Promotion of Mullets Everywhere (WUPME).
@Sharon I am laughing my ASS off at this one comment. You’re tying someone else for Comment of the Year I’ll have to figure out how to put up the picture to show you. It wasn’t a mullet. No. It really was the universal lesbian haircut of my high school.
Oddly, all the lesbians I know NOW do NOT have this haircut.
Maybe you should should notify your chapter of WUPME to notify my high school that maybe they should mix up their hairstyles.
I can’t talk about it because I think I’m in the middle of one of the worst haircut I’ve ever had…and I PAID for it. It’s not quite as bad as the perm/cut I got before my uncle’s wedding during my freshman year of college where the “stylist” (and I use that term loosely) permed the shit out of my hair and then cut a huge effing chunk out of my way-below-shoulder-length hair. *shudder*. Thanks for bringing up bad memories!
I am actually one of the people who looks best with a pixie cut, but it took me a lot of years to realize it. (And my sister asked not long ago, shortly after my third kid was born and I was officially a “mom person” now, “Have you just accepted that you’re never going have long hair again?” I thought I’d cut my hair for aesthetic reasons, but it turns out I was just giving in to my internal mom-ness.)
When I was in about the 7th grade, I had long, straight hair, about to my armpits. But it was the ’80s, and big hair was cool! So I got some sort of bang-related haircut. I’m not sure what the intention was, but partly because I cannot replicate a hairstyle to save my life, I enede up with mostly long, straight hair, with the exception of the line of hair along the middle of my head. That got curled until the room smelled of burnt hair, then carefully brushed and teased until it stood up mushroom-cloud style, then hairsprayed until it begged for mercy. It was like Marsha Brady hair with a big poofy mohawk in the middle.
Of course, when I was in college, my boyfriend was in a punk band, and I got convinced to get the “girl skinhead” haircut, where you shave everything but the bangs and fringe around your face. So the poofy mohawk wasn’t the last hair mistake I ever made. But hopefully no more for a while.
I’ve never been mistaken for a lesbian (well, actually I’m sure I have, but no one’s said anything about it, and I don’t mind either way); what I get is mistaken for a guy. By people, cashiers, usually, standing right in front of me. And I get it, kind of; they think tall (6 ft in shoes), short hair, deep voice = guy. Here’s the part I don’t get: BOOBS. I got ’em. Quite substantially, in fact. And I don’t dress like a guy, so it’s pretty damn obvious I’ve got ’em, if you actually look at me. (Also: hips.) And, though short, my hair is not cut in a male style; my glasses are not male glasses. My face doesn’t look male. (And, since I just can’t get past it: BOOBS.) Luckily, I just find it amusing.
(Not so much when it happened in 8th grade, when I was going to a summer camp at which I did not want to be; I was bickering with my younger sister, and a counselor, who turned out to be very nice, looked at us and said, “Oh, brother and sister?” And I just looked at her and growled, “WHAT?” And I had long hair then, too. But back then I actually was dressed like a guy–jeans, big t-shirt, denim vest, Chuck Taylors, guys’ hat. It was the Age of Hair Metal. Looking like that, I could easily have been a boy. And I was slouching around with my hands in my pockets and muttering at people, so I really have only myself to blame. And twenty years later, I have an amusing anecdote.)
@MoranChick I think that’s the best part of all the humiliating things that have ever happened to me. I can look back and be like, “well, at least I can tell the Internet and shame myself publicaly AGAIN.”
For Amelia’s little ringlets, lots of conditioner. That will help with tangles. Also, use a wide tooth comb when it’s wet. That will help with frizzies. If it gets really curly, please no brush. That will just cause it to friz worse. Use a little gel, scrunch and go.
My worst cut was a few years ago. I’ve always had below the shoulders length hair and I decided I wanted it short. Back and neck shaved, short. While it looked good, I felt like I had lost my pants. Nekkid, I tell you. Never again and I don’t care how old I get, I’ll put it in a bun at the nape of my neck. (Picturing my grandma here.) 🙂
@Margie *trundles off to store to stock up on conditioner and combs*
My first year of college (you’d think I know better) I decided to cut off all my hair, similar to Princess Diana’s short pixie. My hair is pin straight, so I thought I’d get a perm to add some body. My hair had never held perms in the past, this is what I told the new hairstylist in my new college town. Two hours later, when they turned me around in the chair I had the classic Grandma Bowl Cut & Perm. You know the look, when your Grandma goes to the stylist every week and they fluff up her hair to a curly bowl. Knowing my hair really never held perms, I thought, this is bad, but it will wash out soon. No, that perm was permanent. I ended up having it professionally straightned 6 months later. My hair grows painfully slow. After 3 years later, I started to look normal.
