The Life-Changing Magic of Learning to Embrace Hair Breakage

No amount of hearsay can prepare you for the horrors of breakage—the first time you run your fingers through your hair and hear that telltale snap. Frequent fraying comes hand in hand with extreme color—and every good colorist will tell you it’s part of the bargain, before dunking your head in bleach—but it’s easily shrugged off, until it happens.

After going pastel pink last winter, my lengths stayed hale and whole for months. It took a few root touch-ups for the nightmare to begin—strands cracking apart, the moment anyone brushed against them, the smattering of inch-long hairs studding my scalp and growing strong. “I think I want to get bangs,” I told a friend this summer. “Girl, you already have bangs,” she said, lightly grazing the baby hairs that had spread thickly across my forehead, from ear to ear.

There’s a visceral terror in feeling your hair physically break in your hand. Last month, I unearthed a circular clump at the crown of my head that now waves in the air like dandelion fluff. Of course, I began an exhaustive regimen to fight it. A Slip silk pillowcase did wonders to protect the back at night, and I became fanatical about cold bath water, nourishing serums, and B3 Bond Builder treatments to coax each piece back to health. It worked rather well until fashion month, when the whirlwind of shows kept me from it. Even at my best, the breakage could only be minimized, not stopped entirely, no matter how hard I tried.

Then, backstage at Giambattista Valli’s Paris Fashion Week show, I heard hairstylist Paul Hanlon speak of the inherent beauty of flyaways. “It goes electric, goes static,” he said of the young virgin texture he crafted for the runway. “Like fairy hair.” That yen for uneven lengths seemed to intensify, too, at shows like Proenza Schouler and Céline, where air-dried manes kept a scattering of short curling strands on top. Elsewhere, double-processed It girls like Irene Kim and Kristen Stewart started to pull their hair back, leaving a row of cute pseudo-fringe exposed. It’s enough to make you realize that rough-and-tumble texture might be part of the charm of having bleached lengths, better embraced than fought tooth and nail. Fairy hair—who could hate having a thing like that?

 

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