Previously by Lindsay King-Miller: A Hole Album in Which California is Not a Metaphor for Anything and Being a Woman is Super Chill
So you got a super-short haircut! Good for you. You look awesome like that, and your eyes totally pop. But maybe you’ve decided it’s not quite the right look for you after all. Maybe you’re finding yourself inconvenienced by all the queer women, enamored with your bold and patriarchy-defying look, who follow you everywhere. (“Really, ladies, I’m just trying to order a latte,” you plead, but TO NO AVAIL.) Or maybe you’ve just had your hair short for a while and you’re ready for a change! I know that feeling well. So, how do you go from short-cropped to long, luscious locks without having to spend a lot of time in that awkward in-between stage? Here are some tried-and-true techniques:
Give your hair inspirational pep talks every morning, encouraging it to grow as fast as it can and reach its full potential. Make a playlist of invigorating songs to get your hair’s energy and confidence up.
Tie small weights to the ends of your hair to make it grow faster.
Wear an enormous, distracting necklace, so no one will look at whatever weird thing your hair is doing today.
Pull out all your eyelashes and eyebrows and glue them to the top of your head.
Become a professional skier, or a bank robber, or any other career that allows you to wear a hat and/or mask at all times.
Dye your hair in vertical stripes. This will create an optical illusion of greater length.
Many people experience a surge in hair growth during pregnancy, so get pregnant. If this is not possible right now, try to trick yourself into thinking you are pregnant by making a recording of the words “DO YOU KNOW THE SEX YET?” that you listen to eight times a day.
Wear wigs. A different wig every day. Add large sunglasses and a turned-up collar. Never use your real name.
Save up your split ends and bury them, along with a red stone and an egg with two yolks, by the light of a new moon. This will improve hair growth, unless you face northwest while chanting the Secret Words, in which case it will summon the demon Aphelth, who will devour your pancreas.
Feed your hair. It needs nutrients to grow! Smash fresh, organic vegetables and cage-free poultry onto your head three times a day. Don’t give your hair dessert very often, as this can lead to moral laxity.
Stop shampooing. This will prevent damage from over-washing, which can inhibit hair growth, and it will also make people want to be around you less, so they won’t see your weird medium-length hair.
Be lithe and androgynous like Katherine Moennig, and look amazing with a hairstyle that no one else on Earth could pull off.
Live in a cave like a bear. Don’t forget to take a salon’s worth of hair product in there with you, so you can emerge with your long hair clean, shiny, and perfectly styled. Every day can be Kentucky Derby Party Day if you believe in yourself enough.
Avoid damaging your hair with excess heat or chemicals that can cause breakage. Keep your hair in a temperature-controlled vault and check in on it once a week so it doesn’t get too lonely.
If you’re growing out bangs, it’s important to make sure they blend in with the rest of your hair. Drill them on their new identity over and over until they can recite the salient facts in their sleep.
Keep the back of your hair short while letting the front grow out. Divide and conquer. If you can engender competition between the disparate sectors of your hair, it will inspire faster growth.
Build a tower around yourself with no stairs and no door. You can’t get out until your hair is long enough to climb down. Having a clear goal in mind will really help you kick things into gear.
Go to grad school. Be so busy and stressed out (and, let’s be honest, drinking so much) that you completely fail to notice that your hair is growing out and looks super weird. Years in the future, look back at photos from this period and cringe.
Make peace with the fact that you will spend a couple months looking like Florence Henderson. Reassure yourself that she was, in her day, considered a very “lovely lady.”
Stick to pants and long skirts until the ends have softened.
I did the last one! But now I’ve gone and cut it short again and will have to pick a different strategy next time.
You’re getting a doctorate? Good luck!
I actually finished long enough ago to have gotten to the part where I look back on the photos and cringe. It’s true!
I know. But at least I notice that I had fewer wrinkles and age spots.
That last one is a little too real for me right now. A growing out cut + 8 layers of dry shampoo = fun kicky texture, right? RIGHT? Oh god nobody will ever hire me.
I think the last one is the “real” one, and the one that inspired this piece.
lol, I feel like you just mansplained hair to me. Thanks.
I’m really looking forward to that post-grad school haircut I’ve got coming…..eventually…………………..
