Did you know? Trying to do any hairstyle to your own head is physically impossible.* Even something as seemingly straightforward as a simple braid can’t be done; one of the three sections is always slipping through your fingers like a bunch of ghost dicks. Not even the most accomplished of witches can insert a bobby pin without hearing it slide helplessly to the floor the minute she turns her head. Maybe someone else can do these things to your hairs, but I’m skeptical. Have you ever successfully completed a hairstyle by yourself? Be honest. Hairstyles are just lies your head tells other people.

*It is possible I am overgeneralizing based on my own experience.

23. High Ponytails

It’s difficult enough to put all of your hair pointing in the same direction, but trying to scroonch it up towards the sky is asking for trouble. You’re going to lose chunks of hair here; they’ll slide off piecemeal at first but pretty soon it’ll build up into an avalanche and your wrist will hurt.

22. Loose Waves

Have you ever tried to curl the hair on your own head? If your hair already comes pre-curled, then congratulations, you have a hairstyle. Loose waves do not exist. Straight hair that has been artificially curled comes in exactly two forms: I Just Took The Curler Off This Second and The Curl Is Gone, I Have No More Curls. Loose curls forsooth.

21. That Thing Of Where You Wrap A Tiny Strand Of Hair Around Your Ponytail Elastic To Make It Look Like Your Hair Generated Its Own Ponytail

Where does that strand of hair come from. Where does it go.

20. Festival Hair

You know that hair I mean. Where there’s a headband that’s also kind of a little scarf, and parts of it are under the hair and parts of it are over the hair and there’s curls around it also? That’s not a possible thing to do to your head.

19. Infinity Buns

The bun that disappears in on itself, like a little vortex.

18. Sock Buns

Put a sock ringlet inside of your head-hairs, and somehow a bun will appear. I do not buy it.

17. Beachy Waves

Also a lie. See crimping.

16. Heidi Braids, Like A Crown

To begin with, making a braid by yourself is impossible. Taking braids that by all laws of God and man should be hanging downward and flinging them up over your own head is laughable. How do you even make two braids? By the time you finish the first one (you will never finish the first one), all of your hair will be used up. Where would the second braid come from? How could you divide your hair into two sections, and then into three sections again, and then bring all those sections together? What does the second lump of hair do while you’re braiding the first? Slide right into that braid you’re trying to make, is what.

15. Knots

“Just tie your hair into other parts of your hair,” they say. “It won’t make the sound of spaghetti getting slurped up and immediately dissolve into nothingness. We promise.”

14. Finger Waves

I could stick my fingers in my hair all damn day and I wouldn’t come out of it looking like Daisy Buchanan, or whomever. One doesn’t naturally follow the other. “Put your finger in your hair and press it tightly and you’ll have a curled-up head.” No, I won’t. Pinch your nose and tomorrow you’ll have different colored eyes. See, I can lie about the provenance of personal appearance too.

13. French Braids

I think I wore my hair in French braids once. Monica Kowalski may have French braided my hair at a sleepover in junior high, but I may be misremembering. She brought a big kit of makeup that night, and the excitement of it all may have clouded my memory.

12. A Regular Ponytail That Doesn’t Devolve Into A Side Part

All ponytails will slide off your head eventually. It’s an inherently unstable system.

11. Turning Your Long Hair Into That Fake Bob

Make your hair reverse itself, and tuck it up under more of your hair, and hide it there somehow, and now you have a different length of hair. I detest hair secrecy, and this is ridiculous. “Oh, did Betholomew get a haircut?” “No, she’s hidden all of her hair up inside of her other hair.” “Ah, yes, I can see the big bump of hiding hair on her head right now.”

10. What Is A Diffuser

What Does It Do

9. That Thing Of It’s Sort Of A Beehive But Just On Top With A Bump Kind Of?

How do you make part of your hair do one thing, and the rest of it another thing. How many hands do you have, and where do you put the inert hair when you’re activating the rest.

8. Putting A Pencil In Your Hair Like My Friend Natalie Used To Do But I Could Never Figure Out How

She’d just twist it up and put a pencil in it and that would be that. It just stayed there, like all those unfortunate princes who got caught in the hedge forest surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s palace before the winning prince got there.

7. Dry Shampoo

Now your hair is the same, but with powder in it. Nothing happened. And don’t tell me it’s just as good as washing your hair, because I have washed my hair, I am close personal friends with washing my hair, and you sir are no washing my hair.

6. “Backcombing”

It’s just pushing your hair in the wrong direction. It doesn’t work. It just makes your hair snackle and jump out at you and it feels awful.

5. That Inside-Out Braid

Where it looks like a regular braid that someone flayed the skin off of it. Only devil hands can make a fishtail braid.

4. Flat Irons

Now you have hot hair. In a minute your hair will stop being hot. Then it will be like nothing happened to your head at all.

3. Blow Drying Your Own Hair With That Blow Drying Brush

It can’t be done. Once you get the brush under a section of head, it’s impossible to do anything other than slowly pull it out to the end of your hair. You can’t twist it or make it go in any particular direction. And you can’t get the blow dryer anywhere near it, because the rest of your hair is flooshooping into your eyes and your face is hot and your hand hurts.

2. Having A Bun That Doesn’t Slowly Migrate Off Your Head

They just…slide down and out, like a drunk friend who doesn’t want to keep walking.

1. Hair Products

Now you have goop in your hair. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just goop, and now you have to wash your hair again. Your hair grows out of your head, and then it falls off, and in between nothing else happens except for sometimes you can wash it.

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The following are hairstyles that I have been able to replicate in the wild and am convinced exist.

6. Washing Your Hair and Going To Bed

What will it look like? You’ll find out in the morning.

5. Washing Your Hair In The Morning and Letting Nature Take Its Course

Things just get sort of progressively drier, and then the day is over, and there you are.

4. Trapping Your Hair In A Claw Cage

This one is tricky; this one requires skill. Snap your head forward such that all of your hair tumbles over your forehead toward the ground. Seize as much of it as you can and sort of frunge it toward the top of your head and wrestle as much as possible into one of those little plastic claws they sell at the Walgreen’s. Not too little. About as big as your first, the claw should be. Then trap your hair in the little claw prison. This is but a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but it will put your hair in a particular location for at least a few hours.

3. Cutting Off Your Hair Or Putting On A Hat

I don’t have anything else to say about this.

2. Run Your Fingers Through Your Hair

Now your hair has fallen into a slightly different position. If you are Rider Strong circa 1998, your hair looks terrific.

1. Having Someone Else Do Your Hair To You

Sometimes they’ll want money, but there’s no helping that.