What it means when a woman cuts her hair?

Why Girls Who Cut Their Hair Are Actually Cutting Off So Much More

There are few girls who would dare to deny this universal truth transcendent among women of all ages residing across the seemingly infinite expanse of the universe: There is no material possession in our lives rich with greater substance than our HAIR.

I don’t care if its length surpasses the curve of your waist or if it’s razor-cut and asymmetrical.

Whether it spirals into a dizzying array of curls or hangs straight like two silken curtains is irrelevant.

It doesn’t matter if it’s wildly red, bleached and toned, dyed to the perfect pastel-cotton-candy pink or dark as a raven soaring through the night, our hair tells the world who we are, without us having to utter a word.

When a woman takes a moment to reflect back on the colorful story of her life, each chapter will be defined by the diverse myriad of hairstyles she rocked within each specific decade, exploded moment and passionate love affair.

“Hair holds so much more energy than most of us are aware of. Some women use it as a security blanket whose purpose is to shield and protect, while others use it as a secret weapon to tease and entice,” enthused Owen Gould, a celebrity hairstylist who has styled the tresses of everyone from Jessica Alba to Björk to Karlie Kloss to Kate Hudson, amid a mid-afternoon deep and heated dialogue with myself about the powerful connection between hair and identity.

“It can be used as a statement, an air of strength, a ‘don’t f*ck with me’ effect,” he schooled my eager ears, “and cutting it off can be incredibly liberating.

Whether it’s to signal the end of a relationship or a new promotion at work — there is usually a direct correlation between what’s happening on our heads and what’s happening in our lives.”

Amen. The hair goddesses up above couldn’t have said it more articulately than our expert.

After all, what is a more powerful way to embark on a journey of personal transformation than to begin with the literal cutting off of the old and starting anew?

Once those ever-so-shiny silver scissors snip away at our split, broken ends, all that has been damaged and abused in our lives falls onto the salon floor, gets swept up and tossed into the garbage alongside our old hair, never to be seen again.

It’s the shedding of old skin. It’s akin to the feeling of checking heavy baggage at the airport and finally being free to run around with just your coin purse.

It’s like pushing a reset button on your life.

Because what most people neglect to realize is when a woman cuts her hair — she’s cutting off SO MUCH MORE:

She’s cutting herself off from the societal standard of beauty.

Society has the notion of beauty all mixed up. Our eyes are endlessly force-fed heaps of servings of larger-than-life images of Victoria’s Secret models, who are forever adorned with long, flowing locks. We have been brainwashed into thinking this image is the sole definition of beauty.

If we were to close our eyes to society’s message that beauty is only present in long, luxurious hair, we would see the most honest visual of sexiness is displayed in the short haircut.

Short hair exposes the most seductive part of a woman’s body: her neck. And once we get a glimpse of her neck, our eyes work their way down to her clavicle.

Short hair exposes and highlights the physique of a woman — in a way long hair simply can’t.

She’s cutting out a toxic relationship.

The best thing a woman can do when caught up in the tethered ties of a breakup is to embark on a change of heart through the change of her HAIR.

Hair represents the intimacy of her last relationship, and keeping it in the same post-breakup not only keeps her mentally stagnant in the relationship but far more vulnerable to a relationship relapse.

Nothing will kick-start the beat of a broken heart like a new hairstyle. The best part is now she can get the hairstyle she always wanted — not the same blonde highlights she endured year after year because it was what her ex preferred.

She’s free to explore HER personal aesthetic as a fierce individual, without the shackles of outside opinion.

She’s cutting off your expectations of her.

There are few things more life-affirming than a girl proclaiming to the universe SHE is going to finally do whatever the f*ck she wants.

By fearlessly cutting her hair into the edgy style she has always dreamed of, she’s ridding herself of the rigid expectations bestowed upon her by society, her partner, her friends and her family. In turn, she’s creating her very own.

Liberating herself in this way unleashes a whole new side of her personality and opens her up to a world she didn’t know existed.

She’s cutting off safety to find adventure.

Long hair is nestled deeply into the crux of the comfort zone.

By cutting off long hair, we are cutting ourselves off from a falsified sense of protection. Our vision is widened without the blinding veils of long hair.

With short hair, we’re stepping out of the barbed-wire cage of familiarity and stepping into the broad spectrum of adventure.

She’s cutting off the damage.

Sometimes we abuse the hair on our heads. What was once luscious and unbreakable is now frail and wispy. The incessant abuse we bestowed upon our strands with the brutal weaponry of hot irons and teasing combs has wreaked severe havoc. Our hair (and our souls) are left worn and damaged.

