Hair Journey 2010-2013

My hair. It changes constantly, every few weeks it seems. Throughout the past three years, I’ve changed my hair so much that my passport photo draws scrutiny and ill-timed compliments at border checkpoints. Fair enough, I look nothing like I once did. This post is a journey, a retelling of my daring in terms of my hair, and a consideration of how it affects my style on a day to day basis. Enjoy!

This is where we begin. In April of 2010, I was coming through a very nasty breakup and weathering the inevitable existential crisis of my senior year of university. I wasn’t eating enough, as you can see in my bony shoulders. But the hair looks great! This is my natural colour, with only the sun to bleach it.

This one is from the day I graduated from University (obviously). My favourite hairstyle for a year was this curled, long, flowing one.

Some days, I wish that I could snap my fingers and go back to this one, even just for an hour. My hair was as close to perfect as I’ve ever gotten it. I spent two years avoiding cuts and conditioning it to get to this point, and unfortunately cut my hair later on for terrible reasons.

I am hoping to get back to this hair once my henna has grown out and my pixie cut has grown out. I could style it so many ways, and the length allowed me to wear it down once I’d washed it and not have to use any heat. I miss it!

This photo is from later in 2010, the night of my parents’ Christmas Party. You can see that it’s grown out since the graduation photo, and this is the longest my hair ever was as an adult.

This is one of my favourite photos of me ever, on the ferry crossing the Strait of Magellan. It’s a little bit hard to see my hair here, but the length is gone and I’ve got ill-advised bangs. It looked best blowing in the wind and mussed up.

The bangs grew out, and I was constrained to use no heat for months when I lived in Puerto Natales. The result? Beautiful body, goofy face.

This is how long my blonde hair got just before I decided to dye it. Having lived in South America as the tallest gringa that side of Puerto Montt, and blonde, and very fair, I’d had it with men’s obsession with my hair. They looked at me differently than other women, they assumed things that weren’t true about me, and they sometimes tried to touch my hair without my permission. All my life, I had been “The Blonde.” I was sick of it. The dye came out. 

My hair is so thick that it took three of us to dye it, two bottles of dye, a trash bag, and a lot of water from the hostel in El Calafate, Argentina.

And this was the result….

I Loved loved loved being brunette! The dye actually smoothed and shined my hair, making it more manageable and making those curls come out naturally. I was in love. This was in July 2011.

August 2011, and my hair was dark and long and had a hippy hair wrap from San Pedro de Atacama. I loved this look.

When I went to work on my ill-attended French after months of speaking Spanish in South America, I lived in Annecy for two months. It was a fantastic opportunity to heal from the confusion and difficulty of the time I spent in the English Opens Doors program, and gave me student life again. I couldn’t have been happier, and I chopped my hair off on a whim one day. The autumn was unseasonably hot, and having long fuzzy locks was more than I could stand. This was the result. 

It was amazing. I loved the colour, the cut. I’ve been chasing this one since then! 

I started curling my bob after a few months, and this soon became my everyday look for working seven days a week. In November and December 2011 I wore it short and red and inverted, with the back of my head shaved.

It was awesome.

While in Korea, my hair stayed pretty much the same. I dyed it every month with a mixture of red and mahogany henna, imported from the US. The colour was bright and ever changing!

In November 2012, I dyed my hair with henna for the last time. I didn’t know it at the time, but I began growing my blonde out again after this fantastic dye job. It’s still clinging on almost seven months later.

My pallor was also incredible while I lived in Korea, mostly because I almost never saw daylight hours during the winter. It made Korean women envious, but made me look like a ghost. As our trip to India approached, I got more and more itchy to cut my hair off. All of it. O-F-F Off, cut it off. The day after my contract in Korea ended, I went to the Green Turtle in Itaewon. When I showed the stylist the picture of the cut I wanted, he simply said, “No,” and walked away to compose his fabulous self. He came back eventually and said, “Are you sure? Are you SURE?” Then he began cutting and shocked his coworkers with my transformation. My boyfriend loved it so much that he went around proclaiming that I am his girlfriend all through the streets to the pub! This is how it looked the next morning.

My hair has not been this short since I was born. It’s edgy and stylish and on trend, I guess. Also, it’s easy. I mush my hands through my hair with some wax in the morning and boom! Finished. This is what it looked like the other day when I got it cut in central London.

And As of today, 3 May 2013, this is my hair.

It’s been a long and awesome three years!