There are certain places I get anxious about visiting, where an expert is going to tell me what I'm doing wrong or point me in some informed direction. As in, I avoid the dentist because I fear what they are going to say about my teeth (don't do this, but I understand). I try not to make eye contact with personal trainers at the gym because I don't want to hear about my form or why I should do burpees [1] (I'm fine with my current routine, thank you). The one place that never makes me feel this way is the salon.
As a child, at those first forays into real haircuts, I loved sitting in the salon chair to experience the first time a stylist ran their fingers through my hair. "Wow, you have such nice hair!" They would stroke my head, play around with my locks, tussle it about. I could appreciate feeling like a prized pet.
I had some ups and downs with my hair persona [3] in my teenage years with hard-to-style bobs and that weird era when we all wore too many butterfly clips and colored rubber bands. I went through an obsessive phase of needing to slick back any and all flyaways, which made me look bald in photos. Still, amidst these experimentations of style, I had those salon moments that helped me to fully appreciate the hair I was born with.
"Do you color your hair?" Nope. This blonde is all me.
"Does everyone in your family have hair like this?" Pretty much. I come from a long line of thick-haired people with loose waves. Both of my grandmothers had and have plenty of hair late into life.
"Do you do anything to your hair?" I shampoo and condition it, usually every day, and I don't even own a brush. No heaps of product or hours of styling, my hair is pretty good to me without intervention.
What truly became my signature hair happened when I moved away from home. It was the Summer after my first year in art school, my closest friends and I all happened to get haircuts with blunt bangs [4]. It's one of those things many of us try, regret, and then grow back out. My friends quickly went through that journey. Not me. I felt like I found my perfect look. It worked well when I was three years old and it worked well at 20. The more I grew, moving across the country, experiencing extreme heartache, getting new jobs, the more the consistency of my hair felt powerful: long wavy hair and blunt bangs.
The look came into popularity for moments and faded. Zooey Deschanel [5] had the look, and because we share the same name it was weird for a time, I wondered if people thought I was emulating the New Girl star too much, but still I held strong in my hair identity. Years after having the look — air-dried waves and short blunt bangs — I'd still get complimented on my tried-and-true, low-maintenance hair (all it takes is a quick comb through the bangs and a twice-monthly bathroom trim). Even eight years later, as the blonde is fading into an extra-dirty blonde that's nearly all brown, I fully own my signature hairstyle.