The Truth About Short Hair

A lot of the girls I've talked to think short hair is awesome. It's clean, it's chic. It gives off an air of elegance, grace, and maybe even maturity that doesn't come as easily with longer locks. Plus, it's super easy to manage, so you can even save on shampoo!

However, these notions are false. Short hair is nothing but an illusion. Today, my goal is to bring forth several terrifying issues to light, which remain veritably unknown to those who have never had short hair. Behold, the truth about this phenomenon, disclosed in public for the first time.

Myth #1: short hair is neater than long hair.
A lot of people first chop off all their locks thinking that short hair is tidier, doesn't need as much brushing, and can save them a lot of time in the long run. I know when I first got short hair, that's what I was expecting. However, this cannot be further from the truth.

Let's talk physics for a bit. When you have longer hair, it has a greater mass. Weight = (mass)(force of gravity), which is relatively constant in the downward direction. Thus, as you can see, having long hair automatically encourages your locks to fall towards the ground-- that is, the direction it's supposed to be in. However, when you reduce the mass of your hair, this downward pull is absent. There is no longer a force encouraging your hair to go the way it should. Instead, you end up with things like this:

When this unfortunate event occurs, the only solutions are to artificially weigh your hair down with water (which is pretty bad for its volume and consistency), or to wear accessories like your life depends on it. Sometimes, you simply have to take a full shower to bring your hair back down to base level.

However, it is also important to note that it is simply impossible to sleep with wet, or even slightly damp, short hair. That's a horror story on a different level altogether.

Myth #2: short hair doesn't need much care to look presentable.
Another point related to the "tidiness" of short hair is its supposed ease of care. This notion is also completely false, and almost entirely for a single reason: one cannot competently put short hair in a pony tail. It simply isn't done.

Before my hair was the length it is now (still pretty short, but by no means how short it was before), I simply accepted bad hair days as a fact of life. In high school, if you woke up at 6:45AM with a ridiculous cow lick in your hair and had to be out the door in 15 minutes, there was no way to salvage your appearance. You simply walked with your head held high, hoped that gravity would do its job, and forgot about it during the day. 

However, once my hair started growing somewhat longer, I discovered a neat trick, known and beloved by every long-haired person since the beginning of time: ponytails.

How versatile. How easy. How glorious! With the right clothes, a ponytail can even make it seem like you put more effort into your hair that day-- what a wonder.

But when you have short hair and you try to fashion a ponytail, the results simply aren't the same. The few times that I wore a pony tail with short hair, I didn't feel glorious at all-- I simply felt like a samurai.

And finally...
Myth #3: Short hair makes you look more mature.
Ah yes, the vaguest myth of all. I'll give some credit to this one: oftentimes, having a shorter cut does indeed make you look a bit older. If you manage to avoid all the horrors listed above, it can definitely bring about a certain elegance to your look.

But maybe I just have a bad history with short hair. For me, short hair does not make me feel older. Ironically, a horrible short hair cut that I got last year was almost exactly the same as my hair when I was six-- that is, it was the infamous Asian bowl cut. Thus, when I had short hair, instead of feeling older, I rather found myself questioning if I'd aged at all in the past 11 years.

Thus concludes my startling report. Perhaps now when you see a person walking down the street rocking a beautiful pixie cut, you can recognize their efforts. Give them a high five. Buy them an ice cream or something, because a beautiful, well-groomed short hair cut is not an easy feat to manage-- literally.