The Bangs Rule

I have one rule I never broke, and here it is: I do not cut bangs on a woman who has been crying.

Not won't. Do not. It is not a preference. It is closer to a religious position.

You can spot it from the door. She comes in early, which she never does. Phone face down on her lap before she's fully sat. Mascara doing that thing where it's technically still on her face but has been rearranged. And then she says the sentence. There are variations, but the load-bearing part is always the same.

"I just want a change."

Sometimes it's something different. Sometimes it's I'm ready to do something drastic, which is the version where she has already looked up how much a pixie costs.

And what she means, underneath, is that something has happened that she cannot fix, so she has come to the one place in town where a person can be visibly, immediately, decisively fixed. She wants to walk out different than she walked in. I understand the impulse completely. I have had it.

But bangs are a two-year commitment made in an eleven-minute mood, and the growing-out is a slow public reminder of a private bad week, and I am not going to be the one who hands that to her.

So here's what I did instead.

I said the bangs were a great idea and we should absolutely do them, and that I wanted to prep the hair for it first, and then I put her under a deep conditioning treatment for twenty-five minutes with a warm towel and no conversation unless she started one.

That is the whole trick. It's not the conditioner. It's the twenty-five minutes and the warm towel and somebody standing nearby who isn't going to ask her anything.

About half the time she talked. About half the time she didn't, and slept a little, and I let her, and I moved quietly and rinsed her out and gave her a blowout that took forty minutes and cost her the price of a trim.

Then I said, "Come back in eight weeks and if you still want them, I'll take you right to your eyebrows and I'll do it for free."

Nineteen years of that offer. Four women came back.

All four of them got their bangs and all four of them looked wonderful, because by then it wasn't a rescue, it was a haircut. Dana was one of them. Told me she'd thought about it every day for two months, which is exactly the amount of consideration a face-framing decision deserves.

Bangs aren't the problem. Bangs are the symptom.

On a Thursday when you're fine, you can have anything you want and I'll be delighted to give it to you.

On a Tuesday when you're not, you can have a warm towel, a whole lot of my attention, and no permanent decisions.