(December, but that ‘s basically a million years from now)
I will have to try the weights next time around, feeding my hair didn’t work as well as I thought it would.
Well, this just reminded me to go make that hair appointment I meant to book last night. I’m just not ready to tie weights to my hair and my eyebrows are darker than my hair, so short hair it shall stay.
HATS HATS HATS! take up knitting in public spaces and people will be too distracted by your hobby to notice that your hair is sproinging in several directions.
This is my grow-out strategy! I take my knitting everywhere. Yesterday, while knitting during a film screening, a lady came up to me and hissed “Your movements are very distracting!! Just watch the movie!” I believed it to be a measure of the success of the strategy, as she didn’t comment on my hair at all.
Embrace The Mullet Phase, Dudes.
Accept that for six months your curly hair will grow out, as in horizontally, instead of down. Ask yourself every morning in the mirror why the hell you keep letting your mother talk you into pixie cuts. Tell yourself that this is the LAST TIME you let her do this.
Wake up one morning and scream at the lion’s mane of curls going every which way. Go to stylist and cut it all off.
Repeat.
My husband and I were looking at pictures from when we first met, when I wore my hair short. “Your hair looked so cute like that! You should do that again sometime,” he said. I nod. Then we scrolled through the photos where I was growing it out. Awkward silence.
Actual fight I had with my husband while growing out a haircut I hated: Him: “The smell of that hairspray makes me ill!” Me: “We are in the car going to a New Year’s party and this is the only thing I could figure out to do with my hair!” Him: “But I feel nauseated!” Me: “Stop picking on me!”
I did the last one, with the addition of “wrap your oddly bumpy and messy hair in scarves or wear a strange little hat.” Grad school was not a Pretty Time in my life.
Try to audition for something other than a small boy at your community theater.
My solution to this conundrum is to remind myself of split ends any time I think it might be fun to grow it out again.
i saw the headline (“gracefully”?) and my first thought was, “absolutely not possible,” but these realistic and helpful suggestions have helped me to believe that it is possible. (that divide and conquer though…. the painful bit is that you feel like you’re getting NOWHERE for so long, but at least you don’t have a mullet in the interim, i guess.)
as someone who recently hit the 14-month milestone from growing out a very-very-short pixie cut, yes.
also: get an undercut so you can stop worrying about the mullet and tie the rest of your hair into a very-very-tiny topknot. then resign yourself to the growing out process again on a smaller, partial-head scale, eventually.
I am fully in the Florence Henderson stage of a pixie grow out. I need more cabbage.
I have almost reached the “it’s a real bob now” phase of growing out my pixie! My stylist says another 2-3 months. Please everyone, go away and come see me around Thanksgiving.
SAME. T_T i feel like this is the most perilous and fragile growing stage…. it’s sooooo close now, soooooooo close!!
Yeahhhhgg I save my growing out for the winter so o have an excuse to wear a hat at all times. And I am the person in a tuque, even indoors, but so be it.
“Maybe you’re finding yourself inconvenienced by all the queer women, enamored with your bold and patriarchy-defying look, who follow you everywhere.” oh god but i wish that actually happened to me.
growing it out gracefully is possible only after the florence henderson/indigent traveler dirtbag phase.
I know! I read that and thought, wait, is that supposed to be happening? why isn’t it happening? maybe I need to keep it short for a while longer…
I read that, and instantly gave more thought to cutting my hair short.
Cut your hair all off before everyone else does, like “in 5th grade” before. Do not bother to get it cut in a recognizable style: 2 inches long all around and floppy is what is needed. Spend 6th and 7th grade growing it out, while looking enviously at everyone else who just got an actual pixie cut and/or dyed it bright purple. While at high school sleepovers, look back on all the group pictures taken at Bar/Bat Mitzvahs in those years with horror and collectively offer a prayer of thanks. Make a friend pact to never do that again.
I don’t have personal experience with this, I swear.
I’m in grad school and growing out some truly bizarre layers. I didn’t realize how perfectly one decision led to the other until now. Thank you.
I was thinking about getting a pixie and now I’m not so sure!!