Not even the most expensive and luxurious Kerastase treatment in the world can breathe life into hair so DEAD. Sometimes the only thing to do is get rid of it and start the f*ck over.

True for life and hair.

She’s cutting off 25 to 35 minutes of maintenance.

The very thought of even calculating the time and energy graciously poured into the styling, the combing, the washing and conditioning of long hair is painfully daunting. The hours handcuffed to the tending of hair over the course of a woman’s life are uncountable.

It’s as simple as it sounds: The shorter the hair, the shorter the time spent caring for it.

What if a woman invested her time into seeking adventure, reading, kissing someone new and engaging in conversation? Could she become a more fully realized woman? What could fill up those empty hours she spent tangled into the thick wires of flatirons and hairdryers?

She’s cutting off “beauty” to tap into style.

The beauty industry would like us to believe long hair is concurrent with «beauty»— but FASHION says otherwise. Nothing exudes STYLE like a fashion-forward, short haircut.

The truly «beautiful» girls are the ones who have authentic personal style. They have creative vision that is expressed through their own definition of beauty. The girls who abandon convention, opting for originality instead.

After all, «beauty» fades; style is everlasting.

She’s cutting off fear.

When a girl finally has the courage to cut her hair, she’s finally owning who she truly is.

She’s cutting herself off from everything she was, to be everything she is.

When a Woman on TV Is in Distress, She Cuts Her Hair Off

The Newsroom, Mad Men, and Girls have all included this plot point in recent seasons. Why?

August 13, 2013
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In a recent episode of HBO’s The Newsroom, Maggie, a young associate producer on the fictional cable show News Night, cut her long, blonde hair to a short, red pixie. This was foreshadowing. In a later episode, viewers found out why she cut her hair: She’d witnessed the death of Daniel, a little boy she made friends with, while reporting in Uganda. Cutting her hair was a way to express outwardly her inner trauma. She recalled a moment when Daniel touched her hair, during which the boy’s teacher told him that blonde hair was «nothing but trouble.» The connection between the memory and her decision doesn’t really make sense. If the blonde hair is a terrible reminder of the incident, the dye job would make sense, but not the cut. To make the chop all the more dramatic, emphasizing her emotional instability, Maggie cuts it off herself. Plenty of women cut their own bangs and trim their ends. Not many women try to cut a short, complex hairstyle themselves. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t look very good.

Maggie’s not the only TV heroine to chop off her hair in a moment of distress. At the end of the second season of another HBO show, Girls, Hannah Horvath cuts her hair off during a period of mental illness. In Season 4 of Mad Men, Sally Draper cuts her hair for reasons that may include a desire for her father’s attention, a desire for everyone’s attention, or a need to have some form of control over her life after her parents’ divorce.

The dramatic haircut has had mixed success. It works well on Mad Men and Girls. Sally’s decision to cut her hair is a complicated one, and the viewer is left slightly concerned at the Freudian implications of what she’s done: She wanted to look more like a woman she thought her father was attracted to. And yet she is a child, and children tend to seek attention without necessarily thinking through the consequences. It is a slightly unsettling scene, but it fits with her character development. As for Girls, Lena Dunham, the show’s writer and star, has already explored Hannah’s neuroses throughout the series, so the haircut fits in with the broader portrayal of her character.

On The Newsroom, however, the haircut is a sign of shallow female character-writing. Maggie conveys her traumatic experience in an outwardly emotional, almost adolescent, manner. She doesn’t brood and let her emotions fester, or release them in angry, insightful rants. She simply cuts and dyes her hair, looking sullen the whole time. This is emblematic of Sorkin’s treatment of female characters on the show in general: They look incompetent or emotional, if not both. Emily Mortimer’s character, Mackenzie, is presented as smart and experienced journalist, yet she finds it very difficult to cope with basic life problems. In the first season, Mackenzie struggles to understand basic email functions. She sleeps with a politician who makes guest appearances on the show, a reckless decision for a journalist to make. Another character, Sloan Sabbith (whose name is reminiscent of a 1980s porn star’s), is beautiful and smart, but has poor decision-making skills and low self-confidence. She sets one of her bosses up with a woman she knows is unstable and she releases a source’s information on a personal whim. She almost talks her way out of a new job, saying she’s unqualified to talk about economics, despite having a Ph.D. in economics. She sets Timothy Geithner on fire. Maggie’s haircut is just one example of Sorkin’s stereotyping of women as emotionally fragile, rash creatures.

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But even when a dramatic haircut is done well, as it is on Girls and Mad Men, it still sends a troubling message: It seems to confirm that a woman’s value lies in how she looks, and that only psychological instability would cause her to make a drastic change in her physical appearance.

