My thousand dollar haircut

In my office, I am in charge of making sure we have enough fun things to do. When I say this, I mean it literally: in my job description, my duties are parcelled out by percentages...25% of these duties, 10% these, etc. A full five percent is dedicated to leading the office "pep squad" (can't stand the name, but someone came up with that and it just stuck, as bad names have a tendency to do); the idea being, I think, that when I am around, I make things better. People are happier, or more relaxed, or comfortable - or so folks say, on occasions numerous enough to make me accept it as, if not true, then at least, a truism.

It seems easy enough to come up with ideas to make people happy, but once you start considering budgets and personal schedules and other time constraints, you realize finding free-ish, fun things easily done in short chunks of time isn't as easy as it sounds. I was relieved when a co-worker presented an offer: the upscale stylist who cuts her hair had a sort of life-changing experience and wanted to "give back" by offering twelve free haircuts to our office.

His philosophy was interesting: he uses scissors and water, nothing else. Basically believes that all hair, once cut properly, would always look its best without blow-drying, products or styling. Air dry = natural, yet chic and sexy, beauty.

Well, being a wash & wear type woman from little-girlhood on up, this sounded perfect. I have always hated styling my hair, so much so that I don't do it. I mean, I will, when forced - like Vegas, an opera or a wedding, and even then it's always sort of lame, and half-done looking, because I really don't know HOW to do it - because I never do it, you see.

When I was a kid, long hair was the thing for little girls, which I hated because it tangled and was often in the way. On my first trip away from my parents (flew back east to visit the grandparents one summer), I got it all cut off. My best friend was getting her hair trimmed, and I begged her mother to make me appointment too. "Cut it all off," I said. The alarmed mother kept saying, "Are you SURE your mother would let you do this?" I assured her it was okay, and then simply never mentioned it when my mother called to check in. Eventually, Mom passed me when picking me up in the airport because she didn't recognize me. She was horrified but I was free.

So, this haircut off was like a dream come true. I did my homework, of the sake of my co-workers: I spoke to his assistant (wife, actually), reviewed him on Yelp, checked out his website. His reviews were glowing. In fact, too glowing. My expectations were raised to the point where I assumed this cut could not only take 15 pounds off my figure and make me 5 inches taller but I started to expect it would actually increase my salary, fix my car's mild oil leak and help me digest.

It wasn't just the fancy schmancy website and raving Yelp reviews, but the price: his regular price was $300 - $1000. Yes, that's $1000. Now, I don't know what constitutes a $1000 haircut, nor why there was such a wide range (I mean, what could the $700 difference consist of?), but I really wanted to find out. Granted, this cut would be at an office (so, if there was a fancy salon somewhere, I'd never see nor appreciate any excessive overhead, including any expensive receptionist, fine wine and handcrafted shampoos), but still, I assumed a lot of the price was, in fact, the skill. However, I was getting it for free, so what the hell.

Today was the cut. The stylist was as I might have imagined - very focused, all dressed in black and, ironically I suppose, bald. We discussed my parameters. Usually I get stylists a free hand, but I'm trying to grow my hair out so I had many limitations, one of which was that I like my bangs short. They were long because I was way behind on haircuts, and he was dead against my bangs. It's all about my face, he said, especially my eyes, and especially my eyebrows. My eyebrows were the thing that everyone should be looking at, he felt. I mean, OK, I have bold brows, but I don't know about that. (I will say, he did something no one else has ever done, which was he trimmed my brows. I mean, I trim my brows so they aren't bushy or anything but I guess he had a thing for brows. Mine anyway.)

However, since I do in fact have bangs, he was stuck with them. One of the facts about the oft-desired and yet elusive transformative haircut is that you cannot make hair longer during a cut. You have to start with what exists in reality.

My stylist gamely went to work, keeping in mind my abundant parameters - some of them even kind of conflicting. I really did give him confusing directions and expected him to just somehow magically transform them into a terrific cut that was both totally life changing and yet somehow left 95% of the length I was trying to keep. It was an impossible task.

He managed to do it, though. OK, so it wasn't exactly life changing. In fact, quite a few people who KNEW I was getting my haircut - remember, there were 12 of us, so it was like "Haircut Day" at the office - didn't even realize when they saw my "after," mistaking it for a "before." But I felt the difference. I saw it. I had blah overgrown hair and then sexy cute bouncy hair.

At first, I wondered why my co-workers didn't notice, but then I realized it's part of a larger phenomenon I've observed, which is: we care so much about our appearance, but really the people who love us don't really see the outside - they see the inner person. Trite but true. And the people who don't love us don't really give a shit about how we look. I'm pretty well liked at work, so I assume people just saw the person they already know and love - if they never noticed my embarrassing uneven hair, why expect them to notice my kicky edgy hair?

In a way, this is nice, since it means no one will judge me really, on my appearance. It also is a bit of a bummer, because when your appearance is GOOD, you want some judgement, some positive judgement.

Then again, I am also the only person that walks around the office barefoot all the time, and so there's another possibility: I've been written off as a bit of a freak, rather outside the appearance good/bad continuum. With my gap tooth and clothes that migrate from funky to frumpy and my total lack of self-consciousness in my behavior which leads me to do things like sing out loud in the hallways, I'm out of all the normal continuums for judgement. Which is actually just the way I like it.

So, was it worth $1000? No. $300? Oh, maybe. But really the point is, for those prices, one natually expects everything to change, which it doesn't. That is, it doesn't if you think the haircut is about what other people will think of you. It's for HOW I think of me. After all, I'm no Meg Ryan or Jennifer Aniston, and when I got home, my partner was just as happy to see me as he would have been if I'd never got the cut.

So, in the end, it was transformative, but only because it reminded me once again of what I tend to forget, what we all tend to forget: it's not how you look but who you are.