Hair Hair Hair

I’m going to be honest with you: this blog is going to be pretty boring for the next month. I am shooting every weekend, but not as myself — I’m helping out at other photographers’ weddings a lot and have no weddings of my own until the end of July. I basically picked a nice time to quit my day job and focus on my own business, because I can do all sorts of behind-the-scenes things in my little office, and go out to look at properties that we might rent when our lease is up at the end of the month, and eat lots of watermelon…

So the blog is going to be full of personal posts for the next few weeks, and then when it’s August we’ll start rockin’ and rollin’ with Olivia and Amy’s wedding, then Angelica and Christopher’s, and just keep steamrolling ahead with all the amazing weddings going on in September through the rest of the year. Bear with me.

This post is about hair. (I told you it’s going to be boring.) I’d been growing my mermaid hair out for the past few months, because long hair is easier to deal with on wedding days than short hair. I would take my long-long hair and braid it and pin it up with a million bobby pins so it was out of my face, and I’d go shoot in the outdoors with a breeze touching the back of my neck.

Back of my head photo shot by Meredith Greager.

I knew I wanted something different, but wasn’t sure what. I decided to make an appointment with my stylist, Chrystal, and let her do whatever she thought was best. I gave her some guidelines, like “if it’s short, it has to be so short it doesn’t touch my neck, or slightly long enough that I could put it into pigtails for when I work out” and “I liked having bangs… let’s do that again,” but as for the rest, I sat contentedly in the salon chair and had her fuss over the options.

It was halfway through the cut that I decided to say, “I was thinking of something… asymmetrical…” It’s been quite a few years since I’ve read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, but I remember one line that in my 7th-grade-mind had been so cool. “[Hairdresser] had styled my hair differently this time, an asymmetrical blunt-line fringe that was shorter on the left side. It was fashionable, yet not radically so.” I wanted something that was low-maintenance but still stylish on its own.

Chrystal was apprehensive for a moment: “I’ve never done asymmetrical on hair like yours before,” she said.

I settled back in my chair and said, “I have total faith.” And if she messed up, we’d just chop it off to be even on both sides. No big deal. I wasn’t super attached to the long hair.

So she started snipping away, and even without my glasses on I could tell that it was turning out fabulously. When it was all finished, I told her she was a genius. Though now I have to figure out a new way to wear my hair on wedding days, because it can’t stay down and it probably won’t stay up. I’ll work on those solutions.

Yay! (Also, pardon the bathroom-mirror-camgirl shots. I wanted to take the photos quickly and didn’t feel like setting up a tripod.)