A haircut doesn’t have to be a sign of internal turmoil. On The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling’s character, Dr. Mindy Lahiri, gets a haircut, which represents a leap of faith. After doubting her ability to live with her boyfriend in a cramped tent in Haiti, Mindy took a chance on herself and her relationship. The impetus for the haircut was not trauma, but Mindy’s decision to make a huge change in her life. After informing a friend that she was considering going to Haiti with her Christian boyfriend for volunteer work, her friend suggested she cut her hair to better manage life in Haiti, without the amenities Mindy would have in the States. The character is notoriously shallow and selfish, so the decision to cut her hair, which she claims will make her look less feminine and therefore hurt her vanity, is a big step for her. She is walking outside her comfort zone.

Felicity, of the television show of the same name, has also been one of few female TV characters to cut her hair as a show of independence. When she cuts her hair in the beginning of Season 2, Felicity is surely experiencing some stress, between romantic entanglements and career responsibilities—but no more than the average college student. Her monologue demonstrated that the haircut wasn’t about reacting to the world around her. Her decision was based on her desire and nothing more:

It’s one thing to say you’re going to let go. It’s another to actually do it. To loosen your grip, to let yourself fall. So when I walked into the hair-cutting place, I was taking a leap. But I wasn’t doing it for some guy or because of some list. I was doing it for me.

The sentiment behind Felicity’s haircut, that she simply wanted a new style, one unmotivated by trauma or the reactions of men, was the kind of refreshing change that women need to see more of on television and in the movies. Women are accustomed to watching female characters cut their hair in moments of depression and desperation. Sometimes the decision isn’t as shallow and clumsy as Sorkin’s. But these characters’ motivations for changing their hairstyle give viewers the impression that happy women don’t get pixie cuts.

Why Do Women Cut Their Hair Short?

In an article on the «Femail» page of MailOnline, the website for London’s Daily Mail, different sources discussed the topic of women’s short hairstyles and the motivations behind them. It seems the slant of the story was whether or not a woman who has cut her hair short has lost interest in sex, equating the sexual drive in women with her desire to keep her hair long as a sign of attractiveness.

The experts all seemed to agree on both the historical links between women’s long tresses and the image of fertility and sexual desirability, and most seemed to feel that a woman who made a drastic change from long hair to a gamine-short cut was expressing some intent to be «off the market» in some measure.

Specific attitudes on the subject range from whole-heartedly embracing the «long hair is the ultimate look of a woman at her most alluring and desirable» to an assertion that cutting one’s long hair short is a sign of dissatisfaction with some specific part of a person’s life. In the article, Dr. Pam Spurr is quoted as saying, «The woman who has been dissatisfied with her sex life and decides she no longer wants to have sex uses the power of the haircut as a sign to show she’s reclaiming power in the bedroom.»

However, interspersed among the more salacious viewpoints and blurbs is some real content. Dramatic changes in style and look do generally accompany a shift in a woman’s sense of identity. Sometimes it is a reflective response — a new look on the outside to go with a whole new outlook on the inside — and sometimes it’s a reactive response — the «change» to help a woman «snap out of» her mood or cope with some difficulty in her life. Whatever the mechanic involved, the result is a new look and that look usually corresponds to a change taking place where it cannot normally be seen.

It’s generally accepted that most men, and many women, prefer longer hair on women, even if they don’t buy into the motives that are attached to the act of cutting the hair. One contributor to the article cited her own experience with going short, «…But back on the street I was soon aware that fewer men turned their heads the way they used to.» For her, the act of cutting her hair short had the unexpected effect of changing the way she saw herself as reflected in the eyes of others.

My own feelings on the subject are mixed: I understand the history and primal conditioning we all have and how these factors dictate much of our attitudes toward various aspects of our lives. But I’m not so caught up in it that I think evolution stopped 100,000 years ago. Yes, long hair will always be favored by some, regardless of the circumstances, but the popularity of stars like Halle Berry and Charlize Theron (both of whom have proven without a doubt that short hair can be very attractive) are excellent examples of how attitudes about styles change over time.

I’ll buy that the most dramatic changes in style are usually accompanied by an underlying motive, but to try and make a blanket generalization that women who cut their hair do so for any one reason is preposterous. Women will go for shorter looks to feel younger and sassier, to emulate celebrity looks they find appealing, and to have a style that’s easy to wear and easy to care for. Sometimes they even have more than one reason for choosing to change their look. However, there is no one single reason behind every woman’s changing of her hair length and style.

By Stacy | Updated Jan 25, 2023 | ©Hairfinder.com

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