@Angela I’m really thinking I need a perm just for blogging material.
i hear that perms are making a comeback.
ANYWAY, back on topic: bad hair. I have had it. From 6th to 8th grade, I kept trying to get perms, the long spirally kind; they never looked bad, but my hair is such that it WILL NOT hold a curl, no way, no how, so they all fell out within a week. The last one got me $60 worth of free haircuts, however, which in 1990 or so was a good number of haircuts. (Today it would be … er … one.)
In junior high I was going for the heavy metal look–long, wild, unkempt. Since hairspray and huge bangs were The Thing for girls, and I was determined to rebel against anything my peers liked, I eschewed any sort of styling product. It wasn’t a bad time for me, hair-wise, just rather amusing in retrospect, and led to a couple of interesting school pictures. But my hair is kind of weird when it’s long–limp on top, frizzy on the bottom–so it never really did exactly what I wanted. I didn’t get it cut, at all, for probably four or five years.
In high school, I dyed it magenta a couple of times (Manic Panic–remember that stuff? Does it still exist?). Also not a disaster, though I made some … interesting styling choices. (Sides clipped up on the sides of my head, with long strands hanging in front of my face and the back loose, all while magenta–rather anime-ish, though I didn’t know what anime was at the time.) I kind of miss a time when I could dye my hair magenta, though that’s about all I miss about teenage years.
I’m blonde, or I was (now it’s kind of a light brown and BORING AS HELL), and I always, always wanted black hair. So in college I dyed it black, and determined that I was never intended to be a brunette. Every time I walked past a mirror I did a double-take; it looked like I was wearing a hat. I also tried various shades of red, with varying results, but my coloration still wasn’t right for it. It never once occurred to me to go lighter, because I never wanted to be blonde, until post-college I gave in to my stylist who wanted to give me highlights. Now I regularly dye my entire head platinum-blonde, and it really can’t be too pale. Almost white wouldn’t be too light for me. (It also now really can’t be too short.) My natural hair color bores me to tears, no matter how much other people say they like it. I don’t. It’s BORING. I don’t like looking in the mirror and being bored by what I see.
I guess I’ve never had a truly bad haircut (knock on wood), or even a terrible dye job; I’ve just made, well, interesting choices from time to time, and the natural way of my hair doesn’t help things. When I was little my hair tangled at a drop of a hat (which I would wear, coincidentally, to cover the tangles sometimes), and my mother and I frequently fought the great and terrible Hair Wars, in which she would try to undo the matted mess that my entire head had become, and I would resist, because it hurt. Why she didn’t just shave my head and be done with it, I don’t know. (Actually, I do; her mom had made her have short hair when she was little, and she’d hated it, and swore she’d never do that to her own daughter. I think it would have been easier on all concerned if she had.) It wasn’t until I graduated college and moved to Boston and got my hair cut quite short that I learned WHY it tangled so badly; all along my hairline, I have a series of cowlicks that grow straight up, sideways, every way but down like they are supposed to. Who knew? And now I will never, ever have long hair again. I will buzz my own head before growing it out, if there comes a time when I can’t get it professionally cut.
I love reading about everyone’s hair adventures! Sometimes I wish I’d been more adventurous myself, back before I was Professional and Grown Up and all. (Allegedly. I think all this “being grown up” stuff is actually a crock.)
crack me up! your hair as a girl sounds like my daughter’s hair. I wonder if that’s why her hair tangles? cowlicks? hmm…
Come on a had a decade of bad hair I was in High School in the 80’s. Yes the Aqua Net, Permed, Teased to the hilt, big bangs, boofant crap that you Shellacked with the spray. My family will still get out pictures and laugh hysterically at me (while I am there at least) then show any friend that may come by (and they preceed to laugh there ass off). The sad thing is that you can tell by my face in the picture that I’m thinkin “Damn I look fine…sexy beast”. You have given me an idea…MY pictures need to get “lost”
@Tiffany I think that anyone who had that shellacked hair thought that they looked fucking hot.
I was in third grade, perms were all the rage, my sister got one and had hair long enough to have those tight little ringlet kind of thing going on. I wanted the same. My hair was not long enough…I was a blonde Ronald Mc Donald. Shudder!
My mother intentionally gave me boy haircuts throughout my childhood because she “didn’t want to deal with it”. I’m not sure why it didn’t bother her that her little girl was being called a boy all the time, but it certainly scarred me for life. Now anything above the shoulders is a boy haircut on me.
