A Reason for the Razor

My hair has been on its grand debut for approximately three weeks now, though it seems much longer. Each time I encounter someone who hasn’t yet seen me hairless I prepare myself for their open-mouthed awe and deluge of questions. The most common question, and incidentally the stickiest, tends to be some variation of “what the hell were you thinking?” (The more tactful rendition being “Did you donate it?”) It is this question which so often arouses in me an intense desire to lie. “Why yes, I gave it to the Leukemia society”, or “I sold it to raise money for the lost children of Darfur”.
After all, every woman who buzzes her hair generally has a cause. Demi Moore shaves her head in G.I. Jane in order to be one of the guys. In Little Women, Jo sells her hair to buy a railway ticket when her father is wounded in battle. Natalie Portman gets hers forcibly shaved in V for Vendetta. And Sinead O’Conner need no reason other than her intense depression.
Thus my insecurity.
Obviously the prospect of three-minute showers and a hair-product free existence was considerable motivation. And of course there’s the added pleasure of being a walking experiment in gender stereotyping (one of the reasons I’m writing a blog). Yet these were only superfluous impetuses. I really did it for vanity.
As Shana Alexander once said, “Hair brings one's self-image into focus; it is vanity's proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.” Such has been my life since the fateful day someone put a can of mousse in my little hands. Every stage has been yet another confrontation in the continuous struggle with the hair. At first the frizz was cute, but it inevitably became awkward. At one point it was suppressed by unhealthy amounts of gel, but I eventually started fine tuning, and by my freshman year of college it had progressed into a relatively pleasant being. To examine the sweat and blood poured into those auburn curls over my lifetime would surely find me worthy of Narcissus. My hair has defined me in my own eyes as well as in the eyes of others. It has plagued me. Driven me to distraction. It has been the focal point of attention. My one true beauty.
And now it’s gone.
It’s gone until it has the audacity to grow back. Until then I can be free from its wiley ways. Until then my vanity gets to suffer. And that has made it worth the while.