I got my hair cut on Friday!
Of course, I also broke my Gallery2 installation while trying to upgrade it on Friday, which is why I didn’t post about this then. :p I’ve fixed it now, so now I can post this!

Before:

After:

The stylist cut off about 17″ of hair!

I’d spent a couple weeks looking at hair images online, and wasn’t really much closer to figuring out what I wanted my hair to look like.
I ended up going into the salon and telling the stylist he could do whatever he wanted. I wanted it short, but not a boy or granny haircut.
This is what I ended up with. ^_^ I love it; it feels so light!

I haven’t had my hair this short since grade 10/11.

I’ve always loved long hair. As in, down-to-the-waist or -butt long. I like it best straight, but I always like straight hair best (unfortunately for me, my own hair is wavy). If it’s well-kept, I’ll always love long hair.

So over a year ago, I decided to grow my own hair as long as I could. I was hoping for about waist length, with all the layers grown out so it was cut flat at the bottom.
For over a year, I babied my hair. I didn’t use heat (with the exception of my wedding hair style), or harsh shampoos, or use damaging products. It actually grew quite well, and I ended up reaching most of my goal; with 28″ of hair at the longest layer, it hit just below my waist when it was held to the full length (longer than I thought the last time I wrote about it). It’s wavy, so it sat a bit higher naturally.

I finally realized that I wasn’t having any fun with my hair. I pretty much just had hair for the sake of growing hair. Big whoop.
Even though I had long hair, it was still at that “in between” stage; the shortest layers were still too short to do proper “long hair styles” with. And because I couldn’t pin it up very well, I tended to just wear it down (or pin up just the back) and it just hung there. Blah.

I had a lot of great ideas for what I’d do with my hair when it was “right”. This usually meant when I had no more layers and it was all at my waist. But as this goal got closer and closer, I realized that my hair wasn’t looking better to me. It was just longer, but it wasn’t really doing what I wanted it to do.
So I just said screw it. Hack it all off and play with it. I want to dye it again, and not worry that the dye will still be in there in 2 years. I want to dye it a wacky colour at least once, then be able to bleach it out and dye it back to brown without having the damage hang around forever. I’d even like to do dreads for a little while (the tie-in kind, not the knot-up-your-own-hair-forever kind), but I’m not sure my job would go for that. ^_~

I still don’t believe any of the crap the media tries to claim about long hair, like how only short people can’t have long hair or it makes them look shorter, or how women can’t have long hair after high school or it makes them look unprofessional, or that grannies all look better with tight white permed hair instead of long white hair, but for now, I’d rather have fun with my hair, rather than trying to make it nice for myself “in the future”. I’ll deal with the future when it comes. ^_^

I’ll probably grow it long again someday, but I’ll start with it already short, rather than starting with shoulder-length hair that’s been dyed several times; bleached, heat styled, and otherwise damaged. I don’t need inches of damaged hair just for the sake of the inches. GIGO, so to speak.

As a side note, I also discovered that I have many more white hairs than I’d through previously, and that most of them had grown long enough to actually be cut by this hair cut. Most are still in a well-behaved little clump, though, so that’s good. I’d rather grow a stripe than go salt-and-pepper.

~~~~~
Also note that the gallery itself looks like ass, and probably will continue to do so until I find a permanent blog layout and the edit the gallery layout to match.