A friend of mine told me that maturing women in their 30s and beyond should lose the bangs. By bangs, she meant the straight and blunt cut variety. She reckoned that 30s would be the best time for the girl inside us to fully blossom into a woman. While I do concur that the side-swept look is chic to the point of sexy, I also feel like it’s not for me.
So I’m back with bangs.
I used to maintain the same straight-cut thick fringe, on and off, since I was in kindergarten. When I first met N, I wore my hair long and straight with the usual bangs. He never said anything until I chopped them off two years later. “What happened to your ‘Ju-On’ hair?” he asked, not exactly pleased with the short bob I was wearing. Did I look like a revengeful yurei all the while? I’d like to think he meant I’d lost the Japanese-esque hairdo.
I grew them back and settled with where I began: long, straight and those bangs. There were times when I grew the fringe out of necessity. Trimming the fringe takes time and money. Trimming the fringe on your own, then again, takes courage and a steady hand. So ever since my wedding, I’d grown out my bangs and wore the Marcia Brady hairstyle for as long as I could.
Yet boredom lurked. Looking into the mirror with the side-parted everyday hair made me yawn. So instead of grabbing a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or shaving off a chunk of hair at the sides, I got those bangs back. I had them full and long and let them sit just below the eyebrows.
The bangs might not make me look like Anna Karenina or those French girls with perfectly-effortless fringe framing their face. The bangs might even make me look like a white-faced ichimatsu doll from Japan. The bangs might not necessarily make me look younger either (although many have said that the bangs reduced a few years off my age) but what matters for me is what I feel.
This feels familiar. This feels better. This feels more like me.
At least for now.