Aw! It’s not SO bad, I blithely trill, not having really grown my hair OUT-out since I first cut it short in 2004. I usually default to a long-on-top pixie, and then let it turn into a mop before getting it cut again. Part of my survival skills include convincing my haircuttrix to really, YES TRULY, NO I WON’T BE MAD, taper the nape down to almost skin. This helps inhibit the early hints of ’70s Dude Hair and/or mullet.
That said, right now I have an [overgrown, short] angled asymmetrical cut, the shorter side of which used to be buzzed. It looks particularly charming (“charming”) when I pin back the longer part to keep it out of my face at the gym: tiny dumb partial ponytail + unmanageable inch+-long scruff.
hahaha what you’re describing, scruffyinch and asymmetrical bit of pinned nonsense, is exactly what my hair is rn. I have a habit I can’t shake of getting frustrated, lopping it all off MYSELF, loving it 2 weeks, and then a slowcreeping dread builds until it’s a fluffy monster again.
hair, tho.
Mm yes every so often I will get autoentrepreneurial (SURE, WORDS, OK) and decide that I can cut my own short hair. This works up to a point, and that point is usually “well, fuck, what do I do with the long part” after a self-trim/buzz or two. At that point I’ll scrounge up some pictures of Tegan Quin or Ginnifer Goodwin or whomever, and head to the local not-a-Hair-Cuttery, not-an-Aveda that WILL turn my mop into something resembling a “style” and WON’T make me destitute. (I’m almost at that point rn.)
HOW DO YOU CONVINCE THEM OF THAT?????
I have finally resorted to getting a trimmer and buzzing the back a bit before I walk in, just so they don’t “leave it a little long in back so you still look like a girl”, which leads to the mullet-esque hair in about two weeks post-cut.
1. Pictures that clearly show what you’re going for are really helpful.
2. Patiently explaining 400x that you want a very close taper, but [if you’re me] not a defined line at the nape, and that a skin fade is OK with you, can sometimes help. If you know the guard length you’d use on clippers, you can coolly reference that length.
3. If they try to say they want to leave some graceful/feminine fringe at the nape, politely decline and refer to points 1 and 2.
Also sometimes it takes cycling through several people (esp. if you go to a walk-in shop) until you find someone who cuts your hair in such a way that it both looks how you want AND grows out decently.
Uh, the stress of grad school will make your hair fall out in clumps. Particularly in second year. Not a good hair-regrowth strategy.
omg you forgot the best and easiest strategy for camouflaging awkward grow-outs – EXTENSIONS!
Tie industrial power cable extensions into your hair at regular intervals for a fun and practical style that works equally well in a Matrix-themed cyber dungeon party or a Greek Mythology cosplay meetup. People will be dazzled by your flexible yet well-insulated locks, and you’ll always be popular with builders, hedge trimmers, cleaners of large buildings and people with shitty laptops who want to use them outdoors.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA thx for the larfs 🙂
Yeah, anytime I grow my hair (usually via the power of inertia/ain't give a damn) into a shaggy past-chinlength something, thinking that there might be potential for something better than my usual (v. enjoyable!) style, I am reminded that: a] my hair has no body; b] ughhh. And then I delightedly cut it all back off, but when I inevitably review pictures of my hairstyles of yore, I become convinced that some longer thing or other was actually pretty cute, and why did I lop it off, again?
I had hip-length blonde hair for a while, and chopped it chin length. The guy I was seeing at the time saw me the day after I cut it, outwardly mourned my "fairytale princess hair," and then never saw me again. True story!
I have since grown it to mid-back, chopped it to a pixie, and then grown it back out again to nearly waist-length, which it is right now. I love having it this length, because I love the things I can do with it, but the long, blonde hair is definitely A Thing for some guys, and not in a good way.
Ugh, boys who tell me what to look like. Honestly, the shit I’ve done out of spite, just because he told me not to!
Either you are my age, or a chia pet. How long did that cycle of pixie to waist length take?
I went to the hairdresser today for a cut and colour of my ‘growing out ‘ hair.
Got blonde over the grey.
Got blonde over the white (which I didn’t want) .
Got blonde over the pink (you do that at home right?).
Got home with a cut that looked vaguely familiar.
She made me into Hilary Clinton.
I'm not the OP, but I have done the waist-to-chin-to-waist cycle a few times. It takes about three years for me.