I Found My Old Person's Haircut!

How to maintain rizz with minimal effort.

I am having a rough go. I am reeling from This Place during These Times. I am also in my luteal phase. Everything is so, so bad, fascism is everywhere and my heart hurts. Not only that but my heart is tired. But here is one exciting thing, a bright spot.

This is the week that I have picked my old person’s haircut.

OK, so I am very much of the mind that you have to go into aging with a particular target otherwise it catches you off guard and you end up glimpsing yourself on a reflective surface having shambled out into the world unguarded and unprepared and demoralizing yourself for many days.

It’s sort of like how my friends and I believe that we, as Asian people, cannot blunder into any old building dressed carelessly while holding multiple plastic/paper bags or we will be mistaken as food delivery. You need a cue to offset the expectation, like a swish purse or cool shoes. Minimally, so that if some asshole still thinks you’re delivery, they are telling on themselves for being basic and racist and you can walk away with some sense of moral and cultural superiority.

Again, these are the rules. I do not make the rules.

It is my belief that as long as you generally look as though you’re doing something on purpose, you will mostly look terrific. And once you get to a certain age, you will be less concerned with OriginalityTM because you are seasoned and tired enough to know that everything has been done before.

Anyway, it’s not even my haircut. I’ll be doing the Kawakubo. Which some may know as the Edna Mode. Or still others may refer to as a Wintour but that’s actually a very different direction and will require more work than I am willing to take on.

It is also my personal opinion that after a certain age, portraits are better in black and white and if you can be holding your face, you will look smart and contemplative.

See. I look smart. Don’t even try to fight me on it. Even better, I look smart and wry. That shit is hard to do. But whatever, this photo also undermines my earlier position which is that this is for old people. I am all of 38 in this. I am bouncy and full of life. I am essentially an infant.

Anyway, this post is going to have a lot of pictures that I have stolen from the internet.

This is Edna Mode. Also, known as the designer from the Invincibles.

I would say that Edna is more of a Wintour x Apfellian creation because of the Iris Apfel glasses and how stylized she is in general. I don’t know why she is barefoot here. Possibly she is indoors or wearing seamless boots that go up really, really high.

Here is Apfel.

Now, here is the Wintour.

See, this is upkeep hair. This is blowout hair. This is dyed every two to three weeks with a reverse osmosis filtered shower head hair. The color is soft and blended, the bangs cut frequently and styled. If this were my hair, it would be a wig. This could even be a wig. I don’t know. I can’t even keep the definitions of slander and libel straight.

Anyway, here is the Kawakubo later in life. Did she get a perm? I don’t know. But you can see that it’s not entirely manicured and still looks terrific. The jacket helps. Longtime readers of a me know that a jacket always helps.

My Kawakubo will be more of a salt and pepper. I started dying my hair late last year and it was a terrible mistake. I know in my heart I will not be able to do the upkeep. It hurts my feelings to sit quietly in a salon like I live in the 1950s for many hours at a time. Partly, it’s the money. Mostly, it’s the sitting. Waiting feels like death.

I have heard from friends who go to the salon every few weeks. God bless these friends. I don’t personally have it in me. So here’s the plan, I am going to keep going for now because it’s once every three months. This isn’t even the correct amount of times. I should be going every two-and-a-half months but I want the data of feeling bad for two weeks before starting the cycle over again. I want to build a tolerance for it. I want to stare my age in the face with Eye of the Tiger playing in my mind, doing push ups.

Right now I am at around 20 percent gray. Mostly at my crown. Once I get to 50 percent that will be it for me. I will grow it all out, looking witchy and haunted and then I will strike!

Bang.

Full Kawakubo.

It will be a transition so dramatic that everyone will notice. And the thing about everyone noticing is that anyone who is thinking, Holy shit I had no idea she was an old crone this whole time will be forced to bite their tongue out of deference.

It will go something like this, “Whoa! Your hair…”

Then they will take a beat to reorganize their face.

“…It looks incredible!”

And then I will go, “Thank you!” because I am dignified and because of course it looks incredible. Rei Kawakubo is an icon. And then, if they happen to recognize the reference and can conjure her name, they will be so caught up in their own ego that we will both be able to move on.

Then, my old former face and hair will be overwritten and forgotten because the human person only has bandwidth for about 2 seconds for a situation to be about anyone else before it rightfully asserts itself back to self. Thank god.

Also because genuinely who has time to give a shit about extracurricular shit when there is so much pressing, terrible, worthy shit to care about.

Again, late-stage capitalistic fascism is harrowing.

Every moment of joy and levity is a miracle.

Anyway, my favorite thing about having friends who are older than me is that they can report back and generally it seems that unless you become incredibly rich and successful and recognizable, you sort of disappear? Our hair grays and our outlines go from sharpie to more of a 2H pencil drawing involving a lot of feathery little cross-hatches with everyone’s hormones arriving in the same soupy centralized space where gender or defining features pool to become a bit of a moot point.

So the other thing I’ve seen people do very successfully at least within fashion or design or anyone who does aesthetics as a LifeChoiceTM is that they tend to start dressing in uniform or with a thematic consistency that could be accurately described as avatarish. It’s like, what the Simpsons version of you would look like. It’s a fantastic disguise. You have the same brilliantly dyed snap-on LEGO hair. Or the same oversized glasses. Or you only wear Lacoste polo shirts or dress in monochrome. People will continue to recognize you despite how much dramatic structural dilapidation is taking place underneath. And what a salve this is for all of us who keep forgetting entire personages if not for the help of some noisy qualifying feature.

I think the rule of thumb is that if someone else can “do you for Halloween” with three swift, painless accessories, the decision fatigue and hassle around appearances can quiet enough to start preparing for death. As in, packing it in, giving far fewer fucks and understanding that the thing you’ll really miss from this planet is friendship and a sturdy potato chip.

So now that this is solved, I have a few years remaining to focus on the second part of this two-prong attack around aging. The best and admittedly inconvenient part of getting the Kawakubo and aging with purpose is having to near-exclusively wear Comme des Garçons the second my hair gets short.

I’m pretty sure this is a non-negotiable at least if I’m really gonna nail this chapter with the gumption and aplomb and vim and moxie that I’m after.

There are just too many pros. Dressing in LargeShapesTM means I can eat whatever I like and sit in whatever position I like. It will be the opposite of my desire to have been skinny as a young person but accomplish the same thing which is to ward off predators while calling attention to myself.

It is going to be very powerful. AND I will look unimpeachable. This probably means I will need to sell some fucking books. Or maybe figure out something a lot more passive income-ish since I am exhausted and this last book is killing me dead from the inside.

Post Script: I remain undecided about what to do with my face surgically-speaking but I have MANY THOUGHTS. I am also open to others.

Thank you for being here.