In China, Women Are Defying ‘Beauty Duty’ — With a Bold Haircut

 

Buzz cuts of varying lengths are trending in China as well:

When Song Jiaqian passed the Teacher’s Certification Exam last year, she treated herself to an unconventional yet daring reward: She got a buzz cut.

So bold was the 23-year-old’s choice that she had to delay getting it until after securing her government job in Shandong, the eastern province known for its Confucian values and traditional way of life. She even asked colleagues if anyone had been fired for drastic changes in hairstyle, but fortunately found no precedent.

“People are always saying that you should look like a woman, but what does that even mean?” Song told Sixth Tone. “I am a woman. And I look like a woman, because I am one.”

Her decision reflects a growing trend among young women in China, where long hair is often associated with femininity and beauty. While some are now choosing to buzz their hair off to challenge traditional standards and promote gender equality, others simply find it practical and low-maintenance.

Their reasons notwithstanding, the style is quickly catching on, with more and more women ditching long locks for a shorn style. Says Song: “Why do girls have to listen to others and be gentle and quiet, and obedient in particular? I just don’t want to obey the rules.”

Over the last three years, a group on the social platform Douban, called “Women’s Buzz Cuts are Super Cool,” has gained a considerable following.

Established in March 2021, the group now boasts more than 4,500 members. It also includes three sections: “questions before buzz cut,” “posts after buzz cut,” and “anti-beauty duty and male gaze.” It offers women who have a buzz cut or are planning to get one a safe space to discuss their choices and support each other.

Buzz cuts emerged even earlier on the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu. Starting in 2019, several posts show women flaunting buzz cuts in a bid to inspire others to “boldly make a change.” Song was one of them. She is still active on the platform and now shares her experiences to encourage others.

As Chinese society continues to grapple with beauty standards, buzz cuts are just one of the many trends helping women push back.

I shaved my head to avoid ‘beauty pageant’ with Paige VanZant before becoming UFC champion – now I’ll try to win flyweight title

 

For athletes like Rose Namajunas, shaving her head is simply practical. She has kept a very short buzz cut since her 2015 fight with Paige VanZant. She it easier to train and to compete without hair getting in the way, and she's had a successful career.

From the article:

"Why not do it to keep the focus on the fight so I don’t have to worry about training, then rinsing off and washing my hair, then drying it off, making it all pretty, doing my makeup, then getting ready for interviews and pictures and then having to go back to training and putting it back up.

“I just want to focus on the fight and figuratively and literally cut out as much as I can.

Indeed.

Shaving Their Heads as a Form of Protest

This footage is from a few weeks ago in front of the UK Parliament building. A group of women shaved their heads in solidarity with Palestinian women. As the protesters observe, many women in Gaza have resorted to shaving their heads due to severe shortages of water for washing or even drinking. This is not the first time a group of women have organized to shave their heads as a form of symbolic protest. A number of women in West Virginia shaved their heads in protest of a surface mining project in West Virginia that was going to do serious damage to the environment. Similarly a wave of Iranian women shaved their heads in protest of the brutal beating that led to the death of Mahsa Amini for violating antiquated rules requiring women to cover their heads in public. Readers of this blog can probably find plenty of examples of similar actions. Although these acts of protest in and of themselves won't affect any policy changes, they do serve as a public reminder that a significant segment of a population is frustrated by government actions or inaction. The plight of the Gazan civilians is mindbogglingly awful, and many Western governments continue to enable an unfolding human rights catastrophe, including famine as civilians remain targets after six months of war. The women who shaved their heads may not end to violence, but it does show that they are willing to stand and be counted, and that matters.

Buy Me a Coffee

via GIPHY

I am still on hiatus. One way to motivate me to post new content, or to simply show appreciation for what I have put into this blog so far, is to support me a bit. You can, for example buy me a coffee. Doing so means that I can freely spend time looking through YouTube and TikTok to find content appropriate for this blog. Thanks.

These 4 women have had alopecia since childhood. Their hair loss doesn't define them.

As society normalizes discussions about this autoimmune disorder, it's clear that the challenges extend beyond physical hair loss. Many carry a psychological burden, feeling as though they don't conform to society's beauty ideals. Insider spoke to four women who, as adults, are redefining their relationship with their hair, showing us that beauty encompasses so much more.

Read more here.

Note that this blog is still on hiatus, but it would be remiss not to highlight Alopecia Awareness Month.

Fifteen Years

Happy Anniversary!

This blog's first post was published on August 5th, 2008. There were no blogs focused on videos of women who shaved their heads or were bald due to conditions like alopecia. So, this blog filled a very unique niche. YouTube was new back then, and there were no influencers at the time. 

