I’ve always had a lot of thick hair. Wasn’t always so curly—I can thank puberty for that—but since birth, let’s just say that I’ve had much more hair that the average Joe…or Jen.
I’m lucky to have been seeing the same stylist for over 20 years now. (Of course, we were both only five when we started, but that’s for a different column.) He knows my hair and can tame it even in the middle of the humid summers of Baltimore.
Sometimes, though, I’ll ask him to leave it longer because, I don’t know, I guess I temporarily lose my mind or something. Recently, I did just that. He took a couple of inches off, and it looked good at the shop.
Fast forward a couple of days later. The summer humidity hits, and I realize that my hair is too long. It’s flopping down, and I feel like I’m looking most like a female, brown-haired Bozo the Clown. So I decide to call my stylist—he never has a problem shearing off a little more.
Then I realize he’s out of town.
Oh. My. God…
I know that he’s got tons of customers, and even though he was only going out of town for a week or so, when he comes back, they are going to be lining up to, as some of us say in Baltimore, “Get their hair did.”
So I did what any normal, grown woman would do…
I cut it myself.
I know! I know! You don’t have to tell me. “Don’t ever cut your own hair!”
But, sometimes I trim my bangs when they get too long. So, I thought, I can probably just trim a bit off the top of my hair to get out some of the heaviness of it, right?
Right?
Um, wrong.
I cut the top of my hair. Then I felt like I had to fix it, so I cut the entire top layer of my hair shorter.
While it eased up the heaviness of the top of my hair, it caused the next layers to look too far away from the top. I now looked like I had the ears of a cocker spaniel hanging down on the sides of my head.
Great. I went from Bozo to looking like a fuzzy dog.
Sigh…
I called Brandon, another friend of mine, who happens to be a hair stylist.
I told him what I did, and then said, “Can you fix it?”
Instead of giving me a virtual consoling hug via a Facebook message, he replied, “It depends how bad you messed it up.” Then he added, “I’ll do my best.”
Ugh…I didn’t expect to end up bald, but I was a bit freaked out how it would turn out.
Brandon came over the next night. He looked at my hair. He began to take small pieces in his fingers so that he could see how mangled it was.
“What did you cut this hair with?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Scissors.” I said. What did he think I meant? A knife? A hacksaw? A razor blade?
“I guessed that,” he said. “What kind of scissors?”
I began to think that these were trick questions…
“Um, I don’t know. The scissors I keep upstairs.”
“Were they crafting scissors?” he asked.
I soon discovered that many folks evidently have various kinds of scissors for different tasks. There are scissors to cut paper, scissors to make crafts, scissors to trim your dog’s hair, and none of these—I REPEAT—none of these were made to cut my hair.
Or so says Brandon. Of course he does. His scissors, I found out, were professional. They cost hundreds of dollars.
But would they be able to fix my hair?
Tune in to my next column to find out…
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not beating herself up for cutting her own hair, writes “Wojo’s World® from Baltimore.