FASHION : The Long and Short of It : She says: “Past a certain age, long hair worn down is not sexy. . . . It is aging.”
“What’s a good way to describe your reaction when I tell you I want to cut my hair off?” I asked my husband the other day.
“I wince?” he replies, wincing.
“No, I think your reaction is a little more dramatic than that.”
“I smash a brick against my forehead?”
“Yeah,” I say, “that’s more like it.”
My husband also clutches his chest sometimes when I tell him I’m thinking of going short. But he’s not the only man who confuses a woman’s sexuality and beauty with long hair. Lots of guys have an aversion to short hair on women.
In Los Angeles--where you are what you look like--we seek youth, sexuality and romance the way crusaders sought the Holy Grail. Long hair is associated with youth, sexuality and romance. Beach bunnies and starlets have long hair, usually blond. This is why so many women persist in wearing their hair long, even when they have clearly moved out of the beach bunny/starlet age demographic. (Major exception due to longstanding relationships with plastic surgeons: Cher.)
What many women fail to realize is that past a certain age, long hair worn down is not sexy. Nor is it fetching. Nor romantic. It is aging.
The only cure: a sharp pair of scissors and someone who knows how to use them.
Some women we hope are reading: Kelly Lange. Ann Martin. Carly Simon. Gloria Allred. Betty Friedan. Gloria Steinem. Susan Estrich. Goldie Hawn. Anita Hill. Barbra Streisand.
“There are a lot of women who insist on having their hair the same as it was when they met their husband in 1945, which is kind of a shame,” says Mitch Fields, who owns Antenna, a Burbank hair salon. “Lots keep the hairstyle that pleases their men.”
But urge him to explain why this is so and he is stumped: “I don’t know why men prefer long hair. It’s a primitive emotion. I mean, you rarely see a Playboy centerfold with short hair.”
On the other hand, Geri Cusenza, artistic director of Sebastian International, the hair products company, minces no words when asked why men prefer long hair: “Men are attached to long hair because in all these old films you used to see these wonderful women with their hair up. They’d have one pin in it and they’d pull the pin out and the hair would drop and look beautiful. Every man looks for that woman who is going to do that for him one day. But it never happens that way because in real life we’ve got it all sprayed to death, right?”
Right.
Deep down, this is why most women are ambivalent about cutting their hair. They are afraid men won’t find them attractive. A woman wouldn’t mind looking like the short-haired version of Demi Moore, but she wants her man to react to her in that visceral way men respond to a long-locked beauty such as Claudia Schiffer, the Bardot-clone who has sold clothes for Guess? and Chanel.
Gloria Thomas, who owns the Los Angeles hair salon Gloria Lynn, says that African-American women have a harder time maintaining long, flowing hair, but that they are under the same pressures as white women to conform to the cultural aesthetic.
“The maintenance is much higher,” she says. For many black women, long hair maintenance includes chemical relaxing solutions or Diana Ross-like hair extensions.
The problem with artificial long hair, says Thomas, is that no one’s going to run his fingers through it: “It’s more like, ‘Don’t touch my hair!’ ”
“When women cut their hair, they look so well groomed,” says Thomas. “But no one should be pressured. You should do what’s best for you.”
The problem is figuring out what’s best.
Suzanne Beshoff, a Liverpool native who coifs hair in Santa Ana, often finds herself standing in front of a mirror in a trance, with a handful of her waist-length blond hair in her scissors. But she can never bring herself to make the cut.
“I don’t know why,” she says. “I guess I’m afraid of losin’ me strength.”
Recently, in the television news business, blond women (a virtual redundancy on that medium) have been chopping their hair off at an increasing clip: Diane Sawyer, Joan Lunden and Bree Walker.
(Some of us wanted to, but didn’t. See husband’s comments above.)
But almost always, the issue is how men will react? After all, what if the Big Boys don’t like it? Calling a haircut an act of courage may seem far-fetched, but that’s what it is when your primary asset is telegenicity.
Channel 2 news anchor Bree Walker debated cutting her shoulder-length hair for a year before taking the plunge for purely expedient reasons. For Walker, it had come down to a simple decision: Her kids or her hair.
“You’re standing there doing your hair and your baby is crying,” she says. “The last thing I need is guilt over my damn long hair. I needed more time for my kids. And I bought 45 minutes a day in my life by cutting off my hair.”
However, she let her bosses know she planned to cut her hair before she did it.
“I respect that they have a say in this, so I told them when I was on maternity leave, that when I returned, I would like to have a change in my looks and they said fine.”
She knew a lot of her male viewers might not like her new do, but, says Walker, “this was sort of a statement for myself.”
In a May profile of Diane Sawyer, Vanity Fair reported that she cut her hair in a quest for a more serious image. Still, she was so afraid to tell her boss, Roone Arledge, that she asked a female news division vice president to call him. The news was delivered like an urgent bulletin: “Are you sitting down? Diane’s cut her hair.”
Sawyer had received a good deal of criticism some time earlier, the magazine reported, for dangling her “famous, honey-blond tresses” over Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin desk during an interview.
Betcha Boris didn’t mind.
Mitch Fields says there is an age at which every woman should cut her hair. The magic number? “I’m not gonna say. It would make me too many enemies.”
There is a rule of thumb, however: long, gray hair is uniformly aging and should be worn up.
“Generally speaking,” says Fields, “hair swept away from the face and worn up is more flattering to a woman who is aging. You need to create an upward line.”
Unfortunately, a lot of women try to hide their aging faces behind their hair. A prime example is Carly Simon, who was recently profiled on Jane Pauley’s new show “Dateline NBC.” (I have always thought Pauley’s hair would make a fascinating segment on “Unsolved Mysteries.”)
The middle-aged Simon wears her thin brown hair shoulder length, with bangs that hang unflatteringly over her eyebrows and appear to obstruct her vision. This is known in hair circles as a “poor woman’s face-lift.” Except it looks awful and makes viewers want to scream “Get a haircut!” at their TVs. Well, I wanted to anyhow.
But attention, Ms. Simon: Cusenza predicts the next major hair look is everything off the face, no matter what the length. “Women don’t have to hide behind their hair,” she says. “They know they’re feminine. They don’t have to prove it, so they’re wearing it all away from their face--no bangs, no side bits.”
It takes some courage to go short, but women report the risk pays off: After one of Gina Furth’s colleagues kidded the 46-year-old hair colorist that she was “trapped in the ‘70s” with her self-described “poufy, Hollywood look,” Furth took the plunge and cut her hair. Chin-length now, it’s the shortest it’s been in 25 years.
And . . . “Everyone loves it, especially my husband. Of course, he has half a head of hair, so he’d love anything.”
