As a seasoned catastrophizer, I was stunned when the pandemic caught me unaware.
“How could I have missed this?” I wondered. I’ve tried to make up for it ever since by being ultra-cautious. So cautious that I canceled my hair appointment before the salons were closed.
Unlike friends who entered lockdown with a fresh color and cut, I was already six weeks overgrown.
For a while, no problem. “I kind of like it longer,” I declared. “Maybe I’ll even like it gray.” That lasted about two weeks.
Then I started hating my long stringy self on Zoom and decided to take matters into my own hands. My daughter-in-law, a salon owner, loaned me some scissors and yelled bang-cutting instructions from her front porch. “Do not cut them straight across,” she warned. Instead, I dutifully sectioned them off, held them in the air and cut from two different angles. Snip…snip…snip… Not bad!
“Maybe,” I told myself, “I could do more.” And decided to search Amazon for my own equipment: scissors for cutting and thinning, hair clips, and a sectioning comb. How hard could this be?
Apparently others had the same idea. It was three weeks before all the parts and pieces arrived from various vendors. Even then, I let them sit a few days before taking the plunge.
This was due in part to a history of bad hair trauma – my daughter reminding me what I’d once done to her bangs, my older son recalling the rush to a barber after I’d “evened up” his curly hair out on the screen porch. Seated beneath an honest-to-God deer head, he’d lost his girlish locks that afternoon to a buzz cut.
But by Sunday, I could wait no longer. Ever the multi-tasker, I decided I would take on the self-cut during the prayerful ambience of online church.
“If it turns out well,” I promised myself, “I will even appear at the online coffee hour.”
Newspaper instructions made it look easy. Pull it all up to the top of your head in a giant ponytail, and whack! Unfortunately, that works for long hair but not a short layered look. Instead, I’d have to discover a million or so same-length sections and shorten each one.
So with my laptop on one side of the bathroom and a large towel covering the sink, I vowed to capture each section of same-length hair with a clip, lift it with the comb and trim off a quarter inch.
This seemed consistent with my stylist’s usual question, “So about a quarter inch?” to which I had always replied yes. How could anything go wrong?
The answer turned out to be “the mirror.” While I could possibly have succeeded in cutting someone else’s hair with that method, it was a whole different story cutting my own.
I’d pull up a section with the comb, come at it with the scissors, and somehow be either in front of the hair or in back of it – but never right on it – with the blades.
By the time online church was offering the meditational music of a French horn player, I had tossed the comb, grabbed the hair, and was starting to ram hanks of it between scissor blades and squeeze. It was hit or miss, with jubilation so high when I actually got hair between blades that I whacked regardless of how much. Inch-long hunks of blonde flew past.
Once the left -hand side was shorter, I covered up the hacked appearance with longer strands, then traveled to the right in a long-familiar effort to “even up.” This reminded me that even my own stylist had squinted and snipped and measured here, with better results. But by this time, I just said “Good enough” and quit before I had to even up again, then attacked the top with the thinning shears.
To their credit, my daughter, daughter-in-law and stylist were all merciful when I messaged the picture from my phone, and I went straight to the online coffee hour.
Still, I hope this will be my only foray into the tricky world of selfie haircuts. For anyone who can’t wait till salons open, only one piece of sure-thing advice: Put a very large towel in your bathroom sink.
2020 Copyright Pat Snyder
