If it's good enough for Beyoncé, it's sure as hell good enough for me. Well, that's what I've been forced to mutter this week, when in actual fact, it's actually, 'if it's good enough for Emily Phillips to cut off her long tresses, then it's good enough for Beyoncé Beyoncé to copy her.' Because I got there first Bey.
Alright, I did sort of rip off your baby bangs.
And it's a change I could have lapped her on a good few times, the amount of months I've spent umming and ahhing about it. Because, having dutifully grown my hair long long long for my wedding (having gotten engaged in November 2012), I had in the process resisted several bouts of nihilistic temptation to have:
1. A half-head undercut (see Cassie Ventura)
** 2. A pixie crop (see Anne Hathaway)**
** 3. A crayon dye-job (see all of Bleach London's models, ever)**
But, I stayed strong, persisting in growing my long, thick, chocolate brown mane until the wedding on May 31st this year. At which point I opted to wear it in an updo. Which I could have had with short hair anyway.
Anyway, my journey into long hair complete, I now decided it was time to part ways with the fuzz and move on to 'Mrs P Hair.' This, I decided in a summertime frenzy, would be somewhere between Katy Perry's Slimer green bob and Sophia Amoruso on the front of her #GIRLBOSS book.
Then I moved house, and changed job, and had an almighty freak out at all the gargantuan life shifts. I clung to my mop of unruly follicles like a well-worn security blanket. I couldn't change both the interior and exterior of my head at the same time like some sort of human Play-Doh Mop Top...
However, here we are, four months on. A season has passed and I'm approaching my next (quite non-millennial-sounding) birthday. It was time to pass the scissors.
When I visited Mark Woolley at his Electric Salon in Marylebone, I came armed with a year's worth of thoughts and a (probably quite misleading) Pinterest board full of grown-up, wavy, short dos. Mark listened, got the measure of me, then probably ignored me a bit, and took it a big step further.
As the 8 or 9 inches of length fell to the floor, I felt suddenly elated - I was half anticipating a Karen Gillan Guardians of the Galaxy sob-fest - I was literally goading the scissors. If he'd have been armed with clippers, this may well have resulted in Les Miserables disaster.
But what actually happened turned out to be the perfect read of my initial post-wedding mood (powerful, grown-up Nasty Gal) with a hint of my former self from long ago - a kind of 90s-Natalie-Portman-in-Leon-meets-Amelie-crossed-with-Evie-from-The-House-of-Eliott thing (minus the childlike shortness).
I feel like a new girl. And it mysteriously makes me look more grown up and younger at the same time. It has also revealed some very unkempt eyebrows (which need a touch of Lily Collins-ing), but it also somehow unlocks a personal style I wasn't mastering before the chop. I'm definitely not going to wait before making big changes next time.