Why You Need Six-Month Haircut
from Bloomberg Businessweek
By Chris Rovzar
It’s time to stop going from trim to trim and build a long-term hair roadmap.
I’ve had roughly the same haircut for a decade. Like a lot of people, I find comfort in delivering my precise specifications to a barber. I could take my head to any chair and say, “No. 2 clipper on the sides, fade it in, and a half-inch off the top.”
It’s not just that I liked the predictability and don’t like the chitchat. It’s because in my early 20s, I made some truly gruesome hair errors. I grew it down to my eyelashes—picture early Justin Bieber, or the McDonald’s Fry Guy—and bleached it electric blond. I spent two years twitching it out of my eyes.
I’ll never forget the overwhelming joy from friends and strangers that came when I switched to a tight fade. Even a bouncer at a Meatpacking District nightclub, who I was shocked even knew I existed, said, “Thank God you cut your hair.” This caused some self-examination and a vengeful review of my close friendships. (Why had no one told me it was so bad?) I decided to just pick an easy cut and go with it. Forever.
And then, last June, I met Kristan Serafino, a celebrity stylist who’s worked with Ryan Reynolds, Shawn Mendes, and Robert Pattinson—men with thick, glorious, deliciously swirling locks. Whipped cream hair. The hair equivalent of the food the Lost Boys imagine for dinner in the film Hook.
Serafino asked if I’d take my hair on a six-month adventure. I didn’t understand. To me, hair was a biweekly commute. “It’s a three-haircut journey,” she explained, noting we’d go six to eight weeks between cuts. “Typically with the first, I’m working on someone else’s haircut. By the third, it’s ours.”
Men, she said, need to keep updating their style because their hair changes color and density as they get older. “Would you wear that same shirt every day of your life?” she asked.
Reader, a pandemic is a great time to try changing your hair! Chances are, you’re still not going to many social events or even the office. (In late 2021, I hadn’t worn dress shoes in months and still felt a strong aversion to floor-length pants.) You never know if there’s a better haircut waiting for you.
Serafino showed me photos for hair-spiration, including Brad Pitt at London’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood premiere.
“If I tell anyone this is what I think I can look like,” I replied, “it will make them so sad.”
And thus we began. She told me to wait until I felt I needed a trim, then wait two more weeks. Then she’d cut into my hair from the ends, shears pointed at my head rather than perpendicular. This takes out thickness without sacrificing length. Short, straight hair like mine can stick out on the sides, but Serafino’s thinning tactic got me through that phase.
Through fall, I let my hair grow even longer than in my Bieber period. Sometimes it was awful. I didn’t know how to make it do what I wanted, so I tried blow-drying it (helpful) and not washing it (gross). I remember entering a party once and wishing I could announce: “I know my hair looks bad. I just wanted you all to understand that I am aware!”
Other times I loved it, swept off my face with the aid of mighty styling clays, including one from Serafino’s new line, the Best Paste ($28).
She advised me to style it a new way every day: tousled, with a choirboy part, slicked back. I even parted it on the opposite side, which shook me to my core. I have a forehead scar from when I was 6 and a mounted moose head fell off a wall onto me. I’ve parted my hair on the left for 35 years to cover it. Now I brush from the right, showing the wound with pride, practically shouting, “I’m from Maine!”
There’s an awkward period for men called the Hat Phase, when you need a cap to keep your hair out of your face and train it to lay backward. During this time, in about December, my locks were Richie-from-Happy-Days length. I looked at photos of my old short cut and realized my hair had never been voluminous enough for my wide, expressive face. I’d looked like the yellow Teletubby: huge head, itsy-bitsy twirl on top.
I kept growing it until January, when I couldn’t go any further. It’s too windy in New York to keep my hair up and back, and I hate hats. But this was always part of the adventure: Serafino and I playing with length until we found what I liked. So we cut it back to a Zack-Morris-in-Saved-by-the-Bell length, parted it on the right, and stuck it in place with a Best Paste.
It looks just fine. And if some new barber asks, “What are you having?” I’ll say, “A journey. Let’s chat about it.”
