The author reflects on their decision to cut their long hair and the societal expectations surrounding women's hair as they age.
The time had finally come. The rite of passage. The Big Chop.
‘Just do it,’ I ordered my long-time hairdresser Peter when I visited the salon last week. With great crunching snips of the scissors, it fell, 6in skeins of hair drifting down to the floor like leaves in autumn. Approaching my 45th birthday, I was facing up to the truth: there comes an age for a woman to cut her hair short and I have reached it. A shoulder-sweeping style it must be.
Was this a melancholic resignation to middle age? Did I sob at the sight of my crowning glory being swept into the dustpan? Hell, no. I bounced out of the salon, feeling so light that my feet could have lifted off the pavement. Samson (of Bible fame) might have felt his power drain away when his locks were lopped off; I felt the opposite.
Fresh. Groomed. Most importantly: grown-up. It seems shorter cuts are in vogue.
This week 35-year-old Margot Robbie made headlines with her new wavy bob; last week it was Demi Moore, 63, gracing the Gucci front row looking like she’d lost about a metre. She later revealed it to be a wig but, given the number of compliments online, it wouldn’t surprise me if she did go for the chop.
There has long persisted a view that once a woman reaches a certain age, the scissors must come out – and for a long time I resisted it. Why should reaching 40 or 50 mean cutting your hair like Coronation Street’s Deirdre Barlow? For 15 years my hair fell several inches below my shoulders. Briefly, in my 30s – thanks to extensions – it swooshed against my lower back.
‘Great wig! ’ said a friend at a hen do where I was dressed as Pocahontas, rope-like plaits either side of my face. Catherine Zeta-Jones was the inspiration, whose thick raven tresses I have admired since her Darling Buds Of May days. And so I spent countless hours – and thousands of pounds – cutting, curling and conditioning my hair to maximum volume and length.
Aesthetically, it was a 20in-long comfort blanket, an assurance that even if I looked knackered or under-par, my hair would do a lot of the work. When, in my early 30s, a colleague said my hair made me look like Nigella Lawson, my happiness was complete.
Daily Mail writer Clare Foges shows off her new bob, which left her 'feeling so light that my feet could have lifted off the pavement' Actress Margot Robbie, star of the new Wuthering Heights film, with her short do I was determined to keep looking like a blow-dried Brazilian weather presenter right to the grave, just as I would trot around in the highest of heels until I popped said clogs. Of course I felt this way, in hindsight, because evolution has primed us to spend our teens, 20s and 30s looking for a mate to perpetuate the species.
Surveys consistently show that men prefer long hair on women, perhaps because they associate it with fertility. And so, if you’re in the market for a partner to breed with, it makes sense to go for Renaissance-like locks. Yet in my 40s – and married with four children – the image I want to project has changed.
I still want to look good (and will continue to have the odd jab of Botox, thank you very much) but these days my desire isn’t to look hot but tidy. Not ‘tidy’ in the way lip-smacking men might say of the barmaid at the working men’s club, but neat, age-appropriate, put together. My hair increasingly fought against this desire. It started to look wrong: a middle-aged face with a Disney princess barnet.
Catching sight of myself in a shop window recently I thought I had spotted a rare ageing mermaid. My hair started to feel age-inappropriate, in the same way that ripped jeans now do. I want to look like the middle-aged woman I am, not someone chasing a youth that is gone. To some feminists this will sound sexist and ageist to boot: ‘You’re kowtowing to the expectations of the patriarchy!
Women of any age should wear their hair however the hell they want! ’ I agree – and all power to those, like Cher, who have vowed to never cut their hair. But most women, from my observation, look better with shorter hair as they age. Take Dame Helen Mirren, 80, who recently experimented with longer hair.
It looked good but nothing like as great as it does short. Mirren’s signature silver bob doesn’t just work because it looks nice but because it projects a woman at ease in her skin – and with her age. That’s a vibe I want as I get older, not that of someone in their 50s trying too hard to look like a 20-something ingenue.
As for being sexist, it’s not only women who need to reconsider follicular matters as they age. A younger man wearing designer stubble might pass for Tom Hardy; an older man risks looking like he has spent the night nursing a cider on a park bench. My husband is not sold on my new style as yet. Typically, he prefers women of any age to have long hair. Well, sorry: the long-haired days are over
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