Suzanne Harrington: From hair-do to hair-don't — I just don't care about hair-care any more

Irish Examiner

20-07-2025

On my way to the hair salon to get my newly short hair cut even shorter, I tell my partner about what happened when my sister shaved her head a while back, going from a regulation shoulder-length lady hairdo to suedehead in less than 10 minutes.
Her partner thought she was using her new baldy look to signal an unexpected rerouting in a Sapphic direction, a route on which he was not invited; that she was visually breaking up with him, via her hair.
Her tweenage daughter, outraged at the unexpectedness of her mother's GI Jane skull, refused to speak to her for weeks, while older relatives assumed the worst — that my sister was bravely undergoing chemo.
Why else would a woman shave her head, unless she had become possessed by the spirit of 2007 Britney?
'Ha ha,' I say to my partner. 'Imagine all those inferences from a Number 2 setting on the clippers. Doing a sexual U-turn or having cancer or both. Almost as though straight women owe the world their hair.'
'Ha ha,' replies my partner nervously. 'You're not shaving your head, are you?'
When I emerge with a buzz cut — my son and I now have identical short back and sides — my partner does his best to conceal his dismay.
He's a modern man. I'd go as far as to say a feminist, and although he wouldn't know Andrea Dworkin if she headbutted him, he does recognise Simone De Beauvoir's idea that women are not born, but made.
He gets it — in theory at least. But Sinéad aside, turns out baldy women are not his thing.
For context — I have not got rid of my hair because of a sudden attraction to other women (a pity, living as I do in Brighton, lesbian capital of the universe). Nor am I undergoing chemo, thanks for asking. No. It's far simpler — I just can't be arsed anymore.
The clue is in the second syllable of haircare. It's a Boots aisle I no longer wish to visit. After 40 years of hair caring — from my first teenage dye-job, to decades of bulk-buying hair colour and DIY'ing over the bathroom sink, to snipping my fringe in the mirror — I want a hair holiday.
A hair don't care. I want no further involvement other than occasionally rubbing my head with a bit of kitchen-roll. I want to break up with my hair.
And yes, when I look in the mirror, it's not a version of Sinéad looking back at me, all big eyes and bone structure, as much as Jo Brand — someone I greatly respect and admire, but don't necessarily want to see in my reflection.
But at 57, can't-be-arsed wins hands-down over vanity every time.
The only problem with a buzzcut is that it grows out, which is why men go to the barbers every two weeks.
Unless of course you stash a set of hair clippers in your bathroom cabinet in place of all the stupid hair products relentlessly marketed at us from puberty to deathbed. Bzzzzzzz.
'Are you identifying as they / them now,' asks my partner bravely. He's doing his best, but he's struggling.
'Your lovely hair,' he whispers, almost to himself. Then he locks himself in his car for a cry.
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