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I remember wincing as the scissors sliced through my curls and fell to the floor. Not only was 8 inches of my hair gone but, so was a security blanket I hid behind up to that point. In the summer before my sophomore year I decided to get a simple haircut, little did I know that something so elementary would effect me in such a great way. In today’s society, women especially are held to high beauty standards, we're told we should dress a certain and our hair should be long and silky. Usually, when us girls cut our hair people always assume we’ve gone through an existential crisis of sorts. And, while going through major life change is a perfectly reasonable reason to do something drastic, I feel that society often forgets that women are allowed …show more content…
The reason why I wanted to cut my hair was because I felt like I needed something new. I had my long hair, styled in the same way since I could remember. Not to mention, that for the longest time I was strictly against cutting my hair. So with confidence, I thought it was about time I waved my comfort zone goodbye. I no longer wanted to be a soft spoken girl that allowed a societal box to restrict what I felt I could do with myself; I was going to break away from the pressure that I was facing and allow myself the ability to express myself freely. As I planted myself in the hairdresser’s chair; my palms grew sweaty, I worried that I was going to regret my decision. Many individuals told me I was going to cry once my hair was gone, but to my satisfaction, I remember staring at the pile of the hair on the ground and feeling overjoyed that the step I had just taken was going to be the first of many self-fulling achievements. After the “big chop”, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders, in both a physical and metaphorical way. I felt free to be a more bold person, whether that was expressed in the way I dressed or how I acted; I no longer felt the need to hide behind my hair and allow others to tell me how to look. With my short hair came confidence that motivated me to explore new opportunities with myself and the world around me. Not to mention, that not having to take extra time in
She uses playful imagery and casual diction to give the reader an experience of friendship and enjoyment, similar to the one she had with her stylist. She shows this when she writes “I clamped like a curling iron onto the first stylist of my adult life.” By using a simile, she is able to create a lighthearted tone while also displaying the attachment she established with Veronica, her stylist. Howard writes about how the changes in her hairstyle come and go with the momentous occasions in her life in the lines “...the angled bob with flowers behind my ears for my wedding; two long braids for the birth of my first daughter….” The intimate manner of the friendship shared between Howard and Veronica is shown in the following quote: “The process seemed comparable: visit, talk, laugh, cry, catharsis, self-reflection, and exit…,” by comparing the personal demeanor of a therapy session to getting one's hair
Reading through the whole story "Haircut" , it is not easy to believe that the death of Jim Kendall is really accidental. It is most likely that the incident is a murder.
In the documentary “Good Hair”, Chris Rock covers a lot about different hair types and what women would do to their hair just to feel beautiful. He first decided to do this questionnaire because one day his daughter asked “how come I don’t have good hair?” Chris was very curious as to how she came up with that question so he sat out to find out. He went in salons, barber shops, and beauty supply stores to find out all the information he needed to know.
Revolutionary fashions made it acceptable to show more skin, develop different styles, and be able for women to express themselves. Women began to liberate themselves from the traditional long hairstyles and turn to the new and shorter masculine hairdos. “The bob appeared in the US shortly. Women with bobs needed more frequent haircuts, and wanted permanent waves” (Monet). Women began to cut their hair shorter, cringing their hair, and finger waving it.
The kids I went to school with, the boys I had romantic relationships with, and even my family members, all made negative comments about my body hair. As a young kid, I believed my body hair was a personal problem. Experimenting with different hair removal procedures, some even painful. I wasted hours removing the hair on my body, in attempts to feel better about myself. My low self esteem became linked with the hair on my body. I believed I had too much body hair for a girl but according to Mills (1959) and the social imagination, I had too much body hair for society. My peers, as well as my family, had been socialized to believe that women’s body hair was gross, and unfeminine. Women had been taught to remove their body hair for decades now in the western world, and it was showcased or the lack there of hair was showcased in all forms of media. As a young girl, my mom bought me my first razor and paid for the electrolysis for the hair on my arm. It was in these actions, where the idea that it was my own problem started to form because it felt like I needed treatment for this problem of mine. I was perceiving a deep seated public issue as my own personal trouble. I can’t blame my mother or my peers because by the time my peers and even my parents were born, the western world had already determined that women should not have body hair. Christina Hope (1982) explains that in 1914 in America magazine’s had just begun
Women, we have issues with our hair, [Black women's] hair represents the first thing anyone sees of them, or of ourselves, and so we identify with what our hair looks like.
