My New Haircut

I have great hair, or a “great head of hair,” as my maternal grandmother likes to say. I don’t take after the men in my father’s family, where receding hairlines start in the men’s early 20s and wreak follicle havoc on through death; nor do I have hair like the men on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family, where there was never much hair to do much with. But, like a lot of men (especially in the DC area) I suffered from a hair-related illness: I didn’t know how to ask for a good haircut, and too often I settled for bad ones as a result of trusting stylists to discern, perhaps via divination, exactly what I wanted them to do with their shears.

Some of us are especially bad about this. We treat haircuts like a chore, no more aesthetically significant than mowing the yard or picking out new drapes. “Take a little off the top,” we say. “Trim the sides,” we grumble. Or worse, we don’t ask for anything: “I don’t know, just do something with this,” we say as we wave a hand over our heads, as if swatting at swarming bees.

I used to be like that, and I suffered through years of weird and thoughtless haircuts as a result. Bowl cuts. Buzz cuts. Flat tops. Ambiguous messes. The caesar cut (before and after it was cool–not while Justin Timberlake had it). And then one day, I learned to talk about my hair. On an impulse, I asked my stylist how I could make my hair less dry and poofy.

“Do you use dandruff shampoo?” she asked.

My god, I thought. They really are telepathic!

“Yes, yes I do!”

“Well stop,” she said. “Use dandruff shampoo every other day, and then use something a little kinder to your hair on the other days. And condition every time, whether you use regular shampoo or anti-dandruff. And skip a day here and there so that your hair benefits from the scalp’s natural oils.”

And thus an appreciation for my hair was born. My stylist taught me other things, too. About layering (for that brief time when I wanted longish hair); which styles should be rounded in the back and which styles should be squared; why one should always get one’s sideburns trimmed; how to defeat my cowlick; which hair products to use and how to apply them.

So here’s my advice for DC men with hair and hair issues (sorry premature baldies, no list of advice will ease your pain):

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