The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

Jen's got a new hairdo. She decided yesterday to go through with something she's wanted to do for a long time, and shear off her locks to donate to cancer wigmaking. In order to get enough hair (20cm) to donate, we had to take off most of her 'do! She's got much shorter hair than I do now. Here's my perspective of the story... on her blog there ought to be her own take soon.

It was a bit stressful for a little while: Jen really wanted to put her hair in one big ponytail and just lop it off, but unfortunately that would have wasted an awful lot of hair, so we had to be a bit more conservative. We washed it, dried it, went out for dinner, and started looking up a bit online about sectioning hair into portions to chop it up. It was uncomfortable for me, since at first I'd thought I was just gonna be hacking away with a cleaver; all this precision was a lot to handle. I got into the groove soon enough, and eventually was lisping like any proper male hairstylist. "Dahling, it'th thimply GORgeouth."

First we took a detailed photo reference of Jen's long and lovely curls. Then I put her hair up in banana clips, took a deep breath, and lopped off the hair at the nape of her neck. You could tell up close, but once the hair on top was let down it was impossible to see that we had done anything.

I switched out my equipment, using a butterfly clip for most of the hair-holding-back needs after the first cut, and made pretty fast progress after that. I have to say I was pretty surprised how well it turned out: Jen has lovely, thick, forgiving hair. It just clumps itself together into nice rings all on its own, so what I did didn't make too much difference to anything. Well, except making it 9 inches shorter.

The top of Jen's head was a bit tougher, mostly because it parts very naturally after all this time being long... it wants to form a rooster crest now that it is short. Thank goodness for hair product. Once we severed that stuff, Jen was bald! We put her hair in a ziplock baggy. All she had left was the bangs, which she cut off herself in the bathroom mirror, and then she took a shower, tossed some gunk in, and we were done!

I think her new hair looks really nice, I'm sure because of her own naturally lovely hair and not my stylin' skillz. She's worried the bangs (ironically the only part I did not do) are too short, but I think they're fine. If nothing else they'll grow out soon enough, which was our motto all through the styling process. And now my girlfriend has shorter hair than I. She's very excited to surprise all our friends in Sendai today.