When I was young, I had very curly red hair. In fact, when I was out with my mum, old ladies used to stop my Mum and I to exclaim what lovely hair I had. As a 6 year old, I was a bit creeped out by all this unwanted attention from little old ladies in the street, to the point that at one point, I even asked my mum to get me a hat so I’d be less conspicuous.
Over time, things changed, my hair got shorter (and thankfully the old ladies stopped exclaiming “What wonderful curls you have!” in street) and I thought no more of it.
That is until a few years ago when I decided that I was going to see what long hair was like – hair and headbands became an important accessory, simply to keep the curly lightning bolts out of my eyes. After years of short hair, it was really interesting to see what the differences of having long hair were – without a hairband for instance – I didn’t really feel “complete” or at ease, I enjoyed being able to shake my head and get “tactile feedback” from it moving from side to side. It was helped make me stand out – being able to be easily recognised can be very useful – especially in crowded places and I found that my hair was quite distinctive and unique and so people would find me quite easily.
However, in the end, I realised it wasn’t looking quite how I originally wanted it to look – and whilst I largely happy with it, I could explain [to myself] how I wanted to change it to look better. I decided to start again from scratch, and so one haircut later and – there I looked like the photo on the left.
But I still missed the hairbands, and what make me stand out, so I tried to think what I could do that would go some way to replacing that.
Then I had an idea:
