Deborah Lopez
Last mid-winter, when I was in my mid-fifties, I got a pair of clippers and shaved my head down to velvety stubble.
It was something I had dreamed about for years.
And by “years” I mean “decades.”
I still remember an article I read in The Village Voice in the late 1980s about how women shaving their heads was both an act of liberation and beauty. This was at the height of Sinead O’Connor’s popularity, and I think her iconic example gave permission for many other women to shave their hair. There were many photos of women with shaved or shaved heads, and they all looked so attractive to me. I remember many of the people interviewed using the word “cleansing” to describe the act. One woman said that the weekly ritual of shaving her head not only made her feel stronger and healthier, but also like her life was suddenly in perfect order. “Shaving your head is like going to the gynecologist and dentist in the same day,” she said. The fact that I still remember that quote 35 years later shows how fascinated I was with the subject.
I’ve always been drawn to the idea of shaving my head because I’ve had issues with hair my whole life.
At least, that’s what I’ve been told for as long as I can remember.
Every woman with “difficult hair” has a different hair problem, but mine is like this: my hair is a mix of curly and straight, dry and oily. It’s thin but voluminous, and it gets nest-like and tangled easily. It can’t grow long and lush like a princess’s hair, because it starts to break off when it reaches my shoulders. I can’t just conveniently grow it out and put it in a ponytail, because there’s not enough hair to fit around a regular rubber band. I can’t just make it into a bob, because the shorter I cut it, the more it puffs up. My hair has always puzzled my mother (when I was a kid, she would conveniently cut my hair short, so I was always mistaken for a boy, and I hated that), and as I grew up, my hair began to puzzle me too. And so began my lifetime of searching the world for a hairdresser who could “do something” about my hair.
It had lots of pictures of women with shaved or bald heads, and to me they all looked incredibly attractive.
If you’ve ever seen a photo of my hair looking good, it’s because someone did it. Someone I paid to do it. I’ve spent a lot of money over the years to get my hair looking good. And I don’t use the word a lot of money lightly. And in my culture, “good” hair is silky smooth, shiny, with golden blonde highlights and light waves. It took decades, but I finally figured out the exact formula that makes my hair look more or less decent most of the time: daily shampoo (which I have to wash every day because of my thinning hair and oily skin nightmare), monthly highlights, quarterly keratin treatments, and blow drys for special occasions. And then it looks good! Sometimes! This whole situation averages out to about $700 a month, plus loads of time and chemicals. But with the right investment and the right humidity on the right days, I could leave the house looking like, “Your hair looks great!”
But in reality, my hair doesn’t look like that.
It doesn’t just naturally look that way.
It reminds me of a lyric by Dolly Parton that I’ve always loved. Someone once asked her if she gets upset about stupid blonde jokes, and she replied, “No, ’cause I know I’m not stupid. And I know I’m not blonde.”
In fact, very few people are blonde. While about 2 percent of the world’s population is naturally blonde, more than 50 percent of American women, regardless of race or background, wear some form of dyed blonde hair. Striving to be as blonde as possible seems practically mandatory if you want to be successful: A 2016 “blondeness” study reported that more than a third of female U.S. congresswomen and about 50 percent of female U.S. CEOs are blonde. That’s to say nothing of TV anchors. (Would you even get an interview for a job at Fox News if you weren’t a blonde?)
It’s packed with a lot of rubbish and nonsense, including a somewhat perverse obsession with youth (my highlighter was literally called “baby blonde”), nasty white supremacist overtones, and the widely held misogynistic assumption that blonde women are not only more fun, but also more friendly, likeable and approachable.
And I have been complicit in that folly for a long time.
But as I got older, I got tired of it, and over the last few years I’ve fantasized about shaving it all off almost every single day, and every month I’d sit in my amazing hairdresser’s chair for two hours and talk about it.
“One of these days,” I said, “I’m going to tell you to grab the clippers and shave it all off.”
Left: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
Left: Gilbert poses for camera with $700 worth of Goldilocks hair. Right: The behind-the-scenes joys of highlights, keratin treatments and blowouts.
“Why don’t you just get a nice short, stylish cut?” she would say. And eventually we did. But as anyone who’s ever had a nice short, stylish haircut knows, you have to maintain that style. And to maintain that style you need monthly cuts. And that doesn’t necessarily make your life easier.
But in the end, I cut off all my hair myself.
There were two motivations that finally gave me the courage. The first was a week I spent with my spiritual teacher. She is a woman in her early 80s and one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Her hair is white (not “platinum” white, but Mrs. Santa Claus white), her skin is wrinkled like parchment, her eyes are bright and kind, and her hands are spotless. And she is the freest person I have ever met, with the wildest heart. After a week in her radiant presence, I found myself thinking, “Why am I pretending that I’m not old yet? Why am I afraid to look my age? Why do these things even matter in the first place? What if I could be a gorgeous, fabulous old woman like her? What if I was just free?”
The second motivation was that a few weeks later I was at an event in New York with about 100 professionals. All around my age, men and women. Nearly every man in the room had short, cropped, utility-looking hair. All had silver hair, lines on their faces, good-looking features, they were all lovely. And every woman in the room had some form of long, very expensive-looking, complicated hair, and most of them were blonde. And it got me thinking: Why are we still doing this? Why has hair become so gendered? This is New York, one of the most liberal places in the world, this room is full of people who work in the arts, and we still have to follow these ridiculous rules.
That night, I had a realization. I could choose to lament how unfair and unequal the standards of beauty and aging are for men and women, or I could choose to assert for myself the rights of these men. I too could decide to crop my hair and wrinkle my face. I too could decide to stop striving for “pretty” and instead look simple, strong, comfortable, unpretentious, and lovely.
That’s it.
The next day I bought some clippers, watched some instructional videos (if you want to see some really great shaved hairstyles, check out this lady called “Gray Hair and Tattoos” on YouTube), and enlisted a former bad boy friend to help me put the clippers to my scalp for the first time.
It took about five minutes, but I was in tears when I was done. Not because I was horrified by the way I looked, but for the exact opposite reason: because I felt like I looked more like myself than I ever had before. I made this decision because I wanted freedom and convenience, and because I had decided to “give up vanity,” but when I saw myself in the mirror, I looked beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. It wasn’t what I expected. I thought I would look tough, weird, old, and that was fine. But when I saw myself without my hair, I thought I looked gorgeous, and I still do. I loved being able to see my whole head, my whole self. I loved all the white and brown and gray spots that caught the light and sparkled like the scales of a swimming trout. And I loved the way my scalp felt when I rubbed my hands against it. It was soft and fluffy like a puppy’s.
I might decide to stop chasing “pretty” and instead pursue looking simple, strong, comfortable, unpretentious and lovely.
“This is the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life,” I told my friend.Maybe that was an exaggeration, maybe not.
It’s been nine months since then, and I can’t imagine ever growing my hair out again.
I love everything about this hairstyle: being able to jump into pools, rivers, lakes, oceans, showers, looking perfect when I wake up, looking perfect when I get off a 12-hour flight, needing only 5 minutes to prepare before I go on stage to perform, constantly rubbing my scalp with my hands as if it were a good luck charm. And most of all, I love the radical independence it gives me. I have spent countless days sitting in a chair like I was an incompetent 18th century aristocrat while others tried to do “something” with my hair. But now I do it all myself. And yes, every time I cut my hair, I feel like I am purified and have my true spirit back. In fact, it feels strange now when I look at photos of myself when I had hair. The better my hair looks in old photos, the sadder it makes me think of all the time, attention, and money I have spent trying to look something I am not. Something that you don’t even know if it’s appealing other than the fact that everyone has always said that.
Of course, many men don’t like this hairstyle, but I don’t care.
In other words, it doesn’t matter.
I can no longer structure my life around a man’s preferences – I just don’t have the time for it.
I want to clarify that some black men do like this hairstyle. This is very interesting. A few months ago, I was walking down the street in Richmond, Virginia, and four young black men all turned to look at me as I passed them. “Hey guys,” I said, and one of them replied, “I love this hairstyle,” and that made me feel totally happy.
Queer women love my shaved head, of course, but so do straight femme women. In fact, it’s the women with the cutest, most complicated hair who gaze upon it most longingly. “I wonder if one day I’ll be able to shave my head,” they wistfully say, as if I had a castle in the south of France instead of bending over the bathroom every five days to get a five-minute haircut.
But the problem is that most white men don’t like this hairstyle, which is why I can’t help but think that it is indeed “important.”
This is important because white men shouldn’t always get what they want, and that’s not good for any of us.
The first time I posted a photo of myself with a shaved head on social media, a stranger wrote in the comments section, “Why do you want to be bald?” and I still laugh out loud when I hear that.
It was the ultimate confirmation that I did the right thing.
Hey, I want to be bald because I want to be free.
Hey, I want to be bald because I’m free.
If you can’t understand that, that’s why I want it.
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