What’s Your Haircut Horror Story?
Posted by: Erin Flaherty
Filed in:
style
11:30AM, Wednesday September 2nd 2009
Just when you thought we couldn’t blame the recession for anything else, here’s one more negative impact: bad hair. The Wall Street Journal just published an article about how sales of clippers (such as the infamous Flowbee!) went up as the economy sputtered and made the reasonable case that families and even individuals are resorting to DIY cuts in droves. Salon business is hurting, and if you’re jobless or even just strapped for cash, it makes sense that paying for a haircut would be one of the first things to get cut (ha) from your budget.
Then again, this is your hair we’re talking about, people. When it comes to amateur haircuts, plenty can go wrong. As Gordon Miller, executive director for the National Cosmetology Association, put it: “It may look easy, but it’s not.” [WSJ]
We started thinking about times in our pasts when we were brave and/or foolish enough to chop our own hair, or a loved one’s, like the time I trimmed my friend’s bangs and they ended up crazy short. (Sorry Eliza.) After the jump, our haircut horror stories!
“When I was about 8, someone gave me a DIY hair wrap kit. I attempted that but wasn’t pleased with the evenness and decided to remove it. With scissors. While looking in the mirror. So, obviously, I cut a chunk of hair off the front of my head and had to get really ineffective revisionary bangs to try and hide it. Mommy was not pleased.” —Lily
“I cut my own hair throughout college when I didn’t have any money. I used to put chunks of my hair up with clips and do my own layers. I thought it didn’t look half bad! But once during my junior year, I cut my hair right before Halloween, and then at a Halloween party, a school newspaper pal told me a friend of his had been talking smack about a girl she knew who cut her own hair and said it looked awful. When I asked his friend’s name, she turned out to be my suitemate referring to me. Catty bitch.” —Jessica
“I’m too nervous about having a bad haircut to try it myself. I’ve cried and thrown hairbrush tantrums after getting my hair cut at a salon, so I won’t even trim my bangs or cut an out-of-place hair.” —Catherine
“Back when I used to try and blow-dry my hair like Angela Chase from ‘My So Called Life’ I once wrapped my hair so tightly around the small round brush I was using and it got so stuck, I had to cut it out. It was so not Angela.” —Amelia
“There was a time, circa 12 years old, where I tried to cut my own bangs with pinking sheers. I was old enough to know better.” —Kate
“Before I locked my hair I wore cornrow extensions. Problem was my hair was a different texture from the fake hair, so my kinky bits stuck out of the braid in parts. I decided shaving it with a razor would get rid of the problem. Wrong! Not only did I cut my own hair, but the braid also got all funky-looking because hair was too short in places.” —Annika
“In college, I cut a lot of my dude friends’ hair because we were all broke. It was all fun and games until my shower got clogged. Oh yeah, and one guy wound up with a weird-ass lopsided mullet. Oopsie!” —Simcha
“For three years, I cut my hair with a pair of scissors from the dollar store. It wasn’t pretty.” —Susannah
“One evening when I was still in junior high, I suddenly became so desperate to cut off my long hair, I grabbed the first sharp thing I could find — in this case, a pair of cuticle scissors in my dresser drawer — and started hacking away. I did one side of my head before I realized I’d made a grave mistake.” —Wendy
Um, whoa. Please share yours with us so we don’t feel so bad.
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MsMami
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 10:34 am: [report]
Im strapped for cash, so my four yr old son has to hold off on haircuts. He is starting to look like the wolverine, good thing he is into X-MEN.
Coral
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 10:37 am: [report]
I always cut my bangs myself and I do my layers myself. A couple times a year, I go to a salon to get it done professionally. I think I do a great job, and people always are surprised that I do it myself, because it doesn’t look bad. I have terrible memories for many years of my childhood when my mother would not have hair longer than past my cheeks. I don’t particularly like getting my hair cut at the salon because I have no control over it. And now I keep my hair long because I wasn’t allowed to for so long. I don’t think I will ever have short hair again.
GreenAura
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 10:39 am: [report]
My mom slapped a bowl on my head and cut around it when I was 8. My hair grows very very slowly so I had a mullet until I was 12. Combine that mullet with shark printed parachute pants (its was the 90s people!) and a busted front tooth and you have my childhood traumas in a nutshell.
william.paul
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 11:02 am: [report]
One reason that its great to be a guy:
I’ve been buzzing my hair since my second year of college. I’ve always preferred to have short hair and a good $30.00 set of clippers has lasted me for almost seven years now.
joyy
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 11:12 am: [report]
I chopped my long long hair a year and a half ago. <3 short hair, but I was still nervous to do anything interesting, so after initially having it lopped off with some layering, I started having her ease my style into an A-line (slightly shorter in the back but blended). This went well for a few cuts, and I was proud of myself every time I let her (and then liked!) the increasingly steeper angle of the A-line.
