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They say you should never go shopping on an empty stomach. Really, you should never book a haircut when you have a broken heart. One moment of weakness and, before you know it, all that you have to show for months of personal growth is a pile of hair, soon to be swept away.
Of course, that’s exactly the appeal of a drastic haircut while feeling low: the promise of a fresh start. The unfortunate paradox is that it never seems more like a good idea than when we are not quite in our right minds.
A spur-of-the-moment big chop is as much a pop culture trope as the post-breakup binge on chocolate or chardonnay, signifying at best dissatisfaction and at worst emotional devastation. Examples abound across drama and comedy, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and PEN15 to The Newsroom, Empire Records and Seinfeld.
Recently, the third season of Emily in Paris opened with our plucky young Chicago marketing executive moping over a lost love and deciding to switch up her coiffure. The trailer made much of the import of this, with Lily Collins’s character (above) solemnly intoning: “This is the hardest decision I have ever had to make. This is just something I have to do” – then cutting herself a fringe. Her friend Mindy refers to them as “trauma bangs”.
Cutting a fringe is a seemingly small change with vast power to transform – but it can also give you something to hide behind. My colleague, Morwenna, a fan of Happy Valley (who isn’t?), was struck by the fringes of Sergeant Catherine Cawood and her sister, Claire, whose thick curtains seem to grow with every new plot twist, giving a new meaning to “trauma bangs” – sometimes a response to it, and sometimes a shield.
I myself have an appointment with my wonderful hairdresser Katie this evening and – one week after sadly pressing pause on a relationship that I’d hoped (and still hope) would go differently – I’m having to resist the temptation to request an ear-grazing bob, or to go bleach-blonde. Or brunette, maybe! It is a troubling insight into my state of mind that my current chief hair inspo is Portia from The White Lotus: not one exactly defined by her good judgment.
In Judy Blume’s novel Deenie, the title character cuts her own hair while crying. Luke Wilson’s character Richie shaves his head to the sound of Elliott Smith in The Royal Tenenbaums. Britney Spears was widely mocked for, seemingly spontaneously, cutting her hair off in 2007. Now that we understand what she was being subjected to, it makes a certain kind of sense as an attempt at self-liberation.
The best example of this in comedy is of course Fleabag’s second season, when Fleabag’s sister Claire – married to a boor, stepmother to a weirdo and crushing on her sexy Scandi colleague – acts on her unhappiness at the hairdresser’s, and ends up looking “like a pencil”. What follows is Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brilliant “Hair is everything” speech.
A radical haircut signals a desire for change, a declaration to be different from now on – an especially attractive proposition when you are feeling stuck or powerless in other areas of your life.
That’s not an option for me tonight: I already have a fringe – and let me tell you, in terms of commitment, it’s that not far down from a pet. Only after 20 years do I feel I am coming close to understanding it – a bit like understanding oneself, really. No, in light of all this, I’m steeling myself to ask Katie for just a trim – you know, to get rid of the dead ends.
• This article was amended on 10 February 2023 because an earlier version referred to the second season of Emily in Paris when the intended reference was to the third season.
