Briar Clark found the experience positive, and this was something she had wanted to do for a very long time. Read the articleRead the article.
From when I was about 15, I started fantasising about shaving my head. I think I had some kind of outlandish teenage desire to look like Natalie Portman during her edgy V for Vendetta era, or Demi Moore in the '90s.
The only reason I waited until I was 27 was that every time I mentioned that I was thinking of cutting it, I would be met with comments like "Oh no, not your beautiful hair!" My hair gave me cachet, and it was a part of me that other people valued. So I kept it.
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In June, Sydney went into lockdown and like everybody else, I spent a lot of time at home, feeling trapped. I tried to make house arrest look cute. I bought a wardrobe full of matching loungewear sets and did my hair every morning. But after a while, all of the vanity started to feel suffocating. When I looked in the mirror, my hair didn't make me feel beautiful anymore. I would have brief moments of dissociation and completely disconnect from the person I was looking at. My hair simultaneously made me feel old, silly, and like a child in a wig pretending to be a grown up
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The next day, I wrapped myself in a towel, found a long extension cord for the clippers, set myself up in front of an antique mirror in my backyard, and started shaving.
Because my hair was so thick, it took longer than I expected, and I had to ask one of my housemates to help me at one point to reach all the uneven tufts of hair at the back of my head. The combination of blunt clippers and my novice skills resulted in a jagged number 3 buzzcut that closely resembled cheap astroturf, but for the first time in a long time, when I looked at myself in the mirror, the person I saw staring back at me was me.
I bleached my buzzcut in the summer of '22, and enjoyed life as a blonde (brows and all). I briefly toyed with the idea of a pixie cut and grew my hair out in the colder months, before coming to the conclusion it just wasn't for me. Now, I'm fully committed to my bald persona. I even make fortnightly visits to the barber for regular tidy-ups.
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When I did it, shaving my head seemed like a superfluous and superficial attempt to feel different in some way. Now, I realise that it forced me to come to terms with my most authentic self.
