1. Their excruciatingly short shelf life. Bangs look hot from the point you get them cut to the exact second you leave the salon. At any time after that — they look absolutely hideous!
2. How they look good on everyone except you. Hollywood celebrities, songstresses, your best friend, your arch nemesis, your daughter, my sheep dog. True story!
3. As much as your hairdresser will convince you that they will immediately make you look as mysterious and spy-like like as Angelina Jolie in Salt, they’ll only make you look as crazy as Jolie in Girl Interrupted. Why should I look crazy and not even get an Academy Award to make up for it?
4. How the hairdresser takes ages to cut bangs. One snip and you should be done right? No no, he’ll get his special super snippy scissors out, wear his spectacles, peer at you deeply for an entire hour and then start the cutting ritual.
5. The pain and length of time it takes to grow them out. If I hadn’t had three horrific bang disasters, I could’ve adopted a baby, seen him grow to an adult and gotten him married off to my niece.
6. The accessories investment. If I had a penny for every barrette, hair band or clip I bought to hide my bangs, I would be able to buy Jennifer’s Aniston hair.
7. All the stupid hairstyles you have to invent to hide them. I have YouTubed thousands of how-to videos to hide bangs. If there are thousands of women hiding their bangs, why do we bother cutting them in the first place? Don’t we ever learn from our mistakes?
8. Bangs are meant to make you look young and hip. Then why do I look like an ’80s Barbie doll? Even men hate women with bangs!
9. How they never fall perfectly on anyone without help from all the necessary instruments. If you leave the bangs as is, they go ballistic, if you blow-dry them, they become too rounded, if you straighten them they become too flat and limp, if you curl them you look like Betty Boop.
10. When you think the fashion obsession with bangs is gone, the updated version comes in to haunt you. Side bangs, the seventies fringe, blunt-cut bangs, angled bangs, triangular bangs, curly bangs, shaggy bangs, do they ever leave us women alone? Poor Justin Bieber, they’ve even caught up with him!
Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, May 29th, 2011.
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