BIG FEELS ON HAVING BANGS:
Every morning I wake up with my bangs absolutely shooting straight up from the top of my head.
My partner’s favourite – recently banned – joke in the morning is to quote: “Napoleon! Eat your dang quesadilla!” Alluding the the fact that I resemble Carlinda "Grandma" Dynamite.
So rude.
I’ve been cutting my bangs for upwards of 20 years now, and it’s still a gamble every time. The difference between chic, cool-girl bangs, and categorically-fundamentalist-Christian-housewife bangs is a matter of MERE CENTIMETERS.
Bangs are a high stakes game.
I started cutting my bangs in the same way we all start cutting our bangs: in secret, in my childhood bathroom, with whatever scissors were the most readily available to me. True to form, I was a late bloomer and didn’t cut my first bangs until I was 10 or 11. As it turns out, the bangs weren’t all that bad, and soon I was the official bang-trimmer of the entire household.
We were a bang family, mainly because we were a big forehead family.
I always knew that we had big foreheads because my mom would tell us: “Our family has big foreheads. We have to wear bangs.” I mean, it’s true, my forehead is kinda big (in a chic way, of course).
I’ve had my small rebellions. I grew my bangs out at age nine, and again a few times in my twenties. Mostly, I’ve been a bang girl, though.
There is a (lost) picture of 13 year old me that lives in my bangs hall of fame: I am sitting with my cousin and my cousin’s friend outside of YC, the biggest evangelical Christian youth conference in the prairies, and we all have the biggest, bounciest, round-barrel-curled bangs you’ve ever seen. Sprayed stiff with aerosol hairspray. You couldn’t tell me anything that day. I was hot shit.
In my life of bangs I’ve had them blunt, to the side, accidentally-too-short, flat, too-thick, too-thin, and, of course, the ultimate right of passage: the crisis bang.
The thing about crisis bangs that nobody talks about is that you actually want them to be bad. You need them to be a signal: HEY WATCH OUT MY ENTIRE LIFE IS IMPLODING. It’s truly one of the most self-aware things you can do – get severe bangs in a crisis. For my own spin on crisis bangs, I went micro. I mean, as a bang person already, I only had so many options to make a real impact. I’m as proud of my crisis bangs as I am of my round-barrel-curled bangs: they served a purpose and fit the moment. Again, in the case of the micro bangs, I needed them to be kind of bad. I needed them to say, “Fuck off, actually.” They were therapy as much as lying on the floor crying and calling my friend Danielle. They were therapy as much as actual therapy.
But today, on April 11 in the year of our lord 2022, my bangs are actually pretty hot. I thought I fucked them up with my last trim, but after a couple days, they’ve settled into themselves and decided to be a team player. Bangs are a fickle business, and there’s no way to know if next time they will turn out again…or not. I have to live in the moment, and thankfully, this moment is a sexy one.
My only sage advice for all you aspiring bang-havers is to accept the bangs for the lesson they want to give you. It’s like astrology, sometimes it’s a massive ego boost, sometimes it’s humility and pure retrograde chaos.
Also, always trim less than you think you should. Always, babies. *prayer hands*
Talk soon,
Natahna
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The Recommends: The song, Naked in Manhattan, by Chappell Roan.
I LOVE this
I chuckled so many times at this brilliant piece! Confession: I've never cut my own bangs. But now I know what to do during my next crisis!