I was one of two boys on the eighth-grade yearbook staff. I don't necessarily know what this means, nor do I know why I felt that spending my post-school afternoons sorting through photos was a good idea. Regardless, I was a staffer, given the singular task of laying out the two-page spread allotted for the band—of which I was a member—while the other boy shot club meetings with a camera and the hot and popular girls on the staff took on everything else.
   One day I was positioning photos of pimply kids with French horns and listening to Emily Trakas and Katie Mugg record what was "in" at Herndon Intermediate. They'd listed the schoolyear's trends in music ("rap, progressive, rock, reggae, pop"), and were now trying to catalogue hair fashions. Apparently mine was relatively in-style.
   "Hey David?" Emily asked.
   I looked up. "Yeah?"
   "How would you describe your hairstyle?"
   I replied sincerely. "Um, alternative."
   I was that kind of eighth-grader.

Retelling this story to a friend a while back made me think how I would answer that question now. Uncertain, I asked around, interviewing friends, co-workers, and cooperative strangers to see whether anyone else would answer as ridiculously as I did nearly ten years ago.

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Q: How would you describe your hairstyle?
Anne, 23: Messy. Laid-back.

Q:
Mike, 24: Mine is short.

Q:
Jennifer, 23: Um my hairstyle...changes every day because it's growing out and there's cowlicks and it does whatever it wants to do. I just have to kind of roll with it. It looks really good today. Yesterday it looked awful. [laugh]

Q:
Marc, "over 30...oh 33, what the hell?": Short and natural [laugh]—you can put "black" in parentheses—as opposed to short and nappy.
---

These are some names of men's hairstyles: the bowl cut (dipped mushroom cut), the brush cut, the induction cut (burr cut, whiffle cut), the horseshoe flattop, the businessman's cut, the butch, the buzzcut, the Caesar cut (Clooney cut), the Ivy League cut (college cut, Princeton), the crewcut, the fade, the flattop, the Mowhawk, the French crop, the high and tight, the high and tight recon, the low and tight, the pompadour, the regulation haircut, the short back and sides, the teddy boy cut, the ducktail (duck ass, D.A.), the wedge cut, the under cut.
   These are some names of women's hairstyles: the full-bang bob, the page boy, the wind-blown hairdo, the helmet, the pouf, the cap coif, the brush cut, the side sweep, the glamour bob, the straight-line look, the middle-part flip, the side-part flip, the upsweep, the chignon, the tiara, the messy twist, the ultramodern bob, the ponytail, the braided ponytail, the French braid, cornrows, dreadlocks, the Afro.
   There are tons more, and yet, with the unisex exception of the ponytail, no one I asked used any of these names to describe their own hairstyles.

---
Q:
Sonja, 24: I'm wearing a ponytail. I don't know what to tell you. I just got a haircut.

Q:
Rick, 56: Short. [laugh] And grey...too much for my age.

Q:
Miki, 22: Uppity.

Q:
Harry, 31: It's like a piece of art. I almost have like a uh...it's almost like a mullet, it could be a mullet like a hockey player's if you cut the sides real short. But I'm in this movie now, so right now I can't get my hair cut, and I don't have a lot of money, so I'm waiting for my friend from Colorado to come back and fix it. But I want to be an actor so like it has to be long enough so that if I get cast, I have something to work with.
---

There's a certain sort of scrutiny that comes with asking people to describe their own hairstyles. You'll ask and they'll look at you, unblinking, for a second or two to see if you're kidding, or if you meant to ask them something else. You'll look back, and they'll say, "Um," and take a few seconds to recoup, to tell themselves that no, you're not kidding, but rather sitting there and looking at them, also unblinking, with a tape recorder between the both of you, waiting for an answer.
   And those answers will come, sometimes very slowly and often with some laughter, for hair is somehow very, very funny. And when they do come, your interviewees will either tell you about their hair, or tell you how they feel about their hair. It's an enlightening task. The narcissism inherent in talking about one's own hair—akin to those self-love/self-hate feelings we get whenever we mentally compose our own personal ads—will either embarrass them or thrill them, and watching them fall on one side or the other is perhaps the most rewarding part of this whole strange practice.

---
Q:
David, "David": I love my hair, but I got a haircut last time with a hole in the middle. Now the only place my hair grows is in my ears and on my back.

Q:
Lisa, 23: Low-maintenance is how I would describe it. I don't really do anything, I just brush it.