During this time, women were seen embracing their natural tresses with locks and twists, but that seemed to quickly change. In order to fit into this new European standard of beauty, women were required to alter their hair, thus stripping them of the little identity they possessed. The increased support for the natural hair movement alters the black woman’s perception of beauty while intentionally and unintentionally challenging the ideology of beauty within the western world. With more women wearing their hair natural, black women have begun to accept their unaltered appearances while redefining their perception of beauty.
The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off these soggy clumps to make my hair even again. "Peter Pan is very popular these days" the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the length of a boy's, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut, and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.
She takes a look in the mirror, but what can she see? She could have kept her curly hair which was associated with her for many years, however she did not recognize herself, she just criticized her features for not being of standard according to society? Although, Gabrielle is a fictional character, however, her story is a reality for many girls who have thick, curly hair. Although, sixty-five percent of African Americans relax their hair (Ebony), there has been a growing movement towards natural hair styling. Through personal research from surveys, books and other forms of documents, I have concluded that relaxed hair is no longer a popular choice for African American women, for it has become an attempt to reestablish natural beauty.
As the years pass by, many types of hair styles have become increasingly popular; such styles include: permed, straightened, undercut, shaved, and dyed. However, recently, most cuts are extremely difficult or even impossible to do without a cosmetologist. One of the many sections of cosmetology is the cutting, styling, and bleaching of hair.
I’m sitting with my knees tucked under my chin, waiting for my mom’s turn to be finished, so I can climb up in the hairdresser’s swiveling chair and have the big apron tied around my neck to get my hair cut. I’m singing the lyrics to my favorite song by Deseree (softly so mom doesn’t yell at me) while looking through the books of hair designs on the chair next to me. I really like the skinny models with their choppy, short-like-a-boy’s haircuts, and the more pictures I see the more and more I want to look just like them.
Each sex is treated differently for a naturally occurring body process. As discussed, body hair is viewed as masculine, leading to the assumption that women should be hairless and men should wear their body hair with pride. It is clear that society uses hair to label individuals as either male or female (Toerien and Wilkinson, 2003). In addition, male hair is associated with strength and power (Toerien and Wilkinson, 2003). So how come when women display body hair they are shamed, but men are encouraged to grow it? Hope (1982) elaborates that the term, “feminine, when applied to lack of body hair, implies a child-like status, as opposed to the adult status afforded men” (as cited in Toerien and Wilkinson, 2003). That being said, body hair is another way in which society ranks men as the superior gender by making women conform to the hairless normative. A study conducted by Tiggemann and Hodgson (2008), asked women why they practice hair removal. After completing a questionnaire with different statements to evaluate different factors such as normativity, sexual attractiveness, femininity and self-enhancement, they found significant support in all four types of factors for hair removal of the underarm, leg and pubic area. Additionally, they can found that one item pertaining to males preferring a hairless body, was the only one linked to two factors: normativity and sexual attractiveness. It is evident with their findings that women tend to follow the socially constructed normative for many reason, including to please men. The idea is that women have to change their bodies not only to be accepted by society, but they also do so to be accepted by men. Nonetheless, the must make is seem natural and effortless to uphold the beauty allure. In recent years, depletion of male body hair has become popular. In a study performed by Boroughs, et al. (2005), they found that men removed
Moving from a highly diverse community to a less diverse community has to be the weirdest yet interesting culture shock I ever had to deal with. As a young child, I did not know about the outside world. I thought everyone rides the bus or the metro, graffiti on the wall is normal and traffic wouldn’t matter as much since everything I needed was within walking distance sometimes. There were shocking things I learned once I moved to Nebraska.
Everything for a year had been leading up to this point and here I was in the middle of the happiest place on earth in tears because my friends had abandoned me in the middle of Disney on the senior trip.
I have a very fulfilling feeling about what I have been able to accomplish in my life so far. I want the absolute best for myself and those close to me. I often go above and beyond to help those around me succeed and be the best version of themselves that they can possibly be.