The Thin Line Between Love And Bangs
By Kara Nesvig
The biggest love-hate relationship in my entire life isn’t with a man. It isn’t with alcohol. It isn’t with shoes that hurt my feet or too-tight jeans or with gluten or Cheetos or anything like that.
Nah.
It’s with my bangs.
When I have them, cut low near my eyebrows and thinned out, more Bardot than Marianne Faithfull, I hate them.
When I’ve let them grow out to brush my cheekbones – that’s as far as they’ll grow at this point, because I’m always growing them out and then hacking them back again – I miss the fringe on my face. I stand in front of the mirror and contemplate making the snip again.
One night in college, I drank an entire bottle of champagne by myself and then cued up the Rolling Stones very loud, took off my dress and sliced some bangs into my hair by myself, tipsy, in the bathroom with a blunt kitchen scissor. They weren’t perfect, but they were good enough to take out to the bar that night and have shaped by a real stylist in the morning. It was very rock ’n’ roll.
The problem is that my hair is curly, so having bangs requires that I a) blow-dry them immediately upon washing my hair and b) apply the moisture-zapping, hell-hot flat iron to them most every day. Plus, I can never get my bangs styled as well as my hair stylists do. They never lay the same way when I do it because I am a klutz with the hair dryer.
But I look so cute in bangs! With bangs, I don’t have to wear a full face of foundation and sometimes I don’t even need to tint my eyebrows! Bangs are a “look” all the time. So many iconic chicks have bangs; I’m talking Bardot, Marianne, Stevie, even Reese Witherspoon has had some great bangs. (If we’re being real here, hers are usually the style I request.)
Unfortunately, my love affair with my bangs lasts about three weeks. My hair grows fast despite my love of bleach, so I gotta trim that shit or grow it out. I don’t have a whole lot of leeway to make a decision. It’s fight or flight with my bangs. I decide to let them go, then spend weeks upon weeks growing them out. That’s the biggest bitch of all: not the styling, not the flat iron’s sizzle, but the growing-out stage. I twist them back with a bobby pin, braid them, curse my stupid impulsive self for cutting bangs in the first place. And once they grow to the perfect length where I don’t have to worry about them, I get the urge to cut bangs again.
I had the Jessica Simpson clip-in bang extensions for awhile and I love them, but they don’t match my platinum hair and don’t come any lighter than a honey-blonde shade. Plus, you can’t have roots with those babies or they look mad weird. Oh wait … I just discovered that eBay sells fake bangs for $8 from China … I just don’t think I can wait 15 days to get them. Talk me down from the ledge here, folks. I am not above getting naked and snipping them off again!