Q:
Brad, 24: My hairstyle? Well, I've given a lot of thought to it. It's sort of in a transition period, um, between before...not caring and not being very short and now not caring and being a little bit longer. Part of this transition means I have to use some more hair products. Not necessarily gel, but just something a little bit greasy to make sure it's not a 'fro but more of a wet-looking 'fro.

Q:
Dee, 34: Fucked up. I was picking at it for the last two weeks and I said, "You gotta clean this shit up." [laugh] So yeah, I don't like my hair.
---

Personal history told through hairstyles, by age:
< 8 — unremembered (with the exception of a rat-tail at age five) hairdos chosen and styled by my mother
9 — "parted in the middle and feathered back," as dictated to me by my eldest sister
10-12 — mullet, formed chiefly through absolute neglect
12-13 — short and parted on my left, sides and back cut with scissors, not clippers
13-16 — parted in the middle and hanging low, past my ears; shaved close around the sides and back (this was the "alternative" cut)
16 — bowl cut
17-20 — poorly formed Clooney cut
20-23 — alternating periods of buzzcut and Princeton

---
Q:
Rocio, "let's see if I can remember...27": Totally, totally natural and unexistent [sic], I would say. I don't have a hairstyle. I have very, very bad hair days, and therefore...I have to deal with it on a daily basis [laugh].

Q:
Mark, 28: I wish I had a mullet. That would work out for the story.

Q:
Nick, 24: Um, fading fast. [laugh] I dunno, it's just clean-cut. Um, short. I dunno. There's not much to it.

Q:
Joanna, 32: Layered, mid-length. Dyed, highlighted.
---

Westerners are boring and unimaginative. Susan M. Kus is an associate professor of anthropology at Rhodes College. In an article titled, "A Place Not in the Heavens" (published in Rhodes College Magazine, Spring 2001), she documents the lives of the Betsileo people on the island of Madagascar. She writes:

Names of local hairstyles ... also reveal a descriptive playfulness. One current hairstyle includes braids that are swept up along the sides and the back of the head. It is called mitsangàna fa andeha or "let's get up and go." Another has the colorful name of kilavoambary translated as "that-fall-like-the-ripe-grains-of-rice-on-a-stalk."

To our credit, we have the beehive. Not to our credit: the Jennifer Aniston.

---
Q:
Chris, 25: Short. Low-maintenance. Actually no-maintenance would be more accurate.

Q:
Dorothy, 23: Well the previous cut was a modification of a cut I had before. I saw this picture of my mom from the sixties and I thought, that's beautiful, she's beautiful in this picture. So I showed the picture to these folks in Shadyside, and tried to get it cut like that, but afterward I thought, it's too long! I like to have my neck showing. So back in Boston, I went to Harvard Square, and I went in to see Thomas, whose been cutting my hair since the eighth grade. He's totally great, totally gay, and he kinda improved on it.
Q: [same, repeated]
Dorothy: Well, it's like an Amelie cut: not chin-length, not ear-length...it's in between. Mouth-length, I guess. I can put it in my mouth.

Q:
Brian, 23: Oh shit, I haven't thought about it. Um. [sniff] Parted down the middle. I have long sideburns, in terms of down my face, not scraggly.

Q:
Vicky, "middle-aged": Channeling Louise Brooks.
---

Liposuction and cosmetic surgery are always subject to social-circle snickers and gossip, simply because self-alteration makes you phony. It's vicious: folks want you to be attractive and yet hate you for trying to be someone else. But our hair is the one part of us that we're allowed—and even expected—to alter, to cut up and repackage to suit our tastes, our style, our wardrobe. And it's honest. As a part of your body, it's a far more confident declaration of who you are than your clothing could ever be.
   Which is all why the act of describing your own hair is so difficult; why I got so many stutters and "Um"s. I may as well have asked these good people, "Do you know who you are?" Such an act of self-examination is hard for everyone, no matter what their self-confidence is.
   In the eighth grade, I didn't have it. I was vain and insecure, trying to be what I thought my haircut was. And what asking twenty people to describe their hairstyles tells you is that certain folks know who they are, and can describe their hair (and anything else you want) confidently. It's probably too little and assuredly too late, but were Emily Trakas to ask me again, I'd now do a better job in responding.

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Q: How would you describe your hairstyle?
Dave, 23: Short and parted on my right, and cut close on the sides and back. Your standard businessman's cut. Quite normal, really.

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