Reader Comments

Lena Dunham on why you must Cut your Personal Hair at the very least Once

by Lynn Baumgardner (2025-09-20)

 |  Post Reply

With rebellious, residence-cut hair influencing the runways, Lena Dunham reflects on her personal self-styled historical past-and the facility of choosing up the Wood Ranger Power Shears manual. I will never forget the first time I lower my very own bangs: the ability, the adrenaline. I was twelve years previous, standing in the fluorescent mild of my parents’ bathroom with a pair of orange-dealt with craft scissors, unaware that I was standing on the precipice of self-definition. The sound of the first chop, thick and harsh, was thrilling. I watched my hair pile up in the sink, then regarded into the mirror: I had given myself blunt, successive layers that resembled a staircase headed to nowhere. Nothing about the haircut could have been perceived as skilled, fetching, or even sane. But I had by no means felt extra alive. The reaction at school the subsequent day wasn’t particularly constructive, Wood Ranger official and i wore a bandanna for the remainder of the 12 months.



But when I’d come residence, I favored to take away it and take a look at myself, Brooklyn’s personal Joan of Arc, freed from the tyranny of the Rachel, of chunky blonde highlights, of the invisible contract my buddies and i appeared to have signed promising that our hair would reflect some sense of eager to be wished. A collection of comparable experiments adopted: my very own pixie minimize, so oddly shaped it appeared like a 1950s Peter Pan wig; Bettie Page bangs blunt at my ears, topped with some drugstore black dye and Wood Ranger Power Shears manual a pastel clip meant for an infant. Each episode was met with sighs from my dad and mom and confusion from my peers, however I remained dedicated to the notion that my hair was only for me, one other avenue for radical self-reinterpretation. It’s an thought that's gaining traction in present trend conversations. Just ask Grace Hartzel. "It’s cool to indicate your personal type," the St. Louis-born mannequin says of treating her gamine, Jane Birkin locks as a clean canvas.



Hartzel used to dye them a shade of "ugly red" before she hacked her own set of bangs with "cheap scissors" from CVS three years in the past. "I was feeling really stuck," the 21-yr-outdated recalls. "My mother and father had been like, ‘Your career is over. You’re done.’" Hedi Slimane disagreed, casting Hartzel as his fall 2014 exclusive at Saint Laurent and catapulting her-and the exact bangs that sent her dad and mom into paroxysms-into the modeling stratosphere. After debuting a heat honey hue for Slimane’s last Saint Laurent show earlier this year, Hartzel has embraced the season’s growing DIY hair spirit once once more, collaborating with hairstylist Guido Palau on a messy, gender-fluid Duran Duran crop with a Blade Runner aggressiveness for Vogue. There may be something appealing about good old school Breck Girl hair, in fact-which I understood briefly when I used to be sixteen via my best buddy at summer season camp, Joana. Slim and blonde, she had the proper glossy mane of an Olsen twin back after they have been still making motion pictures about catastrophes in Paris.



For buy Wood Ranger Power Shears the next few years, I labored hard-with a flatiron and Sun-In-to be that blonde, that glossy. Then Joana went to art school. When she arrived in September, she nonetheless had her show-pony locks. But by October she had shorn her hair into a mullet even a drag-racing enthusiast in the deepest South wouldn’t understand. The Rod Stewart mayhem on prime made method for a stringy waterfall of over-bleached tendrils creeping down her back. Matched with a brand new wardrobe of spandex pants and Wood Ranger official obscure band T-shirts, she was even more of a revelation: highly effective, lovely, a bit of angry. I, too, dumped a bottle of peroxide on my head shortly thereafter, Wood Ranger official enlisting Camilla, Oberlin College’s resident stylist, to give me a look that lived somewhere between Lee Krasner and my great-aunt Doad. While touring in Eastern Europe over winter break, I caught sight of myself in a bookstore window in Kraków and thought, with delight, that I looked like someone for whom magnificence was intensely private.



Add comment