I’ve always felt that image was a huge contributor to an artist’s success in the rock ‘n’ roll business. But I never quite put together how important distinctive hair was…

“A Visual Compendium of Notable Haircuts in Popular Music” offset lithographic print by Pop Chart Lab.

- Ted Kulczycky

I spent forty minutes watching “Asian Mullet” tutorials on YouTube. Favoured mostly by teenage girls with waist-length, dead-straight hair, the style wasn’t an intuitive choice, but the more I watched, the more they won me over.

Mostly, I’ve had it with my crappy hair. Over the last couple of months (as it grows out) it has been good for nothing outside of short and occasionally painful French braids. Of course, a DIY adventure had its own drawbacks (a bad cut and not enough left for braids at all). But if American Idol and these modern times have taught me anything, it’s that I should not let actual, provable, corporeal limitations dissuade me from making dubious and impulsive decisions.

So I grabbed the scissors and hacked at my hair for an hour and now I have some sort of shag thing happening. And it’s kind of awesome — and it wasn’t that hard.

- g.

Read more about G’s haircutting adventures in Issue 12.

A few weeks ago, I dyed my hair blue – not my whole head, but a fairly substantial bottom layer. The impulse to dye came not from a Clementine-esque desire to mark any major life change (although I’ll admit after reading the post, I pondered hair dye pretty seriously), but from feeling like I wanted to challenge myself – both aesthetically and, you know, in life. I wanted to get into the habit of doing things I didn’t think I could do. Hair seemed like a good place to start.

In the time since, I have learned not only that I should never underestimate the power of hair dye (and the Worn blog), but a few other things, too.

(And I do feel braver.)

10 THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT HAVING BLUE HAIR

1. It looks nice with blue hats.

2. It stains my towels.

3. And sometimes also the tiles in the shower.

4. And my neck, at the beginning. And the collars of my shirts.

5. It’s a good way to make friends. (I continue to be shocked by the number of strangers who talk to me about it. I have met more people in my classes this year thanks to my hair than in the last 3 years of my degree combined.)

6. It looks really cool in braids.

7. It has dramatically increased the number of conversations I have about Smurfs.

8. It has also dramatically increased the number of times people serenade me with songs that have “blue” in the lyrics.

9. It has given me a (very tiny bit of a) reputation as a rebel.

10. It makes me feel tough. In some ways, I feel like it gives me permission to be tough.

What have you learned from your hair-dye experiences?

- Hailey Siracky

I have a serious case of born-in-the-wrong-generation. While I know that life in 2010 has its perks, there is a part of me that has always longed for things like handwritten letters, dances on weekends, and long drives in cars without seatbelts. This longing is never more evident than during the visits I have with my grandmother. Although I don’t see her as frequently now that I spend most of the year away at school, I try to visit as often as I can. My favourite conversations are the ones about what her life was like when she was my age.

One particular evening, we were talking about hair – specifically, the things we do to curl it.

“We used to stick a six-inch nail right in the fire!” she said, holding her hands up to show me how long the nail was. Later, she told me about how her mother used to make rollers for my grandma and her sisters out of paper: “If you twist and twist and twist,” she said, making the motions with her fingers, “the paper gets stiff, and you can wrap your hair around it.”


“We used to wear rag curls, too. Do you know what those are?”

I smiled. I am very familiar with rag curls. I spent many evenings with my mom standing over me, wrapping my hair around strips of old towel or t-shirt until I had knots of fabric dangling all over my head. I always began with the hope that afterwards, I would look a little more glamorous and grown up – but the process inevitably ended with my looking like a poorly groomed poodle instead.

In photos of my grandma as a young woman, though, she always looks enviably classy and composed – all soft smiles and mysterious eyes and the kind of grace that refuses to suffer the indignity of unkempt hair. After I left her house that evening, I was determined to give rag curls another chance. If she could do it, so could I.

All I needed, really, was a little patience. Rag curls involve wrapping sections of hair around a long piece of fabric, and tying that fabric in a knot to keep the curl in place. The end result is usually very tight ringlets. I’ve found, however, that putting your hair in curls when it’s dry, rather than wet, keeps them from being too crazy. It also helps to give yourself a lot of time for the curls to loosen. Instead of poodle hair (which I’m sure has its moments as well), I’ve started to end up with soft and lasting curls.

Rag rolls appeal not only to the part of me that wishes my hopelessly straight hair would stay curled for longer than five minutes, but also to the part that wishes I could have gone to dances every weekend and waited for letters in a mailbox instead of my inbox. I know that the past has flaws, but my grandmother’s generation is one that I still long to understand. My evening visits help me feel closer to my grandmother, and being able to relate to her stories about curls connects me, in the smallest way, to the girl she was before I knew her.

- Hailey Siracky