Love Bites: Cutting Hair, Coming Together

I first cut my own hair crouched in a bathtub, while my best friend rinsed black dye down a plughole filled with the clumps of hair which had framed my fourteen year-old face only minutes earlier. Stained fingernails gripping muddied porcelain, we shrieked with laughter at what we’d unleashed using a £4 razor comb, wondering what everyone would say at school come Monday.

Drastic changes in appearance are often seen as a worrying display of recklessness, but this isn’t always the case. Changing your hair can be an aesthetic manifestation of pain, but also of defiance, confidence, and rebirth. There’s that familiar trope of locking eyes with yourself in a dimly lit bathroom mirror, clutching blunt kitchen scissors. But, while haircuts can be a deeply individual moment, they can also be a collective experience.

Cutting someone’s hair is a mundane yet powerfully intimate thing. When living in Montreal, I had a mutually-beneficial relationship with someone from a community Facebook page; they’d come over and trim my undercut in return for freshly baked goods. In March 2020, I cut my flatmates’ hair while they booked emergency flights home, sitting anxious and cross-legged on our living room floor. The following month, I bought cordless clippers and incrementally reinvented myself down to a shaved head over the course of a week. I relied on those I lived with to clean up my mistakes, tenderly tidying the nape of my neck.

Haircuts reach beyond aesthetics, becoming a concrete act of care for another. Where I sometimes struggle with the right words, I’ll be the first to enable a reverse-Samsonite release. I’ve built community through each break-up fringe for a tearful friend, all of the matching 2am boxes of bleach under the cold light of a student bathroom, and every buzzcut that lifted the weight from my shoulders.