@Susan Isn’t that weird how mothers were like that? A bunch of people I know had mothers who said the same thing. My mom ignored me mostly, so she didn’t say much about my hair. Except to cut my AWESOME bangs.
When I was a freshman in high school I dyed my hair black. When it started growing out, I looked like a skunk because back then my hair was that pale pale blond and it just looked white next to the black. After awhile of that I decided I was over it and went to get my hair stripped. I JUST wanted the black out, I planned to do purple next – woo! Anyway, I specifically told the woman: NO HAIR CUT. She did it anyway! I was mortified… I had to actually DO my hair in the morning! I didn’t even own a brush. I had to wear barrettes! It wasn’t SO bad (looking back) but I have had my hair cut by a “professional” exactly ONCE since then.
@Jenn What shocks me is how I have yet to have someone give me an awful haircut. I think I’m due for someone to chain me to a stylist chair and give me a permed mullet or something. Fuck, man.
Aunty Becky,
I love you and your blog. You’ve made me laugh and/or cry almost daily for several months now. Today I decided to de-lurk and tell you about the haircut I got when I was about 13.
I was a chubby child and had lost some weight so my mother who is, er, thrify in the extreme, allowed me to get a cool haircut, a Sassoon. It was the late sixties and this wasn’t just any bob but a designer one. It was cool, with layers and an off-center part and long bangs. No complaints. I was right in style, for about 20 minutes, until it grew enough for a trim. My mother (see thrifty above) decided she could do it. Long story short, I had a boy haircut with, I kid you not, 1″ bangs (which had started longer but got “evened out” until they were barely on my forehead). I had the worst haircut in Disneyland, where we went on vacation the next week. I know because I spent the entire vacation obsessing about it.
@Yvonne your bangs make me want to cry. Mine were really REALLY huge bangs. Not poofy, but like, started at the back of my neck and went to my eyelashes.
But never short. You poor dear.
Wow, I get too busy to look at my reader for a few days and your whole blog has changed! Very purty, I especially like the reply feature you’ve got going.
My one and only perm made me look more like a brillo pad than a lesbian, but it had a similar affect: no guys came near me at all. In fact, some of my friends appeared to not want to be seen with me in public, too. Hell, I didn’t want to be with me in public.
Did I mention I didn’t perm my bangs? Just the rest of my hair. Tight, spiral curls (not what I asked for), super straight bangs that went straight against my head.
@Katie I kind of didn’t want to be near me in public either. I looked like a brillo pad once my hair started to grow in.
Loves it.
And the threaded comments? FULL of The Awesome. Although it makes me look like I’m WAY more popular than I actually am.
Aww Aunt Becky everyone has bad hair every now and then, I got a cut once and she cut my bangs WAY WAY WAY too short I looked in the mirror and cried hysterically right there in the salon, and then I cried all the way home I called my mom and she thought I killed someone with my car it was crazy!
I am so glad those bangs are gone and gone for good
@daisy I will never, ever get bangs ever, ever again. Ever. Ever. Ever. Growing those puppies out again was too much work.
Oh good God. Where to begin?
When I was a kid my parents always made sure I had boy cuts (cause I wasn’t fond of having my hair brushed), which meant I spent a lot of time yelling at confused old ladies, “I’m not a boy, I’m a girl!”
As a teenager I sported a couple of very sad spiral perms.
When I was in college I rocked the lesbian short spiky cut.
Once a hairdresser cut my hair while it was side-parted and I could never get it to part in the exact same place again . . .
And then there was the time my mom dyed my hair for me and it came out fire engine red.
If I actually think about it, I’m sure I could come up with more.
I so wish I had a digital copy of the photo my stepdad took of me post haircut at the hands of my evil older sister. Age thirteen, awkward as hell, braces, super curly hair cut up to my earlobes, and bangs. Bangs, I tell you! To this day she giggles maniacally at the thought.
I was 9. My mother was in the hospital for several weeks. I repeat… I WAS 9.
My bangs had gotten so long they were hanging in my eyes, so I decided, I was a big girl, Dad had enough to worry about, I didn’t need anyone else to trim my bangs for me, NUH-UH. So I carefully put a piece of Scotch tape over my bangs, making sure that the bottom edge skimmed just over my eyebrows just as my mother always did and I… cut the hair at the top edge of the tape.
I looked like Illya Kuryakin from Man from U.N.C.L.E. I cried. I think my father nearly cried. He said, “How am I going to take you to the hospital to visit your mother now! She’s gonna KILL me!”
