Is This the Longest Hair in Downtown New York?

It’s been more than five years since Esther Kogan had a haircut. The night manager at Chinatown’s cultish Café Henrie remembers the moment well: “I had to stand up, because it was too long to cut in the salon chair,” says Kogan. These days, her thigh-grazing chestnut waves are something of a downtown fixture—acting as the physical time stamp of nearly a decade spent living in Manhattan.

Statement cuts, precision bobs, and flirtations with bangs may be a New Yorker’s right of passage, but Kogan has found a different way to hone her visual voice, refusing to fall prey to a scissor’s siren call. “I’ve only once traumatized myself by cutting it to my shoulders—when I was 9—and I cried and cried,” she recalls with a laugh of a dramatic shearing undertaken as an act of goodwill: Kogan donated her lengths to charity. But while she doesn’t regret the gesture, she hasn’t felt the need to change it since.

Head-turning lengths have been something of a phenomenon in Kogan’s DNA since her flaxen-haired Siberian grandmother gave birth to a curly-haired daughter. “My mother has crazy, intense black [ringlets],” says the Irkutsk-born beauty, whose family settled in Brooklyn when she was 18 months old. By the time Kogan arrived, the path was already paved for her to approach her own exaggerated mane with relaxed ease. “I think I’m blessed,” she says of learning early on to let it hang loose or coil it into a low-maintenance braid. Occasionally she’ll fasten it up. “I love a good high pony, but it’s super-heavy. Regular hairbands don’t work. I can only use old-school scrunchies!”

With its heavy, curtainlike aesthetic and Aphrodite proportions, Kogan’s hair can take on a near-talisman-like magnetism. “Other people are shocked by it—especially at work,” she admits of fielding requests from friends and colleagues who want to twist it into milkmaid braids or straighten it to its full length.

Maintaining its extreme length is not without its sacrifices. “The winters are the worst,” says Kogan. “My hair literally turns into icicles, and I’m scared it’s going to break off.” Meanwhile, in the first weeks of summer, “I feel like I’m wearing a fur coat.” But it’s not enough to sway her to change it. “You always want what you don’t have. But you just have to own what you got,” she adds.

And embracing what nature gave her has allowed Kogan a lifetime to perfect the look of her eye-catching strands. She swears by sulfur- and alcohol-free shampoos to keep her hair healthy.  A creamy, dense conditioner locks her curls together: “I don’t always fully rinse it out, especially in this humidity.” Air-dried for a day, then slept in with a braid, she wakes up with “the top not too puffy and a good wave going, and the bottom curls a little bit.” All the makings of a perfect hair day, and a texture that can read everything from authentically bohemian to slyly subversive. In other words, the kind of versatility worth going to great lengths for.

“Dove Hair research found that 8 in 10 women feel pressure to wear their hair a certain way. In order to break down the beauty standards that prevent women from loving their hair, and celebrate all hair types, Vogue and Dove have teamed up with real women—not celebrities—to tell their inspiring hair stories. Discover more about Dove’s mission on Pinterest.”

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