There’s a Diet Coke commercial from 2006 in which a woman with long, dark hair pops a can and walks by a storefront. She pauses, looks in the window, and decides to enter what we find out is a men’s barber shop.
Two guys are in there: the silver-haired barber and a man with a mustache who glances up from his newspaper to give the woman a skeptical look. Still, she sits down in the chair and smiles as the barber starts snipping away. Seconds later the woman walks out with a pixie cut like a 1950s sailor, takes a final swig of Coke, grins again, and strolls off down the street.
The ad is called “Barber Shop” and is apparently famous, which I didn’t know until I googled it. I was 13 when it came out and stuck in my brain. I thought about it through years of doing ballet, keeping my hair shoulder- or waist-length so I could curl it up into a bun. I thought about the look on the woman’s face as she walked into the barber shop, as she watched her own hair get hacked off: confident, devilish, extremely pleased with herself. And then the exit, the strut down the street, the swag of her transformation. I wanted it! I wanted it all.
I have always believed in the power of aesthetic transformation. This is partly because it’s been drilled into me from a young age — there’s a reason the makeover montage in The Princess Diaries is one of the most cited parts of the movie. She’s All That, Mean Girls, Easy A, even She’s the Man all revolve around a change in appearance as plot device. Someone gets their hair cut or overhauls their wardrobe or puts on a dress and heels or fake sideburns. Then, something happens that radically alters their trajectory: they find love or, sometimes simultaneously, a version of themselves they didn’t know existed. They are affirmed; things get better.
I’m also queer, which as a young person, meant there was dissonance between how I imagined myself and how I thought I had to present to the world. In suburban Texas, the menu of options for how “girls” should present was pretty narrow. I couldn’t come up with something that felt right on my own, and there was no one around to model myself after. Except, of course, for Diet Coke lady.
I got my hair cut short when I graduated from high school, which was as soon as I reasonably could. It wasn’t quite right — more of a can-I-speak-to-the-manager lob with side bangs — and I let it grow out again when I got to state school. But over the years it has gotten gradually shorter, closer and closer to the core of who I thought I was. Every new cut came with at least a few days of elation — moments of feeling changed, untouchable, revolutionary, like the tag line in the Diet Coke commercial: “live like you started it.”
Except! Except for two weeks ago, when I asked my barber to chop the bob I’d spent the past year growing. There was a heat wave, and I was running my AC more than I ever had and also losing my goddamn mind. The bob was long enough that I had to style it in order to make it look interesting, which I resented. I asked for a pixie cut that would gradually become a baby mullet, and Ren spent an hour divesting me of my hair, which was the longest it had been since college.
And I felt…nothing! Not while the hair drifted down past my eyebrows. Not when I saw it piling up in little dunes on the floor. Not even when one half of my head was short and the other long, which is canonically the most terrifying part of a haircut. They snipped away and I watched in the mirror and thought, “Yes, haha, yes!” and then I walked out of there and went about my day. I did take a couple selfies in the good lighting at the coffee shop next door, but in all it was the most non-response I’ve had to a haircut — especially one that laid waste to a year’s worth of effort (my hair grows incredibly slowly).
I have tried this summer to get that feeling in other ways: pedicures, new tattoos, a different eyebrow gel. Most recently I lay on a table and blinded myself by staring directly into the fluorescent lights while Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” was piped into the room and a nice woman ripped all the hair out of my bikini line. I walked home feeling more manicured than ever but still not fundamentally different. I am waiting for the plot to change, attempting on my own to set off a series of events that will radically alter my trajectory. I want something new to happen that carries me to where I’m supposed to be — to the person I’m supposed to meet, or the version of myself I’m supposed to become. But the plot is not obliging. Record scratch, freeze frame, the plot is stuck. It is still hot in my apartment and I’m still sad and everything is still the same.
This feeling creeps in a lot at the end of summer: the sense you’ve had your moment in the sun, and maybe you’ve wasted it. In fact, you’ve probably wasted it. The whole season slides through your fingers and leaves you feeling not even a little bit like Diet Coke lady, no cool triumph, just a sweaty, exhausted descent into the rest of your dumb life.
Maybe appearance-change-as-plot-point is something that only works in your 20s. Maybe now that I’m 30, a change in trajectory is an active exercise in self-determination. Which, if you ask me, is exhausting, and punishing, and probably ultimately worthwhile.
Catch a feel
Cake by Laurie Stone, Dirt
The Fans Who Won’t Leave Britney Alone by Rebecca Jennings, Vulture
The Glamorous Stranger Next Door Needed Help by Michael Wilson, The New York Times