The first few days with super long hair were exciting. I soon found myself gravitating towards completely different outfits, ditching neat Betty Draper dresses for ’70s-style flares and unbuttoned vests. I also (happily) became a human petting zoo, stopping friends to ask me questions like how long it took, what it felt like, and whether I was going to keep it. I also had an exchange with a bewildered (male) coworker, who tilted his head and added, “Oh, hasn’t your hair always been like this? This is so confusing.”
Now that I live in a long-hair world, I find myself envious of anyone who grows their locks out naturally at that length. “I’ve been attracted to long hair ever since I was about eight years old and was mistaken for a boy on vacation,” says aforementioned (and moodboard dream girl) Tish Weinstock of her self-described “long, dark, unkempt” locks. “Now I feel like it’s completely part of my identity. I can hide behind it, but at the same time, I can draw strength from it.”
If Weinstock brings a Morticia Addams to the long-hair conversation, Hill House Home founder Nell Diamond is her foil. “There was a time in high school when I thought my hair was bohemian,” Diamond jokes when I ask about her elbow-length brown locks. “But I quickly realized that there was nothing about my hair that I thought of as bohemian. I’d say it was pre-Raphaelite.” Her hair is the perfect horse girl in the most positive sense of the term: thick and lustrous, sometimes braided or adorned with ribbons. It feels like she’s the model for her brand.
While Diamond has experimented with different bobs in the past (“I’m never doing a bob again,” she says), a bob is out of the question for Weinstock, too: “I feel totally naked without hair and I know a bob doesn’t suit me, which is actually quite ironic considering how many times I went out in lacy ’30s dresses and thongs.”
Weinstock must have read my mind, because a few days later, I took my new look to the Côte d’Azur with plans. While staying at Eden Roc Hotel du Cap, I did the most French thing I could think of: posed topless on the beach, using my mermaid hair as a prop. During the same trip, I ran into Taylor-Joy at a Dior party and stopped to chat with her incredible stylist, Gregory Russell. A “curtain treatment” was a tip he gave me as another way to blend my natural and new hair more seamlessly.
Seven weeks and four not-so-thrilling hours in the back room of the Bellami shop later, my hair was gone and I was back to my “normal” self. My head felt lighter, my hair was thinner (I was warned this was normal), and I was surprised to discover that the bob I’d been hiding at my dream length had grown out considerably. I was that little bit closer to going back to bohemian hair.
