Bring Back the Blunt Cut! Why One-Length Hair Is Everything

For nearly as long as I’ve had hair, I’ve more or less had the same haircut, which is to say not much of a “haircut” at all. I’ve simply maintained my long, semi-wavy, chestnut-brown lengths through quarterly straight-across trims—a blunt cut that feels, both literally and metaphorically, square.

Though this isn’t a conscious act of protest, it sometimes feels like one. Stylists tend to sigh with disappointment, or even scold me, when I land in their chairs. (One household-name hairdresser—who dismissed my look as “so ’70s” and proceeded to carve six-inch-tall Vs into the ends—comes to mind.) After all, nearly every contemporary beauty role model, from bombshell-of-the-moment Gigi Hadid to most of young Hollywood, has pronounced layers cut into her lengths. And it’s easy enough to understand why: Graduated, thinned-out pieces add movement and dimension; they reduce weight; they have a rock ’n’ roll sex-kitten pedigree; they can even be transformed into trompe l’oeil bobs. And, as clicking around this site will reveal, they’re very much of our time.

But for me, that’s precisely the problem. I’ve always felt more Victorian-lit student than Victoria’s Secret Angel; I’m also a staunch minimalist. Staggered and tapered Kardashian-style hair, to me, feels like the digital age equivalent of The Rachel, fated for time-capsule status. And as 2016 kicks off, bringing with it a collective urge for reinvention, a simple, no-fuss chop just might be, at this point, the most radical beauty move of all.

Call it normcore hair or the follicular equivalent of decluttering, but “at the moment, blunt cuts seem very fresh and new to the eye,” says Guido Palau, the hair mastermind behind many of the industry’s most influential runway shows and editorial shoots. “The hardness of the cut gives a strength of character.” Palau and his team revisited the style in earnest at Céline’s Fall 2015 show, where they gave blunt cuts to Chloe Wheatcroft and Simona Kirchnerova; backstage at Alexander Wang’s Spring presentation a show season later, they engineered what Palau calls “short, blunt ’20s/’50s bobs” on several models. “It’s a strong look,” Palau says, “and the mood is very powerful.”

Of course, some heads of hair are powerful enough on their own. With straight-across scissoring, ultra-thick and curly textures run the risk of achieving the dreaded mushroom effect—a sort of witch’s-broom fanning-out. (Though on the other hand, the inverted triangle can be a fierce look if you own it; the unwieldy madness of Gilda Radner’s mop top, for instance, was precisely its charm.) Palau agrees that the blunt cut “works with pretty much any texture,” but notes that dense-hair types might benefit from a bit of softening, if only at the ends, “just to break it up.”

But for those who wish their hair had more volume—a camp I fall into—severity makes sense. After all, breakage from color and heat styling causes lengths to taper naturally. Why hasten that process? And if fuller hair, as conventional wisdom goes, makes you look younger, why would you want any part of your hair to look thinner? “It’s all about having the thickness at the ends,” says stylist Ashley Javier, who has been giving blunt cuts to Chloë Sevigny for years, “because that looks healthy.”

Determining the right length for your face shape is key to pulling off a sharp-edged style, says Javier, who maintains that most women can carry a blunt bob or lob. With long blunt cuts, “I always say it’s best never to go longer than the bra strap,” he says. They have “that old New England preppy look—those values of always keeping your hair trimmed and groomed. It creates a certain kind of graphic look.”

Ultimately, though, what makes the blunt cut cool is that it’s not cool: It’s almost naive in its simplicity, the beauty equivalent of white cotton underwear. Think about it: Gwyneth Paltrow’s Margot Tenenbaum in The Royal Tenenbaums might have looked edgy with, say, a shag, but she wouldn’t have telegraphed the same insolent charm; the tension between her conservative bob and bad-girl eyeliner is the crux of her appeal. And Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction is a femme fatale not because of her neat, girlish coif, but in spite of it. The blunt cut shifts the burden of complexity away from the hair and onto the woman herself. And that—to put it bluntly—is what beauty is all about.

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