Pandemic hair: Flamboyant cuts that mean never having to say you’re sorry
Neglected heads pushing some to bold styles they wouldn’t otherwise try
By the time I turned 40, certain things in my life had become indisputably clear: I would never pitch an all-star game with the New York Yankees.
I would never achieve fame lip syncing the entire first side of Bob Seger’s “Stranger In Town.”
And as a visit to my barber revealed shortly after the turn of the millennium, I would soon become, yikes, bald.
“Your mullet is about to become a skullet!” I was told before the traumatic decision was made to chop off the remaining locks cascading down my neck like loose strands of spaghetti.
“You’ll be a ringer for Larry Fine from The Three Stooges.” Larry who?
Off it came. And as what little hair remained continued to thin in the years since, I entered the current pandemic with the confidence of a swaggering goliath.
Barber shops were closed. Hairstylists too. And as the general population entered a hirsute, “Tom-Hanks-in-‘Cast Away’” phase, I laughed.
For people like me — heads smooth as a Criscoed frying pan — it was business as usual: do nothing until enough tiny scraps appear, then mow them with an electric clipper like a slew of recalcitrant weeds. But somewhere between Easter Monday and Mother’s Day, something shifted: the losers became winners, buzz cut catastrophes became triumphant expressions of personal identity.
And as hair salons and barbers reopen throughout most of the province, a new vision has taken hold.
Behold Pandemic Hair: the flamboyant crown-topper that means never having to say you’re sorry.
“Is this going to be a blip in our lives, or a real revolution?” ponders local author Susan Fish, who scissored her scalp in a valiant attempt to extricate all traces of red hair dye.
“I see it as life and culture changing, really and truly a disruption: how we travel, work, eat out, go to church.
“It’s a really humanizing thing — a fresh start.”
She’s bold. She’s beautiful. She’s the new Susan Fish. And after using her head-topping rebirth to raise $500 for charity, she has no regrets.
“Your smile pops! Your eyes pop!” she notes of the renewed emphasis on facial features.
“This is something I actually wanted to embody — a sea change. Not an attempt to look 27, but as a self-expression. I see it as an art installation with my own hair.”
She laughs. “I was afraid I would look like a potato.”
So enthusiastic was she that when her 20-year-old son arrived home to self-isolate after a year away, he announced that he too would shave his locks.
“For most of my life I’ve had long curly hair,” confides John Fish, who buzzed his head to five centimetres in a 48-minute Instagram feed that raised $1,000 for charity. “This was an opportunity for me to see, as an adult, what I look like.” And — more to the point — to see if he could score a lucrative Hollywood movie deal.
“You think you’ll shave your head and realize you look like Matt Damon,” he jokes.
“But it’s a pipe dream — no Hollywood agents have come knocking on the door about my shaved head.”
He laughs. “I look a bit like a military guy — the prototypical buzz head.”
If there’s an irony, it’s that not only were there no Hollywood agents, but even the people who know him barely noticed a difference.
“Initially it felt like a big lifealtering thing,” confides Fish, noting his head feels cooler on his pillow.
“But it hasn’t changed anything. Nobody had strong opinions on it.”
Not so for Kitchener’s Chris Steingart, whose pandemic poof gives him an Alec Baldwin-meets-Woody Woodpecker vibe that cries out for attention.
“Two weeks before everything shut down in March, I needed a haircut,” confides the website designer with an amusingly Seinfeldian eye for detail.
“It seemed like everyone was well coiffed going into the pandemic and on their cycle. But I was stretching things at five or six weeks already.”
He laughs. “I had a giant helmet of hair.”
So he did the only thing he could: set up a chair in his garage, enlisted his wife and revved up his clippers, leaf blower and garden hose for two hilarious videos posted on Instagram.
“It was fairly low-risk,” he admits. “The difference between a good and bad haircut is about two weeks.”
Pleased with the short back and sides and feeling five pounds lighter, he hasn’t looked back.
“Bald is cool,” he notes of COVID’s most popular hairstyles. “So is looking like a lumberjack. And having gouges in your head from getting your hair cut by your wife.”
He sighs contentedly. “I’m a creature of habit. I just go with what works.”