Bobs Are Back
On no less than two occasions in the last two decades, I have cried in a hair salon. At eight and eighteen I had my hair cut to a bob and disliked it intensely and immediately. It didn’t matter how many other people liked it and told me so—I waited with bated breath for my hair to grow, sure at eight that it made me look like a boy and at eighteen that it would make boys not want to look at me. Embarrassing to admit now, yes, but a testament to the presence of the insidious little voice of the male gaze in the head of a young girl.
Now at twenty-two, I’ve cut my hair back to bob and I write to you today as its greatest champion. Maybe you’re fighting the urge to impulsively chop, or you regularly stand in front of the mirror bending your hair up and asking your roommate if they think that length would look good on you. Maybe you just feel fed up with your hair or with your appearance in general, like something about it doesn’t quite suit you but you aren’t sure why. Let me introduce you to the bob!
In the 1910s, dancer and actor Irene Castle cut her hair short for convenience prior to having surgery. Afterward, she wore head coverings until a friend convinced her to own the length publicly, and the look was featured in Vogue and other magazines across the country. As the women’s suffrage movement swept the nation in the years following, the bob became a symbol of the fight for gender equality. It even had an economic impact; bobbed hair requires more frequent trims, and as a result, the number of female hair stylists and salons for women in the US increased exponentially in the 1920s. In the decades since, the bob has been styled in innumerable ways and carved out its place as a timeless cut.
If you’re still reading, I take it you’re considering the chop. I would be remiss to not warn you of one of the bob’s principal challenges: updos are limited. Keeping your hair up at all is difficult given the lack of length, and you’ll have to get creative with ways to put it up when you need to. The bob is a highly individualized style. Since it’s definitionally face framing, it looks a little different on everyone, which is part of its charm!
This brings me to my most important piece of advice: if you decide to give the bob a try, find someone who knows how to cut your hair type. If you have some sort of wave or curl like I do, don’t let someone with straight hair simply snip straight across the back of your head and then shoo you out to cry in the parking lot. This was, I believe, the deciding factor in my distaste for bobs number one and two in my life, so ignore me at your own risk. And if you’ve made an impulse decision and your friend is using the stylist scissors you just bought for $8.99 at Walgreens, at least make them watch a YouTube video first.
I tried to force long hair off and on for years before finally coming to terms with the fact that shorter hair just suits me better. And so while this is an encomium to the bob, moreover, it’s an encouragement to find what suits you and embrace it. For me, embracing the bob has meant making peace with the reality that what works for other people isn’t necessarily going to work for me. Now I associate my hair and its cut with feeling more like myself in a way I didn’t know I could back when I was fighting my longer hair for some semblance of decency every day.
And so with that, I urge you to give the bob a try! But most importantly, I urge you to adopt what makes you feel like a self-possessed version of yourself, rather than what you think looks great on other people.
Strike Out.
Writer: Sarah Singleton
Copy Editor: Jane Dodge
Chattanooga
