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| novia de Frankenstein |
If I wash my hair and go to bed with it wet, I kind of have Bride of Frankenstein hair in the morning. Not only does it stand up in an inverted cone shape, but I’ve even got the streaks of gray. A friend asked why I’d want a photo of myself like this on the Internet. My answer is that I hope it gives someone a chuckle. And why not post this photo? My acquaintances know I don’t usually look like this (and if they say otherwise, they’re lying).
This is what I look like more regularly, say while listening to music and riding the elevated train around Chicago:
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| probably listening to 70’s soul r&b |
This is what I love about my new haircut (by Edda Cosconi who currently cuts at Salon Lamia in Evanston, Illinois but I’d follow her anywhere): it’s very easy to take care of, I like the way it looks and it sends a message. This is the message:
I don’t care about looking attractive to men.
You might think, “What are you talking about? You look great.” But I think it’s particularly significant for a Latina to chop off all her hair like this. Of course, the way women wear their hair tends to be important everywhere and has been since time immemorial (the Bible gives prescriptive advice on hair), but I’ve noticed that married Latinas often have to take their husband’s opinions into account when they want to cut their hair. I understand wanting to be attractive to one’s husband so I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but it just shows how important long hair is to a lot of Latinos. Middle-aged Mexican American women tend to wear our hair to at least our chins and often to our shoulders, even into our 50’s and 60’s. I’m newly single and long-time Mexican, so to crop my mop like this can be interpreted as a deliberate statement.
Please, world, interpret my oddly short hair as a deliberate statement. Having just finalized my divorce three months ago, attracting a new romance – or whatever – is neither on my list of priorities nor on my list of when-I-have-time’s. Does this haircut make me look like a feminist? A dyke? A gringa? A boy? So be it. That’s fine with me.
Great article, thank you.
Styling hair is a natural activity that most people perform day after day. If one is not careful, he or she could inflate the costs of maintaining the hair. Did you know that you do not have to incur these high costs?
taper
What was your message? It sounds like your intention was slightly different from mine. And how was your short hair too much work? I've found that long hair is pretty easy to deal with, a bob takes the most work, but then if I go pixie (like right now), it gets easy again.
I love this! I too chopped my hair, inspired by the feedback I received after guest lecturing in a colleague's class while he was at a conference. We had a brilliant class, great discussion, but most of the feedback he got was about my appearance. Screw that. It was a big step–hair is pretty important in my culture, and more important to my husband than I ever suspected before the chop. But my message was deliberate. In the end, short hair was too much work so it's growing again.