But then I went back in one time with the exact same directions I’d been giving her (trim it, layers, slightly steeper angle on the A-line), and she gave me an inverted bowl cut. It was all jacked up like Victoria Beckham wore for a while, and I didn’t say anything because I figured the blow-out/styling was what made it look different. I was wrong. It took 3 months to grow it out enough to get it fixed, and thankfully my new stylist not only knows how I LIKE my hair, but also what kind of cut will make me leave her as well.
ThatWeirdGamerChick
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 11:29 am: [report]
In second grade, my mom decided to cut my hair really short because she was tired of me screaming when she combed it (it was long, the knots hurt, I have a low pain tolerance) So we went to a salon and they cut it really… really short. Let’s just say that I didn’t look so good with short hair back then.
Now, I’ve been cutting my own hair for the past few years now, and I love it. I wouldn’t let a stylist near my head now even if I was paid!
bogart4017
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 11:53 am: [report]
I hate the time it takes to get a haircut. Because mine is soft and wavy and grows uneven any barber i have for under a years considers me some kind of science project. Meanwhile i’m sitting there fidgety and having all kinds of anxiety just dying to go home.
karmakaze
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 01:14 pm: [report]
My junior year of high school, my mother insisted that I let her “trim” my hair. She cut off 3 inches, homecoming was the next night, and I had already decided what to do with my hair. I haven’t let her near my hair since.
snap
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 03:50 pm: [report]
omg, love the picture!
Padre
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 03:59 pm: [report]
The Wall Street Journal failed to mention the newest invention…. the AirCut that just came on the market last week. I have been cutting my hair with it from it’s start…I am the inventor…it works…you can’t make a mistake…
Jenbug
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 05:12 pm: [report]
I have fairly long wavy hair and I used to just go to Great Clips or Super Cuts, pretty much any place that would cut my hair for under 15 bucks. I decided to treat my self to a real salon experience, so I went to this snooty little day spa for a cut and color. I am sitting in this perfectly groomed beauticians chair when she awkwardly asks me where I have been getting my hair cut. I sheepishly admitted my dirty little hair secret, and that’s when she tells me my hair is three inches longer on one side then the other! I don’t know what was worse, that I paid for such a bad cut or that I didn’t realize this massive length difference.
Coral
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 06:35 pm: [report]
@Jenbug: Is it possible that the hairstylist was just telling you that so you would stop going there and switch to the hair salon she works at? Because I would find it hard to notice such a big difference myself.
Anniushka
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 06:46 pm: [report]
Oh boy. And this Friday I’m due to get my hair lopped off at the local beauty school. Wish me luck.
Well, it can’t be as bad as last year, when several of my dormmates tried their hand at cutting our RA’s hair. At one point the electric clipper made an unusual sound and the boy wielding it said “Uh oh.” Not what you want to hear when you’re getting your hair cut! Our RA ended up with a “young Hitler” kind of cut. Good thing he was eccentric enough to like it (or kind enough to say he did)!
Aidra
wrote on September 2 2009 @ 08:46 pm: [report]
When I was 11 I wanted to get my hair cut in a longish pixie do. I went to Great Clips and the lady EFFED up my hair big time. It looked terrible. That summer I went to summer camp and I had a couple boys ask me if I was a boy or a girl. Arseholes. lol. I have come to realize I don’t have dainty, smooth features like some women do, so when if cut my hair really short and wear no makeup, it kinda looks rough. lol. Until a month ago I have cut my own hair for 6 years. People never believed me. I still cut my own bangs.
Jenbug
wrote on September 3 2009 @ 10:02 am: [report]
@Coral, no she showed me. It was then that I realized there was such a thing as too low maintenance.*sigh*
Western_Red
wrote on September 3 2009 @ 11:58 am: [report]
I have REALLY thick hair (every hairdresser I’ve ever been to comments on it). In 5th grade, I wanted a perm. Hairdresser told me that with such thick hair I’d need to have extra small rollers to make sure it set properly. Oh boy, did it. My shoulder length hair formed an almost perfect square around my face (complete with glasses and braces of course).
Now, not a big deal in and of itself . . . except that I did another perm two years later and I let a new hairdresser convince me a second time that thick hair meant I needed smaller rollers.
akanya
wrote on September 3 2009 @ 07:53 pm: [report]
A couple of years ago, I went to get a haircut. My hair was probably about two inches past my shoulders, maybe? I sat down in the chair, and said, “I want to grow my hair out - other than that, you have free reign, I just want it to grow longer.”
Cut to 45 minutes later and I have literally 1.5” of hair left on my head, and sideswept bangs that went diagonal across my forehead, the shortest of which was about .5” long.
I wish I was joking. I’d share photos, but I got rid of all of them - so terrible.