One of the first posts was a video of a woman with alopecia who talked about normalizing bald heads on women. It's still one of my favorite videos. Over time, this blog would share videos of women shaving their heads, discussing life with alopecia, pros and cons of having a shaved head, shaving and scalp care advice, makeup advice, music videos, ads, GRWM videos, and some of bald women just going through part of their daily life. Sometimes news articles and columns were posted. Even the occasional artistic website got featured here. I tried to make sure there was adequate representation, including videos from different continents, different languages, ethnicities, ages, etc. This blog was intended to be as body neutral as possible. 

I took plenty of breaks. Early on, that had to do with lack of content. These days, there is an abundance of content. Since mid-decade last decade, time to do proper maintenance has been a problem. I took an extended break between 2017 and 2019. I have been posting quite a bit since. The 15th anniversary seems like a good time to take another extended break. Traffic has dwindled since 2021, when this blog was averaging about 5,000 unique visitors per month. Even that was a fraction of what traffic was like at its peak around 2015 or 2016. I have wondered if this blog has more or less served its purpose (which would be a good thing). I'll periodically log on and check for dead links. Otherwise, I think it is time to step back and make some decisions in a few months about this blog's future.

Hopefully you find value in what is already in the blog's archives, and hopefully this blog helped to normalize shaved and bald heads on women.

I shaved my head bald and it's been the most liberating decision of my life

I meant to post a link to this article earlier. 

Although my decision initially plagued me with undercurrents of fear and anxiety, I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I could finally be unapologetically me. I was optimistic about the future, eager to explore my femininity through aspects beyond my appearance and re-define my own personal perception of beauty.

Fast forward six months, I have discovered new realms of self-love and now understand that the need to establish ourselves beyond societal expectations is crucial. Beauty is honestly skin-deep and sometimes it takes being vulnerable to obtain the truest version of ourselves. I loved my hair but I knew that I couldn’t depend on it. I now know that when it comes to my appearance, the only opinion that matters is my own.

What Symone Sanders’ New Show Means for Bald Black Women

This was published in 2022, but it's still timely. Read the column here. 

Some excerpts:

If you’ve ever watched Sanders you see that she is dynamic, exudes confidence, and embraces her baldness—which is something that any bald woman will tell you can sometimes be hard to do. The patriarchy’s views on how women should be wearing their hair are firmly entrenched in American society, and broadening Americans’ horizons on the many ways women can be beautiful, professional, and authoritative is going to take some time.

“I'm a bald, curvy, Black woman from North Omaha, Nebraska, with a bedazzled nail, and I like a bold lip—and that's what I'm going to continue to be,” said Sanders in a recent BET interview.

...

Thankfully, Sanders is rewriting the script (literally) and refusing to allow stereotypes of being a bald Black woman keep her from accomplishing her dreams. “My hope is that me showing up every day as my authentic self, continuing to keep the bar high and substantive, not [as] a caricature of what people think I am, but truly just being myself—is opening up the door for other young people to step into their respective workplaces, wherever they are, and be comfortable with who they are,” said Sanders to BET. Like Sanders, I have always felt empowered, beautiful, and on top of the world as a bald Black woman. But many other bald Black women could still use the confidence boost, to let them know that they are truly enough.

For those of us who are already there, we’ll continue to showcase how being a bald woman is fierce—and something that you have to “own” proudly, regardless of the negative and harmful rhetoric that has been put upon us.

Shaving my head for the first time

Troy (Sinead O'Connor)

It would be a shame if this blog did not pay tribute to Sinead O'Connor, who shaved her head because she was disgusted with traditional beauty standards, and especially the standards that existed in the music industry. She was a pioneer.

BOULE A ZERO GROS CHANGEMENT DE TETE BYEBYE CHEVEUX A LA TONDEUSE

5 reasons I love my new buzz cut! | why every woman should have one

the liberation of a buzz-cut

Florence Pugh Explains Why She Shaved Her Head

As the subtitle to the article puts it, “Vanity is gone.”

“I purposely chose to look like that,” she told Radio Times in an interview published Tuesday, according to the Daily Mail. “I wanted vanity out of the picture. Hollywood is very glamorous—especially for women—and it’s hard for an audience to see past that.”


By stripping away her hair, she not only has the opportunity to gallivant around Europe with Andrew Garfield while looking cool as hell and rock the wig of her choosing when she feels like it, she also believes it “helps the audience.”


“Vanity is gone,” she said. “The only thing that people can look at then is your raw face. Even at the beginning of my career, I was always fighting to control my image. … It helps me when I’m wearing less makeup because then I’m less of a sparkly thing on screen. I feel like I’m allowed to do ugly faces, like it’s more acceptable.”

Life Is So Good - brookLYNN