Rachel Connolly. Simply sign up to the Style myFT Digest -- delivered directly to your inbox. I had gone with the idea that I wanted a less feminine look than my straight, shoulder-length hair.
I thought a radical change would reflect my new freedom: I was an independent woman, striking out on my own. And so I requested a choppy, cropped thing that had no business being on my head at all.
It would have suited someone gamine, with a small, mischievous nose. Looking back, I find my decision hard to understand since I was also embarking on a spree of casual heterosexual dating at that time. Even during the haircut, as I faced myself grimly in the mirror, I could see what should have been obvious from the very start: the new crop made me look like a pigeon. The hairdresser, a harried woman sporting raven black, waist-length hair, was about halfway through the cut at that stage.
One side of my head was the full pigeon. The other side had a longer, suggestive layer yet to be trimmed. I had prepaid for the experience on a website that let me shop for the best deals all over London. That was how I found hairdressers back then this is a very bad way to find a hairdresser. I spent the week after in denial, going about the place with approximately two-thirds of a haircut, trying to look at myself in the mirror as little as possible.
It was like the experience of being broke and trying to avoid the sight of your bank balance. It was not just that the haircut made my face look bad. Mine was supposed to make me seem carefree. I had wanted to be the kind of woman who is louche and quietly elegant. But I was not that kind of woman and I never would be. Instead I looked dowdy. And also, I feared, kind of uptight; like someone who had short hair for reasons of practicality or cleanliness or similar.