Thankfully, no photographic evidence of the crime exists.
Dude i have no comments for that iphone cover and because I really like you I will try this- dude one of those doodads will so fall off and may become a choking hazard, so yeah I would suggest maybe something else. Not because of the hiddeous factor, but you know for other stuff 😉
@mountainmomma That may be the best thing that anyone COULD say about the stupid cover. It’s AWFUL, I know. And I LOVE it.
I used to cut my bangs with the little scissors on my Swiss army knife. And that was better than when my mom cut my hair! My brother had the choice of my mom or me cutting his hair, so after seeing my hair he chose me. At least I practiced on the dog first, so his wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Except the fact that I nicked his ear off accidentally.
@Ann AAAACK! Now I’m shuddering at the thought! This is why I don’t go NEAR the kids to cut their fingernails. ACK!
I decided at 16 that “SUN IN” was a fabulous thing. It wasn’t enough that i had a bad haircut from the cheap hair salon. I had to “highlight” it. If a little is good, a lot is better. So, not just Sun In, but Sun In with HEAT would be best. Spritz, spritz, Vrrrrrrr…
Bright, Brassy Yellow Hair, cut Old Lady Short. It looked Bad.
The stupid football jock in front of me said “it looks like you dyed your hair with cat pee”.
whatever. just turn your pimply shaved head back around and go back to sleep you jerk.
Once i got a job (a real job), I paid well for nice haircuts and color and have ever since. I always spend more on my hair than makeup or clothes. Thinking back, I wonder if that moment had something to do with it. interesting.
My story is boringly (I think I just made up a word) similar to yours. I have super thick hair but I really wanted a cute little Pixie cut. First I cut it kinda short and that looked bad, then a little shorter and that looked bad. Noticing a trend??? Unfortunately at 15 I did not notice said trend and went Pixie short and then spent my entire sophomore and part of junior year getting back to normal hair.
@Carrie What shocks me is how long it took for it to grow back!
At 16 I shaved my head for the first time. It’s been almost 5 years now, and I have to admit I’ve been itching to it again.
Nothing feels quite as free as the wind on your scalp in a convertible when you’re 16 years old. *sigh*
@Angie I imagine that feels tremendous.
Oh yeah I’ll join the club. I got one of those dreaded “boy” haircuts in High School. Totally BAD move. I looked so awful it wasn’t funny. I don’t think there are any pics of it though.
@Holly I have a LOVELY picture of this up on Facebook. I’d share here if I could figure out how to put it up here. Why not humiliate myself further?
My worst haircut was just recently, and I posted about it on my blog. http://cookienotes.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-haircuts-go-bad.html
Before then, I remember being in grade 2 or 3 and my Mom giving me a home perm. She rolled the curlers too tight. I was wondering why, in class, my hair was coming out in clumps……
You may have a tiny head, but I have a GINORMOUS one, and short haircuts make me look like a fucking furry basketball. And makes me look like a lesbian. I actually DO have a picture of myself in the 9th grade with this horribly short haircut, that my dad’s friend gave me. He was a BARBER not a hairstylist, so….you get the picture.
[…] I Was Almost A Lesbian Once […]
Oh dear Aunt Becky, let me tell you a valuable lesson I learned when I was in my late teens.
I like to experiment with haircolor and have had some really nice looks, some not so nice, but only one that can be considered a disaster.
I have fair skin. Very fair. Ok, I’m so white I am practically transparent and glow in the dark.
I thought it would be a good idea to use black hair dye. Really black. Not dark brown – BLACK. Why did I think this would look good on me?
I looked dead. Makeup made me look like I just returned from my own funeral. It was horrible. When I tried to change colors it turned purple. I then looked like a punk corpse.
Did I forget to mention this was the weekend before senior prom? Yea I looked so good in those pictues…..
@Tabetha Oh you poor thing! Almost no one can pull off black hair! I dyed my hair back to black (which is my natural color) and I looked goth!
I realize that this is an older post and other people have had the same incident, but meh whatevs. I was in the Air Force and had long brown beautiful hair. Some people mentioned I should go black and I imagined awesome shiny black. Instead I got creepy “I hate the world” goth girl black. The next day I was getting a promotion in front of my entire squadron and my commander a.k.a. the big cheese of my Air Force unit decided to call me Airman Elvira. After this people frequently sent me pictures of said lady of darkness and even suggested that I try to become the new Elvira since she’s old as crap now. I immediately spent 200$ to have a professional bleach my hair and burn my poor poor scalp, only to have her redye it a shade of brown that wasn’t remotely close to my original color. I will never dye my hair again.