New year, new hair? 2022 might be the year of the rebellious haircut

An acquaintance of mine once commented that I should “never cut my hair short,” remarking that my long, dark hair appeared “cool” and made me look “even younger” than my biological age. At the time, as well as throughout most of my adult life, my hair has reached the middle of my back with a severe center part, remaining just unruly enough to evade being classified as “bed head.” My hair embodied the ideal of effortlessness that fuels fashion and beauty headlines and shampoo At the tail end of my 30s, I latched onto the acquaintance’s remark in a way that made clear how much of a blinding influence traditional societal constructs of beauty, youth and age have on me. “So, when making a change of one’s image by cutting one’s hair, a shift in one’s energy field can occur with the vibrational frequency of self-love and/or self-confidence.” Mohar Chaudhuri, vice president of social intelligence at marketing and communications firm Edelman Data & Intelligence in New York, was prompted to cut more than a foot off her hair last fall because of the weight of general pandemic stress and the stress around planning her pandemic wedding. “I’ve maintained long hair ever since I was a little kid,” Chaudhuri says. “At Pinterest, we’re predicting 2022 to be the year of the rebellious haircut,” says Topran, who got a big COVID-19 chop recently, trusting Siobhán Quinlan at the Cutler West Hollywood Salon, to cut 6 inches from her hair.